Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath.
Good morning, my friend. So autopilot, the Atlanta Braves, Category 5 storm, mindlessness. Explain all these random things to me.
Sucheta Kamath: Sure, good morning to you, Todd and I’m so excited to talk about these random things.
Haven’t we all done things like rushing through activities without really paying attention to them, breaking or spilling things because our mind is on something else? Mindlessness means operating on an autopilot while being lost in the fantasies of the past and the future, or simply going through the humdrum of this moment just so that you can get to the other moment which are more enticing, more exciting. We rush and make mistakes or sometimes, run into social faux pas, even. Take this example: a Category 5 storm is not an everyday event, you agree? And recently, we here in Atlanta, we are hit by Hurricane Irma and the incident made an impression on me. As Atlanta played the Miami Marlins at SunTrust Park on September 7th, 2017, the fans were bemused as a 1984 hit song, Rock You Like a Hurricane by Scorpions blasted over the loudspeakers. It wasn’t that the Braves had never played that song before, but more like the timing of it was not quite right. The song choice was a bit odd considering that Hurricane Irma was plowing through the Caribbean as the game was going on and Southern Florida was in the midst of widespread evacuation. Potentially, Atlanta was the next on that list. Braves were heavily criticized for this ‘tone-deaf’ move, as many news reporters called it. It was later discovered that Scorpions’ song was on the team’s regular playlist and no one thought of pulling it off the playlist. The song was on autopilot, so was Braves’ management team. The officials declared that the Braves will not use this song again during the series which makes no sense to me.
The point I’m trying to make is, we need skills to tune into the world around us and a strong working memory, along with the desire to persist when we tackle life’s nebulous problems. We need patience to sort, organize, and reflect when dealing with the novel or the unknown. Some are natural and intuitive but most struggle with it. Executive function is the central processing unit where these complex functions originated and expand, and working memory system aids us to do what we need to do to attend to information while brainstorming and problem-solving life’s mysteries, or simply mysteries of self.
So today, I bring you an expert guest from my neck of the woods and from my city. It is Professor Randy Engle.
Professor Randy Engle who is the primary investigator at the Attention & Memory Lab at the Georgia Tech School of Psychology whose research interests center around the working memory capacity. He founded the GSU and GT Center for Advanced Brain Imaging, it’s known as CABI on the Georgia Tech campus and currently serves as the director of it. Professor Randall is an adjunct professor and professional fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. For the past 30 years he has explored of the nature of working memory and the association of working memory capacity and cognitive control through fluid intelligence. Doctor Engle serves as an editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science and has been on the editorial board of numerous other journals over his career. His work is highly influential across a wide array of areas including social psychology, emotions, psychopathology, developmental psychology, psychological testing, and has contributed to modern theory of cognitive and emotional control.
I am very excited to introduce you to Professor Engle.
Producer: Wow, I’m looking forward to your conversation with Dr. Engle Thinking about your story, the Atlanta Braves playing Scorpions’ song, I mean, it just never occurred to me that when you encounter a situation like that where someone just seems tone-deaf, I never connected the dots that that was an executive function issue, so that could be fascinating to think about that and better understand that.
Alright, well, this is going to be a great episode. I’m looking forward to it. Let’s get to it, here is Sucheta’s conversation with Professor Randall Engle.
Sucheta: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Engle, we are so delighted to have you. Here’s a common experience everyone can relate to. Someone leaves me a voicemail with their name and phone number and this is of course before we invented visual messages. I listen to the voicemail, I keep it in mind long enough – the number that they have left for me – I dial it and then immediately, I forget about it. If you ask me to repeat that number, what it was, I probably can’t do it. Is that a good example of working memory? How would you define it?
Professor Randall Engle: How do I define working memory? That’s part of working memory. Well, memory, and when we started doing this, I’ve been doing this work for almost 40 years now, and when I first started doing this in the late 70s or late 80s, that’s almost exactly how I would have defined it, but I now know that in fact, working memory is better thought of as a system and it’s a system of temporary memories which you just referred to, but it also includes the interaction with attention. Attention is really the key to this in many, many ways, and there are two aspects that I will talk about later. We use working memory much of the time when we are doing important cognition. It is not involved in everything we do and yet it’s exceedingly important for most of the complex cognition that we do, and it’s this temporary memory along with attention, and it’s particularly important in the face of interference from previously thought of information or ongoing information.
