Torkel Klingberg, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has written about the problem in a book titled The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. Klingberg documents the incredible demands that are made on our minds by modern life and points out that our brains evolved to handle fewer tasks that were probably less complex.

I think the solution to the problem having too much to pay attention to while not having enough attention to pay has two parts. Klingberg provides a nice introduction into the first strategy: increasing working memory through brain training. Klingberg as well as others have shown that working memory can be trained, and limited evidence suggests that the difference training makes can generalize to real-life tasks.

The second part of the strategy is developing better attention through practice in focused attention and in resisting distractions. We all have the experience of forgetting something important because our attention was drawn to something else. The ability to pay attention to an object that is important is a prerequisite to almost any achievement.

Computer training has been used to help people learn to function better under distracting conditions; it may be a helpful strategy in coping with multiple distractions.

Meditation is a widely used technique that can help you reduce stress, help you focus on what’s important, and resist being distracted by things that aren’t important. Simply spending a little time each day in a situation with minimal distractions can help you appreciate how much of the noise and distractions in your life arise from inside yourself. If you allow each to rise to your consciousness, you can decide which issues deserve attention and follow-up action, and which can be ignored.

The bottom line: Training working memory with computer-based tasks can help. Meditation can help you focus on what’s most important and use your limited resources effectively.

What does that have to do with brain fitness?

Mind wandering of the kind we’re talking about is associated with increased activity in a group of structures in the brain called the default network. It’s called that because it was discovered when researchers left the scanners on when people were being evaluated for brain activity in other experiments. When people weren’t actively doing a task, investigators found that a set of structures in the brain tended be more active. Conversely, when people are focusing on a specific task or actively directing their attention, activity in this network decreases. If their minds wander to upsetting or worrying things, their mood may worsen.

When I give talks to groups of seniors about brain fitness, I often ask them what their number one complaint is. It mirrors what I see in patients who come to the clinic for evaluation of memory problems. “I went into the other room for something, but forgot what it was.” “I opened the refrigerator but forgot what I wanted to get out.”

The diagnosis is something I would call loss of the ability to maintain an intention. From talking to people with the complaint, it seems likely to me that what happens is that their minds drift to an introspective or planning state (perhaps reflecting a shift to default network activity) and thus the object of the intention (what they were going to get in the other room or out of the refrigerator) is lost.

Why does this happen more as we get older? Declines in the central dopaminergic system have documented with increasing age, and that system is known to be intimately involved in both attention and motivation. A decline in the activity of that system might explain the shift – maintaining the object of the intention in memory isn’t as automatic. Most older persons can remember what they are going to get, they just need to consciously maintain the object in their thoughts by rehearsing it.

What is the answer? Some researchers have studied the use of dopaminergic drugs (often the same medicines used to treat attention deficit disorder) to improve apathy in older persons. Many stimulant medications act on dopamine, and improve focus and sustained attention. It’s an open question whether these medications should be prescribed for this purpose.

Perhaps a better and unexplored alternative is to work on ways to explicitly train older persons with memory strategies for just this kind of problem. If you rehearse (say over to yourself multiple times) what you want to remember, you can improve your ability to remember almost anything. Another possibility is meditation – some kinds of meditation are associated with changes in the default network’s activity. It may be possible to improve a person’s ability to deactivate it and activate alternative sensory networks, with a resulting improvement in memory.

A lot of people are skeptical about this idea, perhaps because most of us are taught that the cells in our brains are pretty much fixed and don’t change over time, except for dying off as we get older.

More recent studies, though, now have shown that the brain can grow new cells. Other studies have shown that some kinds of brain training change how some of the chemicals in the brain work. And still other studies have shown that cognitive training can have long-lasting effects.

So what can you do to improve your brain fitness?

• Find a rut and get out of it. What habit are you in, and how can you get out of it? Do you collapse on the couch every night and watch TV? Try going for a walk. Record your favorite TV show and instead spend a half hour searching the Internet for something that interests you.
• Learn a little bit of a new language. Learning a new language may be one of the best ways to rewire your brain. Maybe you won’t learn enough to be fluent, but learning about the sounds in a new language may help your ability to pay attention to sounds, and learning new ways to express a concept may help you keep your thinking flexible. You could take a class, but more and more language resources are on the Web.

Although we still don’t know exactly how to improve brain fitness for everyone, research gives us some promising directions.

Results of the overall study were negative – DHA at a dose of 2 grams a day didn’t slow how much patients’ cognitive abilities declined over 18 months.

One finding of the study has been largely ignored in media reports. In a planned subgroup analysis, though, patients treated with DHA and who did not have the ApoE 4 allele had slower cognitive decline. ApoE 4 is a gene that has been associated with greater risk for having Alzheimer’s disease. It may be related to how fatty substances in the body are used by the body.

Although the findings of the main trial are negative, one subgroup may have benefited from DHA treatment.

This study thus adds to a series of studies based on observations that people who take vitamins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and fish oil supplements have lower risks for Alzheimer’s disease. The logic of the trials has been to evaluate things associated with lower risk as treatments, but none has turned out to be effective.

Click here to read the full article.

Reference:

Quinn JF et al (2010). Docosahexaenoic acid supplementation and cognitive decline in Alzheimer disease. JAMA, 304, 1903-1911.

What kinds of cognitive training actually make a difference in someone’s brain functioning? Research to answer this question is in its infancy, but a number of studies have suggested that there is something special about training working memory. You use working memory when you have to keep several things in your mind and once, and then do something with them.

Think about adding two numbers that each have two digits, like 98 and 33. Remember, this problem is read aloud to you, so you can’t see the numbers, except possibly in your mind. You may know to add the 8 and 3 to get 11, but then you have to keep the 1 in mind while you add 1 (carried over) to 9 and 3. That’s working memory.

Why are people interested in working memory and brain fitness? We know it declines with age, and at least one study has shown that it can be improved with training (Jaeggi et al., 2008). Further, training working memory has been related to improvements in fluid intelligence, a key ability that underlies new learning and problem solving. And some researchers believe that working memory ability is a key part of general intelligence.

Another study showed that working memory training could change the density of neurotransmitter receptors in a part of the brain that is important for attention (McNab et al., 2009).

My colleagues and I are working on a study of working memory in older persons who are cognitive normal. Tomorrow I’ll list ways you can train working memory for little or no money.

References:

Jaeggi SM et al. (2008). Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 6829-6833.

McNab F et al. (2009). Changes in cortical dopamine D1 receptor binding associated with cognitive training. Science, 323, 800-802.