| View Larger Image | The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory | Hardcoverby Torkel Klingberg (Author)
| List Price: | $21.95 | | Price: | $14.93 | | You Save: | $7.02 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Oxford University Press, USA | | Edition: | 1st Edition | | Page Count: | 224 Pages | | Publication Date: | November 07, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 39,305th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780195372885
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
As the pace of technological change accelerates, we are increasingly experiencing a state of information overload. Statistics show that we are interrupted every three minutes during the course of the work day. Multitasking between email, cell-phone, text messages, and four or five websites while listening to an iPod forces the brain to process more and more informaton at greater and greater speeds. And yet the human brain has hardly changed in the last 40,000 years. Are all these high-tech advances overtaxing our Stone Age brains or is the constant flood of information good for us, giving our brains the daily exercise they seem to crave? In The Overflowing Brain, cognitive scientist Torkel Klingberg takes us on a journey into the limits and possibilities of the brain. He suggests that we should acknowledge and embrace our desire for information and mental challenges, but try to find a balance between demand and capacity. Klingberg explores the cognitive demands, or "complexity," of everyday life and how the brain tries to meet them. He identifies different types of attention, such as stimulus-driven and controlled attention, but focuses chiefly on "working memory," our capacity to keep information in mind for short periods of time. Dr Klingberg asserts that working memory capacity, long thought to be static and hardwired in the brain, can be improved by training, and that the increasing demands on working memory may actually have a constructive effect: as demands on the human brain increase, so does its capacity. The book ends with a discussion of the future of brain development and how we can best handle information overload in our everyday lives. Klingberg suggests how we might find a balance between demand and capacity and move from feeling overwhelmed to deeply engaged. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 48 reviews)
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Read this, Contemplate, and read again.. by James G. Snyder (Albuquerque, NM USA)  5 Stars
November 25, 2009
I think that every person who has any interest in the Human Brain should read this book. If you are a parent or a teacher interested in how brains grow and develop, or if you simply possess a brain and enough curiosity to wonder just what is in that black bow inside your head! That being said, I was also frustrated with this book for reasons I will come to in a moment.
I was very impressed with the depth of information and subtle concepts about the functioning of our brains that Tokel Klingberg explained in this text. This is not an easy text, simply because these are not easy concepts, but Dr. Klingberg explains both the mechanisms of working memory and our present understanding of its role in attention, learning, problem solving and intelligence. This is very profound and thought provoking stuff, with many implications for anyone with a brain.
I disagree with reviews that consider this to be a college text, it is quite understandable to the lay public, even though it will be slow going at times. Klingberg has avoided the pitfall that most authors fall into when writing about the brain, of going way beyond the scientific data. This is not a mass of unfounded neuro-speculation, a genre popularized with the likes of right-brain left-brain prescriptive.
However, my frustration was that in maintaining academic rigor he sticks a little too close to the already known. I found myself constantly wanting to ask him to speculate a little more. I'm sure that a scientist who has devoted himself to understanding working memory, attention and intelligence at least has a sense of where to go next. He implies that training attention, either through single pointed focus or the juggling of multiple tasks, might improve working memory and intelligence, but he back off from prescriptions. While many authors in this field are willing to write entire speculative bibles, I would have loved to see at least a final speculative chapter. Even one qualified by we can't say this for sure but if I were a betting man I would go with...
Despite this I would say to anyone. Read this book, at least once. Better would be to read it, think about it for a year, and than read again, as I have done.
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Title is Perfect by Loves the View (Hawaii)  4 Stars
November 24, 2009
This is a digest of information about the capacity and limits of the human brain. Our brains were designed for an environment where demands of information retrieval and manipulation were much more limited than today. We are using these "stone age brains" to deal with an incredible flood of information.
In 1994, I was struck by the scene in the film Little Women (Collector's Series) where Laurie receives the day's communication: his butler delivers a letter on a plate. This was just as I was starting to receive action items by not just mail and phone, but also fax, voicemail and a few cyber communications from email pioneers.
Torkel Klingberg examines how the brain... the same brain as Laurie with the single letter delivered on a tray... is managing all of this. One advantage: the average brain of today has a higher IQ. It has been rising, at least since 1900, in countries such as Israel, Belgium, Norway, Holland and the US at the rate of 3% a decade. It is interesting that while problem solving ability has risen, there is no evidence that vocabulary and other knowledge acquisition components have.
