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gut, decisions.

      This same breakdown in our analysis and decision making can happen to any of us when we’re overwhelmed by a tsunami of information at work. It can lead us to make emotional decisions at times when strategic thinking matters most, such as when choosing a new vendor. For example, if you interview all twenty-three candidates who expressed interest in the project rather than narrowing down the candidate pool to five or fewer, your Conductor may lose track of all the data about their past work experience and qualifications so you end up tossing all that valuable information out the window and going with your gut. You choose the guy who’s an Arsenal fan because you’re a huge Arsenal fan too. That’s not the smartest move.

      Children are just as likely to suffer this same type of working memory overload when they are overwhelmed with information at school. When teachers introduce too much material at once, the Conductor loses control. This can cause even the brightest students to stop reasoning and start guessing on tests.

      Too much information can even lead to what we call catastrophic loss of working memory. Our friend Sam was recently made redundant from his job because his company downsized. He had a six-month parachute to regroup and seek out new opportunities, but every time he sat down in front of his computer, he got distracted and overwhelmed. He would read emails from friends suggesting that he use his parachute to go travel in South America for three months. Other friends called recommending jobs, and the websites he surfed showed hundreds of possible career opportunities and directions he could take. He became paralyzed by the choices. In terms of working memory, too many choices equals too much information. Entertaining the myriad possibilities—traveling, becoming a firefighter, going back to school, writing the Great American Novel—caused Sam’s working memory to crash, much like a computer does when too many programs are running at the same time. He became so frustrated that he gave up his search and started watching endless reruns of CSI. He suffered a bout of depression, related to his working memory overload. We explore the important link between working memory and mood disorders and general life happiness more in the next chapter.

      It’s important to know that being faced with seemingly limitless choices, or simply too much information, doesn’t mean your working memory Conductor is doomed to fail. It’s the way you deal with the steady stream of choices and data that determines whether you’ll be inundated, like Sam, or able to quickly zero in on the best options and most important information for you. People who escape the crushing weight of too many choices don’t allow themselves to entertain every single possibility or attend to every bit of information. They winnow down the options and sources to a more manageable number. We offer some tips about the best methods for doing this in our training manual at the end of the book.

      Time Management

      Another skill crucial for productivity is time management. These days we all have to learn the art of doing more in less time. But the problem, as we all know, is that even as new technologies help us to work faster—responding to email, reviewing important sales data or new documents, all before we walk through our office door in the morning—they don’t always help us work smarter.

      One downside of the new technologies is that they have given us many new ways to spend our time; we linger online, checking multiple news sources, travel deals, or sale items on our favorite websites. Instead of being productive, we end up wasting more time. Working memory plays a vital role in helping us keep on top of the time we’re spending and complete the tasks at hand.

      Cognitive time management is a term Katya Rubia and Anna Smith at King’s College London used to describe how well we can estimate the amount of time we spend on a task, as well as manage the time we allocate to an activity. Their review of brain-imaging studies on cognitive time management revealed that the PFC is highly activated during tasks that involve timing. The theory is that working memory keeps track of passing time and modulates decisions about when to take action.

      Managing Stress

      One of the pervasive characteristics of life these days is stress, and unfortunately stress considerably undermines our working memory, as Mauricio Delgado of Rutgers University found. To test this in a study, Delgado created stress by submerging participants’ hands in a bath of cold water. Though this may seem a procedure unlikely related to stress, it is a psychologically recognized method for inducing stress without harming participants. Delgado found that the stress undermined the participants’ working memory to such a degree that when they were asked to determine the outcome of a series of financial investments, they tended to just give up thinking things through and use their emotions to give an answer.

      The negative effect that stress has on working memory was also shown revealed in a study conducted by Amy Arnsten and colleagues at Yale University. They worked with rats to simulate stress by increasing their levels of protein kinase C (PKC). High levels of PKC are connected to increased stress: the more PKC there is in its system, the more stressed the rat. When the researchers raised the levels of PKC in the rats, their working memory literally shut down. As a result, they had impaired judgment, high levels of distraction, and displayed impulsive behavior. High levels of stress definitely have a negative impact on working memory.

      But what’s really interesting is that having a stronger working memory can also help inoculate you against stress. In 2006, Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and her colleagues at Yale Medical School examined working-memory-type skills in a wide range of traumatic and stressful situations. They looked at combat veterans who had experienced posttraumatic stress disorder, those facing the loss of a family member, women in early stages of breast cancer, and those who had just survived a natural disaster. They found that skills associated with working memory played a big role in helping them to cope.

      Calculating Risks

      One final basic skill that contributes significantly to success in life and in which your working memory Conductor is integral is assessing risks and rewards in a variety of situations. Do you quit your dead-end corporate job to take a position with a start-up company that could either put you on the career fast track or leave you jobless if the business fails? Do you follow the family tradition and go to your parents’ local alma mater, or do you enroll at a small liberal arts college thousands of miles from home? Do you accept the first job offer you get out of college or wait to see if something better comes up?

      Risk assessment is also fundamental to the more menial aspects of our daily lives. Things as ordinary as driving regularly require a great deal of risk calculation. Should you speed up to make it through a yellow stoplight or slam on the brakes? Deciding requires your working memory to quickly assess the oncoming situation, the presence of any pedestrians in the crosswalk, and the possibility that a police officer might be lurking ahead. It’s our working memory that allows us to juggle all this information in a split second. Think of all the daily tasks you do that require a similar assessment of risks, and you will realize how important working memory is.

      So we’ve seen how important working memory is to the core life skills that allow us to achieve success, whether in school or work. In the next chapter, we introduce a fascinating set of findings that revealed that working memory is crucial to success in another fundamental aspect of our lives: our general happiness.

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       The Joker in the Mines

       How Working Memory Makes Us Happier

      MARIO SEPULVEDA, one of the thirty men rescued from a collapsed Chilean coal mine in September 2010, became famous for making jokes. During the sixty-nine days he and his coworkers were trapped in oppressive heat and total darkness deep in the heart of a dangerous mine, the forty-year-old’s infectious sense of humor helped to keep the group from devolving into chaos. Even on

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