Karolin­ska Institute’s Dr. Torkel Kling­berg has just released in the US his excel­lent book The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­ory

The title was first released in Swe­den with great suc­cess, and our co-founder Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg gave a Fore­word to the new US edition.

Dr. Kling­berg will be writ­ing an essay for Sharp­Brains read­ers soon, so we can dis­cuss the impor­tance of this topic and his work in depth. Let me now link to two thought-provoking reviews of the book:

Atten­tion Must Be Paid (Inside Higher Ed)

- “The weak link in the infor­ma­tion age seems to be our human hard-wiring. So one gath­ers from The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­ory (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press) by Torkel Kling­berg, who is a pro­fes­sor of devel­op­men­tal cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the Stock­holm Brain Insti­tute. A review of recent research on how atten­tion and mem­ory actu­ally func­tion within our gray mat­ter, it is a work of sci­en­tific pop­u­lar­iza­tion rather than a hand­book on how to min­i­mize the cog­ni­tive drain of distraction.”

- “To sim­plify Klingberg’s already pared-down analy­sis, we can dis­tin­guish between two kinds of atten­tion. One is con­trolled atten­tion: the directed effort to apply ones con­cen­tra­tion to a par­tic­u­lar task. The other is stimulus-driven atten­tion, which is an invol­un­tary response to some­thing hap­pen­ing in the envi­ron­ment. (You can tune out the con­ver­sa­tions going on around you in a restau­rant. But if a waiter drops a tray full of dishes, it is going to impose itself on your awareness.)”

- “Kling­berg reports that a two-year study in his lab showed that it was pos­si­ble to increase working-memory capac­ity: “chil­dren who had done a cer­tain type of com­put­er­ized mem­ory task, such as remem­ber­ing posi­tions in a four-by-four grid and click­ing a mouse but­ton, improved at other, non­com­put­er­ized types of work­ing mem­ory too.… We had shown that the sys­tems are not sta­tic and that the lim­its of work­ing mem­ory capac­ity can be stretched.

Jour­nal­ism bat­tle for rel­e­vance in an age of too much infor­ma­tion (Media Channel)

- “Acquir­ing new infor­ma­tion requires par­tic­u­larly focused atten­tion, which includes the abil­ity to ignore dis­trac­tions. In order to absorb the infor­ma­tion con­tained in a CNN news­cast, for exam­ple, we must not only direct our atten­tion to the per­son talk­ing, but also fil­ter out the run­ning head­lines, news updates, and finan­cial ticker on the lower part of the screen. Torkel Kling­berg, a pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at Karolin­ska Insti­tute in Swe­den and author of The Over­flow­ing Brain, puts it simply:“If we do not focus our atten­tion on some­thing, we will not remem­ber it.” In other words, atten­tion is a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of learning.”

- “Michael Pos­ner, a researcher who has ded­i­cated his career to study­ing atten­tion and a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of psy­chol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon, explains atten­tion as a sys­tem of three net­works alert­ing, ori­ent­ing, and exec­u­tive. Alert­ing refers to the state of wake­ful­ness nec­es­sary to attend to infor­ma­tion, while ori­ent­ing is the process by which we respond to stim­uli, such as move­ment, sound, or noise. Exec­u­tive atten­tion is the highest-order net­work, the one that we have con­scious con­trol over. If we are try­ing to study for a test or read a novel, we use it to direct and main­tain our focus, as well as to sup­press our reac­tion to com­pet­ing stim­uli like the din of a nearby con­ver­sa­tion or television.”

The book: The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Memory

For inter­views with Torkel Kling­berg, Michael Pos­ner and other lead­ing sci­en­tists, check out our Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series.