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irony in this allure of immediate satisfaction is that psychologists have found that the amount of pleasure you derive from that impulsive purchase dissipates considerably with the pain of making the payments. In order to achieve that fleeting feeling of excitement again, you need to plunk down your credit card for another new bag or gizmo. Eventually you may be perpetually chasing the thrill of the new purchase while placing yourself deeper and deeper in debt. If people really thought through a purchasing strategy of “owe more, enjoy it less,” they would be far less likely to buy anything on credit ever again.

      The ability to delay gratification and practice strategic allocation of our attention is vital in many areas of life. When you have a big test or a big project due the next day, your working memory keeps that squarely in mind so you can say no to the kegger at the fraternity or the happy hour get-together with coworkers. Your working memory keeps you from gobbling up the cheesy lasagna on your fiancé’s dinner plate when you are trying to get into beach body shape for your island honeymoon that’s three weeks away. The good news, again, is that you aren’t stuck with the working memory you have now: you can strengthen it to shore up your ability to delay gratification and get the bigger rewards in life that you really want.

      Focus and Multitasking

      The ability to focus is another advantage that working memory gives us. Focus is crucial to learning and makes a big difference in our performance in school and beyond. In order to focus, your Conductor has to keep the goal in mind while making sure no other distracting thoughts overwhelm you. This is, of course, increasingly challenging in the world of nonstop email, Twitter feeds, and multiple windows open on our computers.

      The fact that the strength of one’s working memory makes a great deal of difference in this skill was demonstrated powerfully in a study that Michael Kane and colleagues at the University of North Carolina conducted in 2007, which measured the impact of working memory on people’s ability to stay on task in the midst of demanding activities. They gave working memory tests to more than one hundred young adults and asked them to keep a week-long record detailing how often they experienced distracting thoughts or mind wandering. They found that the people with low working memory scores were often distracted, especially as the tasks got harder. In contrast, those with high working memory scores maintained their attention better.

      Distraction isn’t the only impediment to focus. We are all increasingly expected to multitask, and studies have shown that this demand to multitask taxes working memory and easily overwhelms it.

      Let’s take a look at what multitasking might look like in the brain. Imagine that it is seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, and you are helping your daughter, Gemma, with her long-division homework. The last time you did long division was twenty-five years ago, so it’s not an easy chore, and you are firing signals between your intraparietal sulcus and PFC to stay on top of things.

      All of a sudden, you hear your phone make the email “ding!” and you break your attention from long division. You have a big deal in your sights at work, and they need your help. You’ve got to respond with some critical information ASAP. You set aside the long division, and fire off a quick response. Now, back to the long division.

      Psychologists call this skill task switching, and it is closely connected to your working memory abilities, as a colleague at the University of Geneva, Pierre Barrouillet, discovered in 2008. Barrouillet wanted to find out how switching from one task to another affects working memory. He gave the participants number tasks on a computer screen. Numbers were colored red and blue according to the task the person had to do. In the red task, participants had to decide whether numbers were larger or smaller than five. In the blue task, participants had to judge whether numbers were odd or even. The participants were given a chance to try it out and become used to the rules of both tasks.

      Barrouillet could now test whether switching between the red task and the blue task would jeopardize performance. When the participants had to do only the red task, they were fine. But when they had to quickly switch between the red and blue tasks, their working memory was overwhelmed. It took them much longer to complete it, and they also made more errors.

      One of the hardest realities of life these days is that there are certain times when you simply can’t shift your attention from one task fully to the other but must do both at once. For example, you may find yourself having to answer an email from work while sitting in a meeting with your child’s teacher, or take a call from school while navigating the highway on-ramp on your way to work. Can working memory allow us to do both, and will we be able to perform both tasks just as well as if we were focusing our attention on only one task? It depends.

      In 2010, Jason Watson and David Strayer at the University of Utah tested the ability of two hundred people to handle a multitude of tasks. The participants had to drive in a simulator while using a hands-free phone. To make the task even more challenging, they had to listen to an audio of a series of words interspersed with math problems. This was a working memory task that required considerable mental agility: they had to use their working memory to retrieve mathematical information from their long-term library to solve a problem. At the same time, they had to keep track of a string of words in the correct order. On top of all this, they had to negotiate traffic in the simulator.

      Out of the two hundred adults, the majority of them did worse in the driving simulator when they had to use their working memory at the same time. They took longer to brake than they should, and they tailgated a pace car. If you ever had to think through a work problem while driving or even decode your Aunt Mabel’s cryptic and hastily scribbled directions in the days before GPS, you know your driving can suffer. The results of this experiment were clear: people perform worse when they have to do more than one task at the same time. Watson and Strayer also found that while most people are at least able to keep two possible tasks in their mind, when that number grows and they are forced to handle more than two tasks, their working memory Conductor drops the baton.

      Scientists have known since the 1980s that performing two tasks at the same time undermines performance in both. But one additional discovery Watson and Strayer made was quite surprising: the rule that performing two tasks at once undermines our ability to do each well doesn’t apply to all of us. Participants who had top working memory scores were able to do both the driving and the working memory task at the same time without any decline in the performance of either. For these “Super Taskers,” as Watson and Strayer call them, their working memory was so good that it took everything in stride. If we improve our working memory, we can become more like the supertaskers.

      Managing Information

      Another major stress on our working memory is information overload: too much information can overwhelm our working memory.

      One interesting study that shows this effect was conducted by researchers at Washington State University, who wanted to look at how information overload can affect financial decisions. They gave participants a gambling task. They were presented with four decks of cards; some cards won them money, and some lost them money. Remembering what they’d won and comparing it with the cards they had turned over, the best players were able to determine quickly which decks were able to win them the most money and which decks were to be avoided because of losing cards. But when players were also given random sequences of numbers to remember, it took them longer to distinguish between the winning and losing decks, and they ended up losing more money. This shows that too much information can make you a bad investor.

      This is all the more true on Wall Street. If you’ve ever seen the bank of flashing screens at a broker’s desk, you have a sense of the information overload they are up against. When deciding whether to invest in a company, for example, they may take into account the people at the helm; the current and potential size of its market; net profits; and its past, present, and future stock value, among other pieces of information. Weighing all of these factors can take up so much of your working memory that it becomes overwhelmed. Think of having piles and piles of papers, sticky notes, and spreadsheets strewn about your desk, and you get a picture of what’s going on inside the brain. When information overloads working memory this way, it can make brokers—and the rest of us—scrap all the strategizing

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