So you probably didn’t pay attention to that number very well when you first heard it. It was in temporary memory long enough for you to dial it, but you didn’t really think about it long enough to store it in what they might think of as ‘long-term memory.’ We do this with names and faces, when we’re meeting people for the first time at a party or getting ready to start a new semester next Tuesday, and I will ask every student in the class to tell me their name, and in a situation like that, we are typically thinking about many, many things. I’m thinking about, gee, where’s the beer? The dip – if I’m at a party, see if she’s cute, where’s the bathroom? All of these thoughts that can occur in a situation like that. On the other hand, when I’m introducing myself to my students and them to me, I’m really thinking about that. It’s very important that I concentrate on paying attention to their name, their face, and in doing that, it doesn’t take me very long. Really, one time through and I can learn the name of 15 or 20 people, and with two times through, I can probably learn a class of 30 or 40, but it’s like working by paying attention to that and by saving that information, copying that information in what we think of long-term memory, making it a bit more easily retrievable inn the face of interference, and that interference can be even things that are capturing my attention. So if while you and I are talking, a plane flies overhead and I ship my attention to that, it’s quite likely that I’m going to forget sort of the thread of my conversation with you at that time. So this working memory system is a bit more complex than just a temporary memory, that’s a part of it. But attention turns out to be, I think, in fact the most important part of it.
Sucheta: I’m going to talk a little bit about attention. So is it fair then to say that working memory is activated as soon as we begin to attend or to process whatever enters our consciousness?
Randall: In fact, many people would equate the contents of working memory, this temporary memory information as the equivalent of consciousness. It’s hard to know that because we don’t really have objective ways of measuring consciousness. It’s one of the things that has eluded modern cognitive science, I think, and unfortunately, but it is – yes, and I do, I tend to think of it as a good and rough way of thinking about the contents of working memory as the contents of consciousness. When something is lost, what that means is the activation of that information drops below some threshold, so you can think about it as the nervous system where you’ve got thresholds for activation, but that information is acting above some threshold, unconscious of it, unaware of it. Even if I stopped attending to that information, it’s going to be in consciousness for a brief period of time – I just got a call from my wife, let me turn this off; it’s my wife, she will call back –
Sucheta: No problem.
Randall: That call came in and I had to stop – what was I talking about? So I had searched for the thread of what I was talking about there. I think I’ve retrieved it, but in a busy day, I might not. That ability to react to information that was previously thought of is really important, and that’s why the idea of interference is so important because this interference that makes it necessary to keep that information active and easily retrievable.
Sucheta: So, in my work, the way I see – and I deal with people who have developmental disorders that affect their attention, and then I have also acquired brain injuries where their attention is affected, but I see a unifying complaint or a challenge that I need to help them with: it is not just paying attention but it’s knowing what to pay attention to –
Randall: Oh, absolutely.
Sucheta: Continuously monitoring that you are paying attention to what matters, and if you don’t monitor that, then you are really paying attention to something irrelevant or unimportant simply because – just because it entered your consciousness, doesn’t mean you will actually -what you’re paying attention to is critical to your need, correct?
Randall: That’s correct. It’s actually more than that. It’s that many more things enter consciousness because you don’t block them out. Along with this ability to attend to incoming information, a critical part of that is what I call ‘disengagement,’ and that is that information is coming in and I have to block it out, so thinking for my office here at home, there’s a street that goes by but I need to not pay attention to the car that goes by outside or the high school kids coming home from school walking and talking. I need to block that out, and I think people who have problems of the type that you were talking about often have difficulty blocking out what we can call task-unrelated thoughts. So as I’m talking to you, talking to you is my task, it’s what I want to do and I want to pay attention to you, you want to pay attention to me, but the thoughts that are outside of that really fit into an area that we call ‘mind wand.’ Mind-wandering is a very hot area right now; it’s very much related to this, and there are big differences in ability, and we will talk about abilities here in a moment, and add the ability to prevent mind wandering. As we’re having this conversation, I need to block that information that’s coming in from all over the myriad of sources in my environment. The people that you’re talking about, whether it’s a result of a brain injury or developmental issues as well – my wife is a school psychologist and she worked with people, children like this all the time who just have difficulty preventing all this extraneous information from getting into the consciousness, if you will, and those things can then lead the person down a path away from the task that they’re doing. This attention capability, a big part of it is blocking that extraneous information or blocking the pursuit of that information, if you will.
