Beeman shows that people can do this kind of puzzle better when they are in a relaxed frame of mind, such as after seeing a comedy video. Beeman speculates that at such a time, your mind is more able to make the kind of new connections that help to solve this kind of problem.

This has implications for understanding the neurochemistry of puzzle solving. Why do we enjoy puzzles, games, and problems? One possible answer is that working them stimulates the release of the brain chemical dopamine in the parts of your brain that are associated with pleasure (interestingly, drugs of abuse also stimulate the release of dopamine). Working and especially solving puzzles may be inherently rewarding because of dopamine release, explaining why so many of us can spend so much time on them.

Dopamine is key in understanding cognitive abilities such as working memory and psychomotor speed, as it is critically important to both of them. One theory of the cognitive changes that occur with increasing age implicates lower levels of dopamine in the brain, so anything that helps keep that chemical system active is probably important.

Beeman’s work suggests that getting to the solution may also involve other brain systems, or at least a change in the status of brain systems that focus attention. Instead of tightly focused attention on the problem, being able to disconnect from it in a limited way may facilitate the problem’s solution.

The bottom line: Developing the ability to let go and relax when solving a problem may be an important part of getting to the solution. Deadly serious practice of cognitive tasks may promote your brain’s fitness, but getting to the answer of some problem may be facilitated by relaxing.

Here are 5 ways to train working memory:

The single best way to train working memory for brain fitness is to use (almost the) same computer program used by Jaeggi et al. in her study. You can’t get exactly the same software that will automate something called n-back training. You can, however, use Brain Workshop, free open-source software that closely imitates the procedures used in studies of working memory. The software for brain fitness training is free, and you can download it here.

As useful as n-back training is, you may want to branch out and do other things. A visual game that can train working memory is called concentration, a matching game that makes you remember the position of pictures while you look for a match. There are lots of these kinds of games on the web (and one version is included in the Posit Science brain training software. I put one up on the Web – click here to try it out. (I borrowed the code for this game from a book called ActionScript Game Programming University and can’t take personal credit for it. It’s a great book about Flash game programming, and you can find the author’s website here.)

Away from your computer? Why not try Sudoku? You can do it on paper in books, and you can find a number of applications for your phone or handheld game device. You can even download and print them from the web. I found several sources, including here. Don’t know what Sudoku is? Find out more about it here.

Standing in line at the grocery store? Pick out numbers off the cover of the magazines and add them in your head. Too easy? Subtract them and multiply by another number. Still too easy? When was the last time you did a square root in your head?

Sitting on the couch at home? Spend time visualizing the route from your home to a place you only go to once in a while. Get a mental picture of your own home, then create a mental image of the first turn, and then the next, and the next. Did you get there? Now reverse the route until you get home.

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.

Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.

Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.

This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.

Reference:

Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014

The members of the class are interested in my presentation, and we’ve done several exercises to help them learn more about what they can do to maintain and improve their memory.

Nothing is more helpful than understanding how your memory works, and probably the most critical issue for older persons and their memory is attention. Although it’s obvious (once you think about it), if you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t remember it.

Even the most commons memory complaints I hear from patients are often related to memory. The number one complaint is “I went in to another room to get something and forgot why I was there.” Whenever I mention this, I see lots of nods of recognition in the audience.

For many people, this issue is caused by failing to maintain attention on a specific task. While you’re going to the other room, your mind moves on to another topic (maybe you notice something else you’ve been meaning to do). By the time you get to the other room, you’ve lost the task you were thinking about in the first place.

The solution is to maintain focus on what you want to do, at least until you’ve been able to encode the task in your memory. This means keeping the task in mind while you go to the other room or rehearsing it several times before you move to the new room.

When we’re younger, we can depend on some things in our memory working automatically. As we get older, things that used to work automatically may require a little extra attention. Often, it’s not your memory that isn’t working, it’s how you’re paying attention.