The Working Memory Advantage
Train Your Brain to Function Stronger, Smarter, Faster
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A bigger asset than IQ: The first book to introduce the newly discovered—and vitally important—mental skill known as working memory, showing how it is crucial to our success in work and life and how to strengthen it.
Working memory—your ability to work with information—influences nearly everything you do. What if you could find a way to better handle a crazy schedule or expertly manage risks? What if you could gain an advantage in climbing the career ladder or in school or sports? What if there were a way to improve your outlook on life, to face each day with more optimism and confidence?
Tracy and Ross Alloway, leading experts in the field, show how working memory is the key to all that and more. They present important recent findings, including research on how Facebook can help with working memory, how working memory can improve your kids’ grades, how it changes as you age, and how working memory is linked with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and Alzheimer’s. The Alloways describe their Jungle Memory program, which Ross created to help children improve their working memories, and is rapidly being embraced by the education community. Most importantly, they share the best news: you can improve your memory! Their book provides three tests to find out how good your working memory is—and more than fifty targeted exercises designed to help readers both process and memorize the information to maximize effectiveness.
The Working Memory Advantage offers unprecedented insight into one of the most important cognitive breakthroughs in recent years—a vital new approach to making your brain stronger, smarter, and faster.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Socrates worried that the advent of writing would allow people to put things to paper and immediately forget them. Today, we outsource our memories to expensive computers and forget the free hardware we all have: our brains. No wonder, then, that our capacity for memory seems to be lagging. In this mental workout workbook, the Alloways set out to help the reader exercise and strengthen his or her working memory that is, the kind used every day to process information and solve problems. This type of memory requires conscious and sustained effort, and the husband and wife duo (the latter is a psychologist at the University of North Florida) provides readers with plenty of memory exercises and mental tests, revealing explanations and technical descriptions of the mnemonic mechanisms at work, and strategies for creating habits and managing emotions. They even offer dietary suggestions meant to better nourish a hard-working brain. For the skeptics out there, the Alloways insist it's worth the work a strong correlation has been shown between a robust working memory and feelings of happiness. Occasionally, the book slips into more general self-help territory, but it's still a valuable guide for readers looking to put their minds to work.