Sucheta: Yes, so let’s go back to that very important point that you have just started talking about. So the brain’s attention system, the way I understand it, moves and shifts between two states: intentional focusing by engaging the central executive or the mind-wandering during which we do things like mental time-traveling, whether we go forward or backward in time, just lingering thoughts about past events or anticipation of future events, or the third kind which is – not the third, but it’s kind of a mindlessness – everyday mindlessness which is also a sort of mind-wandering. Can you tell us a little bit about the science of mind-wandering?
Randall: Your idea about the attention system is partly correct. I’m going to be using some technical terms for these. We don’t have to.
Sucheta: No, please do.
Randall: When you are just free-floating and you’re not really thinking about anything, so I’m sitting here for a few minutes before you contacted me today and I’ve got several different projects going on. I’m kind of thinking about them but thinking about what I’m going to do this weekend. So that mental state and part of the nervous system that does that is called that the Default Mode Network, and it is when we’re not really doing any particular task – I’m not trying to solve your problem, I’m not applying my mental abilities in a focused way – well, that Default Mode Network is the inactive. We can think of it as inactive but the brain is always active, and yet when the call came in and we were going to talk, I now invoked what’s called a Task Positive Network which is actually, there are several different elements to that system, and it’s a very different system but the first thing that I have to do is to deactivate that Default Mode Network, and we know there are big differences in that, in the deactivation of the Default Mode Network. Older people are less good at deactivating the Default Mode Network than younger people. Children who have the attention difficulties are less good at the activating the Default Mode Network, and going into this Task Positive Network.
Almost every day, we have new discoveries, understanding both the neuroscience and the cognitive science of the attention system. I think the aspect that I’m most interested in is the control of attention. So things capture our attention. That’s all animals with a nervous system, things capture our attention, whether they are alligators or rattlesnakes, or human beings. If a bright light occurs off in the periphery, it’s going to capture the attention of that animal or me, or you, but one thing that we humans are better at than most animals is the ability to control that. So one of the tasks that I use is something called that the Antisaccade test, and it’s been used a lot with the developmentally disadvantaged children, and so forth. Imagine the following, it would be better if I have a picture, but imagine you’re looking at a fixation point, just a plus sign in the middle of a screen. On each side of that plus sign, just oh, several inches away on each side, there’s a box and at some point, one of those boxes were to blink. It will flicker. Blink, blink, blink. There are two conditions here in this test, what is called the Prosaccade – ‘saccade’ called is an eye movement – and what you are supposed to do there is to simply follow your vision, follow what your nervous system a million and a half years of evolution have prepared your nervous system to do, and that is to look at the thing that is blinking. Now, why would you do that? Why would all animals, why would that be so predisposed to do that across animals? Because blinking suggests movement and movement is important to survival, and so things that blink suggest that there’s something out there that could eat you or you could eat it, either way, critical to survival. So all animals do the prosaccade conditions very, very well. Children, old people, everybody, almost no individual differences in the ability to do the prosaccade condition.
Sucheta: Because it’s like a natural survival –
Randall: It’s a natural – that’s correct. Your nervous system is hardwired to do that without your thinking. It’s not a voluntary thing. Where there is something that looks like movement in your periphery, you attend to it. The other condition, the one that I’m most interested in, is called the antisaccade condition, and there, if for example the box on the right blinks, you are to immediately look to the box on your left. You are to control that impulse, to not have this box capture your attention. Now there we find huge differences. Developmentally, younger children are – it’s a difficult task for them. Attention deficit children have a real difficult time with this, people with a variety of brain damage have difficulty – particularly the executive systems that you are interested in – have a real difficult time with this but we find even among young adults, 18 to 35 who don’t have any known brain damage and are otherwise normal individuals show big differences there, so this is one very important marker or what we call executive attention: the ability to control where your attention is allocated, and so when you were talking before about an individual who’s all of that information is entering into that consciousness, their attention is captured by all of those events because they’ve lost the ability to control it, so this ability to control attention is hugely important and plays a really big role and the way I think about it is complex system of not just working memory but it turns out, it’s hugely important to something we call fluid intelligence which is the primitive, the biological side of intelligence, if you will. This attention control is really important and this Antisaccade test is one really important indicator of that for looking at individual differences.
Sucheta: In my experience, I really understand what you are saying and in my experience, this really helps in cognitive training, at least what I have found. When you have to perform or engage in a task where the condition tells you not to, you have to employ your impulse control or redirection of action. That’s when the rubber meets the road from executive function point of view.
