Brain Training for Employment Success
ENIAC, the first computer capable of general problem solving, consisted of 70,000 resistors, 17,468 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. At 27 tons, it filled an entire room, consumed 150 kW of power and required six people to program its routines. Today, a chip of silicon the size of a grain of sand has the same computing power as ENIAC. ENIAC went into operation in 1946. In the past sixty years more and more jobs have been transformed until now almost every mode of employment involves complex information processing in some way shape or form.
In the modern workplace, our brain is our most valuable asset. We spend much of our working day using our problem-solving skills and expending considerable mental effort. However with the barrage of information we need to deal with in the form of e-mails, text messages, conference calls, voicemail, etc., we rarely have time to focus on any one thing for very long. Ironically this chronic multi-tasking undermines our ability form memories and stimulate deep learning, making it difficult for us to develop the skills we need to succeed.
Fortunately, science the culprit is once again science the savior. Neuroscientists have learned that the adult brain can grow new brain cells and change to work more effectively in response to the right kind of mental stimulation. Recent studies have even shown that we can substantially increase our thinking capacity with carefully designed brain training exercises. Once thought fixed and immutable, scientists have demonstrated that we can use such exercises to increase our fluid intelligence and general problem-solving ability.
Last year a team from the Universities of Michigan and Bern developed a novel training method to progressively improve a person’s visual and aural working-memory, positing that this would produce a transfer gain in fluid intelligence. After only nineteen days the study participants recorded gains in working-memory and fluid intelligence over more than 40% (over and above the scores of those in a control group). The potential impact on our job performance of this kind of cognitive gain is immediately apparent.
Rather than working longer hours or buttering up the boss, we can make ourselves more valuable or more marketable by making ourselves smarter. Generally speaking, jobs that require more intellectual heft provide greater economic reward.
But before you go looking to snap up a brain training program, make sure that you purchase a product that will work. The scientists developed an extremely efficient and effective training protocol called “dual n-back.” No other brain training method has produced results even remotely as dramatic. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I was so convinced of the broad benefits of this training that I use the same training method in my company’s brain training program, Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro.)
With the country in a recession, unemployment rising, and the job market tightening, it makes sense to invest in your most valuable asset. With brain training we can now do just that.
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