Business
Ask yourself how your business could do better. You know that your product and service is good, but the same can be said for your competitors. How do you set yourself apart? You do it with better people. At the end of the day, the company making quicker, smarter decisions will emerge the winner. You can dominate the market by simply outthinking your competitors.
Decision Making
A recent study from Nature Neuroscience has provided evidence that a reduction in the ability to keep a clear distinction between information to be stored in working memory and information that should be ignored and subsequently suppressed, is associated with poor working memory performance. Weak working memory translates to weak decision making, through the inability to process quickly and well what is important and useful and what is not. Hence working memory strength might be the single most important factor in helping us stay on track with the correct business choices.
Poor Recall and Impaired Thinking
Impaired working memory is associated with an elevated level of cortisol. Cortisol is one of the body’s “flight or fight” hormones. When you are stressed your body releases Cortisol into your blood stream. Cortisol causes the cells of your body to release sugar to use as fuel if you need to run, it speeds up your heart rate to get ready to run or fight. It is produced by your adrenal cortex, and Cortisol is a hormone that responds to anxiety by raising blood pressure. It increases blood sugar levels and weakens immune response.
Overload
Although central to all human thought processes, your working memory can lose information easily through distraction or overload. Those with poor capacities will struggle to meet the heavy working memory demands of daily living and on the job. Within that struggle lies the stress.
There is a connection between your stress and your cognitive performance on the job. Chronic stress levels are connected with slowed down Working Memory performance, as well as impaired recall and poor decision making. Test results indicate that chronic stress induces dramatic working memory impairment. This means you process information more slowly, you cannot decide what information is useful to your decision making, nor can you recognize problems and focus to deal with them efficiently.
Top Performers and Working Memory
Top performers are able to remember, work, think and test better because of a better working memory. They have a better ability to sort the wheat from the chaff and better talent to recognize and act usefully on the situation around them. As a result, this individual makes better decisions faster with less stress. They effectively bring critical thinking and efficiency to all their endeavours because they can extract meaning from surrounding confusion and then use it to achieve their goals.
They have learned how to cultivate and tap into the full scope of their raw brainpower and you can too.
The Personal Computer
The personal computer now provides the tool to train your working memory and protect the health of your brain. It is the ideal tool to monitor and adjust the level of challenge. Imagine piano lessons. If the piano teacher presents an exercise of too high a difficulty level for the student, the student soon becomes discouraged and gives up. If the piano lessons are too easy and move at a pace which presents no apparent growth, the student soon tires of the pastime and leaves the training. The experienced teacher assesses each individual as to what is required for optimum growth and full development of the potential possessed by the student.
In working memory training, this is what the computer does. It records the precise number of attempts to do a particular task and gives us the opportunity to succeed by presenting challenges at just the right frequency and difficulty levels to enable growth. The protocols of working memory training use auditory and visual stimuli to present an ongoing opportunity for systematic and incremental growth.
Just like the piano lesson, where the exercise of learning notes, then running basic scales leads ultimately to the concert stage, the first steps of working memory training lead to improved focus, better memory and ultimately faster processing speed, a more facile mind and better problem solving. These all add up to a more stress free work experience derived from better decision making and heightened fluid intelligence. It is possible to have or be part of a work force that thinks better, processes more quickly, feels happier, suffers less stress and makes better decisions in everything that they do.