Randall: That’s correct and impulse control is a big part of this. I mean, there are all kinds of studies now showing that these individual differences in the ability to control your attention, this executive attention ability are hugely related to a huge variety of pathology, psychopathology, so what will you find is that people who are drug addicts or alcoholics have greater difficulty with that than individuals that are not. When we are sleep-deprived, I’ve done work with highly experienced Air Force pilots and even those people, when they are sleep-deprived, their ability to control their executive attention diminished enormously and it’s much more likely to lead to the kind of error that you have in many, many aviation accidents.
Sucheta: So this brings me to this interesting thought about, in my work with executive function, working memory impairment is quite often something that goes hand-in-hand with executive dysfunction systems, and as you know, working memory is one out of three components of executive function. The other two being impulse control as well as cognitive flexibility. I see that executive function refers to this deliberate and goal-directed modulation of attention and actions, so in that sense, what do you see the relationship between working memory and executive function exists and how much intentionality goes into regulating what information we manage and working memory as we are taking complex and difficult decisions?
Randall: I think that you framed it pretty well there, actually, and that is that intentionality is an important part of this. I think we can get better at controlling what we attend to and what we do to prevent ourselves from attending. I think that’s critical. Some people don’t attend very well to what is necessary to perform the task at hand because they don’t know that they should, and so I think that there are big differences in the ability to do that, even if everybody is equated on what they know about attention, so even if everybody were perfectly skilled at knowing that I should pay attention to what you are talking about, I should not let my attention be captured by the person talking, sitting next to me, but once we equate for that, there’s still this big individual differences that really reflect differences in the nervous system.
We have a really good understanding now, getting better every day, on the biology and the genetics of this attention control aspect. I’ve seen this differences in 4-year old children. The difference is in that attention capability in 4-year old children were observed 3 years later when they were trying to learn to read, and it predicted very well reading readiness, how ready somebody was to begin reading, and that was indicated by tasks that we perform two to three years earlier when they were sitting on their mom’s lap, so these are important differences in the nervous system. We are getting more and more understanding everyday of the biology of that and the genetics that underlie them, by the way. What is really important also to understand is that we can be better educated about the need to not let ourselves be captured, not let our attention be captured by extraneous events, and in dealing with the patients that you deal with, that’s got to be one of the hardest things, is to teach people – once you say that you’ve got a task, you are trying to do your homework or you are doing your job, or you are listening to your wife, or whatever the task at hand is, you have to keep telling yourself, “Attend to that, don’t let yourself be captured.” That’s where this idea of maintenance comes in, by the way, because that’s a goal, right? Each of those things I just mentioned is a goal, and if I can keep that goal active and sort of keep rehearsing, “I need to pay attention, I need to pay attention,” then I stand a better chance of not being captured, having my attention captured away.
Sucheta: You bring up so many important points and I think what I find that in my work, my work really cannot begin until I work on insight and some introspection because you need working memory to hold onto a strategy that you are trying to employ while you are dealing with distractions and interference, but if you don’t have adequate space in that working memory which often is taken away by distracting thoughts, distracting emotions, distracting –
Randall: Absolutely. That maintenance of information I was talking about before, and as new information is coming in, you are attending to where they compete with that critical goal for activation in this working memory system, and so it is hard to hang on to it. It’s hard for all of us and if I’m particularly stressed – I’m 70 years old and my brain is certainly less good than it was when I was 40 – but when I’m in the first 2 or 3 days of school and I’m under a lot of stress, I’m getting my classes ready and all of that, I’m much more likely to lose a critical goal, right? Because I’ve got all those other things competing for that space, if you will, and working memory, but attention is really key to all of that because if something comes along that in fact, I need to shift my attention to, if all of a sudden somebody comes in, says there is a fire in the lab, okay? I need to shift my attention to that. I need to forget it’s the first day of school and I need to forget everything else. So that new information can be really critical, right? It is like the antisaccade test where sometimes, I do need to let my nervous system follow what it’s trying to capture my attention. If you’re sitting in a movie theater and there are people talking behind you and we tend to – good attention-capable people tend to block out all of that what’s being said behind you and around you when you’re in a movie theater, but if somebody says the building is on fire, you need to know shift your attention to that. It’s a complex thing but if you have difficulty blocking that out, you’re going to be captured by everything.
Sucheta: Absolutely. So in closing, I have a question about learning. So when we learn new information, it changes the brain’s neural circuitry, right? So how learning is different from working memory?
