Book Review - The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg
Category Book Review Torkel Klingberg The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory
I received a copy of The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg via the Amazon Vine review program recently. Working in the tech industry, I'm all too aware of the massive amount of information we're exposed to each day. What I was hoping for was an understandable, practical guide for dealing with it. Instead, the book turned out to be tilted more towards the academic side of the equation, citing study after study about how and why (we think) brains work as they do. Throughout the whole book, I kept feeling like I was missing a thread, a common theme that would tie together all the chapters into some unifying message. I'm the first to admit that subtlety is not my strong point, but I'm not sure that unifying message ever appeared for me.
Contents:
Introduction - The Stone Age Brain Meets the Information Flood; The Information Portal; The Mental Workbench; Models of Working Memory; The Brain and the Magical Number Seven; Simultaneous Capacity and Mental Bandwidth; Wallace's Paradox; Blain Plasticity; Does ADHD Exist?; A Cognitive Gym; The Everyday Exercising of Our Mental Muscles; Computer Games
As close as I can determine, Klingsberg feels that our short-term, or "working", memory is what limits us. We seem genetically wired to retain about seven (plus or minus 2) pieces of data at a time. Then if the information isn't pushed to long-term memory, it's pretty well gone. I keep trying to think about how this book would have been more useful to me, since I seemed to disconnect with it on a practical side. I could see this book being used in a psychology class as a textbook of sorts, each chapter spurring discussion of the concepts in that particular chapter. The large number of studies cited could provide additional material. With that frame of reference, I think I might have been much more open to the writing. But as a layman's book, I'm not sure this did anything but add to my already overloaded mind.
I received a copy of The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg via the Amazon Vine review program recently. Working in the tech industry, I'm all too aware of the massive amount of information we're exposed to each day. What I was hoping for was an understandable, practical guide for dealing with it. Instead, the book turned out to be tilted more towards the academic side of the equation, citing study after study about how and why (we think) brains work as they do. Throughout the whole book, I kept feeling like I was missing a thread, a common theme that would tie together all the chapters into some unifying message. I'm the first to admit that subtlety is not my strong point, but I'm not sure that unifying message ever appeared for me.
Contents:
Introduction - The Stone Age Brain Meets the Information Flood; The Information Portal; The Mental Workbench; Models of Working Memory; The Brain and the Magical Number Seven; Simultaneous Capacity and Mental Bandwidth; Wallace's Paradox; Blain Plasticity; Does ADHD Exist?; A Cognitive Gym; The Everyday Exercising of Our Mental Muscles; Computer Games
As close as I can determine, Klingsberg feels that our short-term, or "working", memory is what limits us. We seem genetically wired to retain about seven (plus or minus 2) pieces of data at a time. Then if the information isn't pushed to long-term memory, it's pretty well gone. I keep trying to think about how this book would have been more useful to me, since I seemed to disconnect with it on a practical side. I could see this book being used in a psychology class as a textbook of sorts, each chapter spurring discussion of the concepts in that particular chapter. The large number of studies cited could provide additional material. With that frame of reference, I think I might have been much more open to the writing. But as a layman's book, I'm not sure this did anything but add to my already overloaded mind.