This is a short pithy book. For its size a lot is devoted to the differences in working and long term memory. It is clear and precise regarding the research and its strengths and limitations on what can potentially enhance working memory which is the portal to long term memory.
Klingberg discusses the issues surrounding memory enhancing and repressing drugs which are currently in development. He does not speculate about the people of third world nations where IQ may or may not be rising to meet this challenge. He does not discuss evolutional adaptations that may or may not be happening or anticipated. He produces a solid book on limited but solid ground.
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Watching Video Games Don't Increase Your IQ! by Rose M. James (Atlanta, GA USA) 4 Stars
September 28, 2009
Brief Summary:
In The Overflowing Brain, Klingberg examines how we overload our brains with data and that we ineffectively process this data. He later claims that we can train our brains to handle information overload by continually multitasking, thus increase our working memory capacity.
Overall Opinion:
I wouldn't whole heartedly recommend this book, because I didn't find it particularly fascinating. The book was more of a review of scientific research on attention and memory and NOT a practical book to learn on "unloading" the brain. Had Klingberg focused more on how to reduce cognitive overload caused by distractions and "noise" data, I would have found this book to be useful. The book is interesting for those that would like to know of the different types of memory (controlled attention and stimulus-driven attention), brain development and cognitive development. The author did a great job incorporating a good amount of scientific research for backing his theories.
Synopsis:
Klingberg's first 8 chapters begins by discussing how the information-rich environment we live in overloads the brain with information. He provides many examples in which people are forced to multitask in order to keep up with all the information. This multitasking "fries" our brains and leads to less productivity. He ingeniously compares the human brain with computers. He states that the slow processing speed induced by running too many programs at once on a PC is similar to the effects of multitasking on the brain. He then goes on talking about various sources of noises: TV (many commercials), newspaper (heavy on ads), and cell phone.
Klingberg describes our constant bombardment of information as our "ADD society." He focuses on two aspects of this society: the amount of data a person is exposed to and the capacity of the brain to process that data. The two aspects were derived from research of Klingberg's and others. Klingberg emphasizes the role of the working memory, its capacity, and techniques to filter out "noise" data.
Chapters 9-11 delves into attention deficit hyper disorder (ADHD), as well as different ways in increasing the working memory capacity of the brain. The author emphasizes the importance of understanding working memory to truly understand ADHD. He then analyzes in depth the many research experiments that were conducted in training and increasing the working memory. In chapter 12, Klingberg discusses the effect of playing computer games on the brain. He states that although playing video games do no make one less intelligent, it does cause the brain to rewire itself; this rewiring makes it difficult to think in the abstract. Lastly, in Chapter 13 Klingberg the Flynn Effect, which is the rise of the average intelligence quotient test scores over time. The author states that an increase in working memory is highly correlated with an increase in intelligence (IQ). He states that an increase in working memory occurs when the brain adapts to brain overloading/multitasking. Klingberg finishes off the book by analyzing the different techniques in increasing the capacity of the brain.
Style and Structure: Klingberg utilized a good amount of recent research in drawing his conclusions. However, Klingberg summarized the implications of his research findings in easy-to-understand terms for a layperson.
My Opinion:
There are two statements that Klingberg made that bothers me. He first concluded that computer games are not detrimental to IQ or working memory. Unfortunately, he did not properly focus on how relying on video as the sole medium can affect working memory. It has been greatly studied that the type of medium used to share information can affect how well that information is retained and kept in memory. Although Klingberg did analyze the negative misperceptions of television and video games, he did not paint an accurate picture. It has been proven many times over that those who read their information as opposed to watching have greater working memory capacities, thus a greater IQ generally.
Klingberg stated that people in general are getting smarter, which he based off on rising IQ test scores. First of all, IQ tests measure only certain dimensions of "smartness". Secondly, Klingberg based his conclusion of people getting smarter on a small number of intelligence tests. In defense to Klingberg, one reason why IQ scores are both rising and decreasing could be that those that are already smart keeps getting smarter, whilst those that are not as smart become less intelligent. The inherent discrepancies in IQ testing alone contribute to the decrease validity in Klingberg's conclusion.
Recommendation:
Author Maggie Jackson has a great book called, "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age". This book has a different spin than Klingberg's book. Jackson talks about how civilization will get impacted negatively by brain overloading.
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Good, but not the best by Dave English (Arizona, USA) 4 Stars
May 23, 2009
This is an awesome subject, and this is a good read. Nothing really wrong with the book, but it just doesn't quite lift itself up to being world-class science writing.