Randall: Working memory is a key part, can be a key part of learning, so when you talk about learning, that’s actually, learning and memory is one of the courses that I teach at Georgia Tech, an undergraduate course. That’s so does the flip side of a memory, if you will, because information that has entered my attention, some of it is going to be really important and I will keep attending to it, it will maintain control of my attention like when somebody says the building is on fire. Well, information that is in working memory longer and for which there is more attention is learned about, right? And I’m much more likely to retrieve that later is that if I don’t attend to it. The two systems are very much related.
Sucheta: Is it that simply by – working memory is that holding place where information is brought into focus, paid attention to, analyzed, processed, and these steps actually is nothing but the steps in learning. So more attention the information receives, more association and analysis it receives, the deeper the meaning we formulate towards that information, and then it’s likely to be part of long term memory, right?
Randall: That’s correct. That’s absolutely correct, but there’s one element to that whole process that I think that needs to be added here. That is, you say something to me and I pay attention to it, and then we go a little bit longer, and now I have forgotten it from my working memory, but you asked me about that again. You ask me, do I remember your producer’s name? Well, I haven’t thought about that in a little while but if I can get it back now, that’s critical to learning. We now know that that testing of information is actually much better for a long-term learning if you tell me his name again, even if I think about it. So this re-retrieval of information is hugely important to long-term learning.
Sucheta: Yes, and actually, I had a conversation with Professor Mark McDaniel who studies prospective memory and this is the biggest difference between learning as form of education of learning learning versus actually, prospective memory where you have to remember to remember. If there is no intervening questions that ask you to recall the learning you have done, then you are likely to forget more, correct?
Randall: That’s correct. Mark, now he’s a good friend of mine. He and his colleague Gilles Einstein is at Furman University, both good friends of mine, have done a lot of this kind of memory called prospective memory. It is a critical aspect of memory and working memory turns out to be related, it’s important to that kind of memory and it is when you see that one of these tragic incidents where somebody has fixed their kid to drop them off to school but they forget and they leave them in the car, and it usually doesn’t end well for the child – we had a case here in Atlanta not long ago like that.
Sucheta: Yes, I remember.
Randall: Well, that prospective memory is really critical in many, many situations. What you find, and I’m sure Mark talked about all of this, is that if you look at the accidents in medicine, for example, where nurses give patients the wrong drugs or they forget to give a drug to a patient, or doctors do something like leave a sponge after an operation, or they operate on the wrong thing, almost all of those are associated with an interruption.
Sucheta: Exactly, interference.
Randall: Well, that’s right. So the nurse is walking – the nurse typically will have it written out, the drugs are going to get to various patients, and if that nurse is interrupted on the way into the room and somebody asks him or her a question that takes a lot of their attention – attention comes in play here again as well – so now, it’s quite possible that they’re going to forget where they were in that list and give the next patient at the wrong drug. Studies show that over and over again and you see the same thing in aviation accidents, that the vast majority of human-caused failures in maintenance or in flying itself are related to these interruptions which occur – most of aviation now is automatized above 10,000 feet and below 10,000 feet, at least in commercial aviation, but below 10,000 feet and above 10,000 feet, there are a lot of human decisions that must occur, and if people are interrupted, so they’ve got a prospective memory of what they need to do but if they are interrupted, that increases the likelihood of them doing the wrong thing.
Sucheta: Skip a step.
Randall: Substantially, yes.
Sucheta: Yes, and Erickson has done a lot of work with that, right?
Randall: Yes, yes, indeed.
Sucheta: This has been such a wonderful, wonderful conversation and I really appreciate your time, Professor Engle, and you have provided our listeners such a breadth of knowledge and the depth of understanding that I think we need to listen to it twice. I highly recommend it.
Before I end our interview today, if people want to know more about your research or get ahold of you, what’s the best suggestion you have for them?
Randall: Well, let me give you my email address. It’s at Georgia Tech, and it’s randall.engle@gatech.edu, but if they Google ‘Randall Engle’ and ‘Attention & Working Memory Lab,’ I’ve got a lab website. It has all of my papers available for download and the description of the work that we do.
Sucheta: Oh, that’s terrific. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and for taking time to talk to me today.
Randall: You’re very welcome.
Producer: Oh, goodness, Sucheta, what a great conversation with Dr. Engle Fascinating stuff. I learned an awful lot from that conversation. Any key thoughts of the top of the mind there?
