Klingberg

Fortunately, however, in recent years, researchers like Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, have made it their mission to abolish the notion of a fixed working-memory capacity.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Klingberg, “Increased prefrontal and parietal activity after training of working memory,” Nature Neuroscience, 7 2003, 75–79.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Importantly, Klingberg designed his experiment as a double-blind study.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Klingberg and his colleagues have conducted a number of studies to test his idea, but let me describe just one to you that really captures the malleability of working-memory quite well.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Klingberg used fMRI to see how this working-memory improvement came about, and found that brain areas that support cognitive horsepower, such as the prefrontal cortex, showed more activity after training than before training.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Klingberg, et al., “Computerized training of working memory in children with ADHD—a randomized, controlled trial,” Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, 44 2005, 177–186.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Recently, Klingberg asked normal twenty-somethings to spend several weeks training on working-memory tasks similar to the ones that his ADHD children had pursued—for example, remembering letters and then repeating them back in the reverse order of how they were presented.15 After training, adults were not only better at the tasks on which they had trained, their improvement generalized to several attention and reasoning tasks that they had not practiced.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Klingberg has been especially interested in whether children with ADHD can improve their focus of attention and lessen their hyperactive tendencies with brain training.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

Much like Klingberg, Posner treats the brain like a muscle that needs training in order to grow.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010

In this study,13 Klingberg and his team randomly assigned children diagnosed with ADHD to one of two groups: a treatment group or a placebo group.

Choke Ph.D. Sian Beilock 2010