We take an understandable tour thought current (2008) research (fully referenced) and thinking in that part of memory we call 'working memory.' The idea of our old 'stone age' brain in the modern flood of multi-tasking information is introduced, and then explored in enough detail to be interesting to someone really wanting to know more about working memory.
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Recent revelations about attentional abilities, information processing, and brain training by Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) 5 Stars
March 18, 2009
In his introductory first chapter, Torkel Klingberg proposes that, in addition to determining how to learn to be less stressed by decelerating the pace of our lifestyle, we must also accommodate "our thirst for information, stimulation, and mental challenges. It is arguably when we determine our limits and find an optimal balance between cognitive demand and ability that we can not only achieve deep satisfaction but also develop our brain's capacity the most." Klingberg stresses the need to achieve and then maintain what Jonah Lehrer characterizes as "perfect equilibrium" in his recently published How We Decide. First, in Chapter 2, Klingberg examines the mental demands that surround us every day and compete for our attention, "through which the information flood re4aches the brain." (These mental demands comprise what marketers correctly call the "clutter" that they struggle to penetrate with their messages.) At one point, Klingberg cites an experiment that demonstrates "one of the rudimentary mechanisms of attention: the selection of neurons to be stimulated at the expense of others. The phenomenon is called [begin italics] biased competition [end italics]."
Then in Chapter 3, he examines "the really interesting constraints [that] lie in how we control our attention and how we retain the information we absorb." (It is important to keep in mind that if we do not focus our attention on something, such as the explanation of the specific subject Klingberg that he is discussing, we will not remember it.) "How do we remember what it is we concentrate on? The answer is [begin italics] working memory [end italics]." That is our ability to remember information for brief periods of time, usually a matter of seconds. Our long-term memory that retains events in which we have been involved in one way or another or facts about them are "encoded in long-term storage through a chain of biochemical and cellular processes that Klingberg examines. However, during the remainder of his book, he focuses almost entirely on working memory because "it not only retains instructions, numbers, and positions in the memory but also seems to play a critical part in our ability to solve problems [once we] remember what it is we are to concentrate on.
There are several reasons why others think so highly of this book. Here are two of mine. First, Klingberg brilliantly and (yes) patiently explains for non-scholars such as I (a) how and why our brains overflow with an increasingly greater number of "messages" from an increasingly greater number of information sources (e.g. other persons, electronic and print media, The Web, telephones, billboard), (b) how and why at least some of it is retained by working and long-term memory capabilities, and (c) what we must do to achieve and then maintain a balance of working load with working memory capacity, if not the "perfect equilibrium" to which Lehrer refers. "If we analyze the situation through the lens of the concept of working memory, we find that your feelings are matched by something quantifiable: the simultaneous inflow of two streams of information is extremely demanding on working memory." Moreoever, the complexities and consequent difficulties of this inundation are exacerbated by the fact there is a constant updating, revision, and even replacement of the information we have retained. That is why Klingberg suggests, "we must always be aware of the limited scope we have for receiving information." Choices, sometimes very difficult choices must be made...frequently when there is a crisis. The safe landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River on January 15th offers an excellent case in point. Captain Chesley ("Sully") Sullenberger working memory of procedures enabled him to process and then respond to the information provided by the computers aboard the Airbus A320.
In his review for the Wall Street Journal (Monday, December 15, 2008), Christopher Chambris suggests another reason why I think so highly of this book. "For Mr. Klingberg, the mismatch between our modern lives and ancient brains is most evident in the problems of working memory and attention, but another culprit may be at work. We are easily distracted also because we vastly overvalue what happens to us [begin italics] right now [end italics] compared with what comes in the future and because novelty is intrinsically rewarding. So whatever we are supposed to be focusing on has to compete with every new email, new task, new blog post and new conversation that wanders into our information sphere." Chamblis' purpose is not to suggest how to cope with various workplace "culprits." It remains to be determined by additional research in a new field of neuroscience whether or not the capacities of the "ancient brain" can be increased to accommodate the "flow" of information in the 21st century. However, in my opinion, Torkel Klingberg has made a substantial and significant contribution to our understanding of what workplace supervisors can and should do to balance their working load with working memory capacity within their own "information sphere" and also help others for whom they are responsible to do so within theirs'. The extent to which workplace distractions are reduced will almost certainly determine the extent to workplace productivity will increase. Moreover, there will be another benefit of incalculable value: improved worker morale.
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