Sucheta: Certainly, Todd. In my work, many focus on defining working memory in its most elementary form as something that allows us to keep the thoughts, events, and ideas in mind for a short period of time, as short as even for a few seconds while we work on it, but Dr. Engle explained however, that working memory is more than that. It is like a system, a system that is activated to use the mental ability in a focused way. The important part of the system is not just temporary memories we hold onto but also, its interaction with the attention system and that is a key point he was emphasizing. Being human means being reactive to stuff around us, being attentive to incoming flood of information, and every aspect of human life involves working memory. As Dr. Engle says, working memory is essential much of the time for much of the cognition. Any sort of thinking and interacting with the world requires engaging working memory, but it is the filtering aspect that is the characteristics of working memory.
Producer: Just to avoid confusion here, I want to be sure I’m clear on this. Can you comment on the difference between memory for learning something new versus what you said as working memory?
Sucheta: Yes, working memory is certainly different from learning where we learn a new concept or idea, we transport that understanding from a temporary hold to a permanent storage. For example, a neuroscientist described this way that when learning takes place, one can conceptualize that there is some sort of permanent inscription or engraving in the brain’s neural network, but when we are holding on to something while we’re working on it in the working memory, there is no engraving. It’s like writing letters in the water dew on the little pad and it evaporates, and then if there is more dew, you can write more letters. It’s more like an Etch-a-Sketch, you can imagine where we chart down things in the mental sketch pad and erase it once we are done with it. It’s an ongoing process on a continuous loop. Unlike memory which is with repetition and practice and processing, it becomes cemented, then we don’t need to keep it on a continuous loop of learning. We replace the information that we are holding onto in working memory with new things, and we let go the old things that we have finished using, and that information is escapes our conscious thought. So even when we are distracted, we are holding on to something, but what we are holding onto is really not that important or relevant, and all that is still happening in working memory. Is that clear?
Producer: Yes, no, it’s fascinating. Using this example of the Etch-a-Sketch really helps clarify it, so fascinating stuff. What I also thought was interesting, Sucheta, is that people have been researching this phenomenon of being zoned out and it’s fascinating.
Sucheta: Yes. I think we have casually been using this term ‘being zoned out,’ and actually, that is a well-known phenomenon. When our brain enters a natural resting state, our mind stops trying to remain attentive and begins to wander from one idea to another which is what we call mind-wandering state. It’s also called a Default Mode Network. This often helps us feel relaxed and refreshed. In contrast, a mind’s other state which needs to be brought into focus when doing intentional work is called the central executive. It’s a mode of paying intentional attention. During this state, the brain focuses intently on the task in hand or whatever the stimulus in hand or engages in purposeful task, allowing us to get things done. In fact, we go back and forth between mind-wandering state and intense focusing state. Forming a balance between these two states becomes imperative because we can best rejuvenate our brains when suppressing the active state of attending and regain best perform, and pay attention when suppressing the non-active state. So a lot of creativity, for example, happens when we let my lose in this mind wandering state, but you can actually actualize the creativity by bringing it back into focus, by using the central executive.
So Todd, we zone in and we zone out, but at any given moment, there’s only room for one idea to be processed in the working memory.
Producer: Okay, well, Sucheta, I could tell you, one thing I am good at is being zoned out for sure. So alright, well, as we wrap, any final thoughts, Sucheta?
Sucheta: I don’t believe you, Todd, that you are better at zoning out than zoning in, knowing how proficient and effective you are. You probably are very good at reining in that attention. So yes, in conclusion, what I would like people to know that working memory is a fragile and weak system, and it is often susceptible to failure, and it can quickly fall prey to interference. What are we being interfered with? Any thoughts and information that we are chewing on or a past experience that we are ruminating about, or simply revisiting an activity that we just finished can interfere in our capacity and ability to focus on anything that is in our hand, and this interference can be external or it can be simply internal. What we must get good at is the activating this Default Mode Network or this suspended mind activity where the mind is freely floating in whatever direction and rein it back so that we can engage in something Dr. Randall referred to as Task Positive Network. So giving full attention means really paying attention with intention, and this can really help people save effort. Some people are good at it and some people are not, but I think the awareness that you are not good at it can be a stepping stone for those who are struggling with this aspect of working memory.
Producer: Indeed. Great stuff. Again, Sucheta, it was a great conversation between you and Dr. Randall Engle. I’m looking forward to next week.
That’s all the time we have for today. Thank you for tuning in and we look forward to seeing you next time on Full PreFrontal.