Science
People who are used to constantly being distracted by extraneous thoughts during any activity have a large amount of so-called RAM (just like computers!) , which allows them to hold and process, respectively, a large amount of information in their heads. At least that's what American scientists think, who recently published the results of their research on this topic in the journal Psychological Science. Researchers note that a person needs this type of memory from school, as this allows him to perform various tasks at the same time: for example, follow the teacher's instructions and memorize dictated sentences.
The study in question involved a group of volunteers, for whom scientists prepared two simple tasks, asking the subjects to record the degree of involvement of their own thoughts in the process completing these tasks. In addition, the researchers independently assessed the amount of RAM of the participants in the experiment, testing their ability to remember random letters, and periodically distracting the subjects from performing of this test with simple math problems. Daniel Levinson, an American psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that those participants in the experiment who were found to have more the amount of RAM, noted the fact that their thoughts “wandered” somewhere while performing such simple tasks. But what is noteworthy is that the quality of tasks performed by such people did not suffer!
“The results of this experiment suggest that a favorable environment for completing the task allows people with large RAM to also think about things without relevant to this assignment,” Dr. Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute in Germany said in an interview with Biological Science magazine Leipzig. The amount of RAM is also related to the overall level of intelligence, which can be measured by various intelligence tests (IQ tests) and the ability to quickly comprehend read material.
In fact, as part of their research, scientists tried to open at least a little bit the door to the mysterious and incomprehensible world of human thought. “The results of our experiment suggest that people's ability to make multiple plans, holding and thinking about them in their heads all day long (when they go to work, “they ride a bike, take a shower, etc.) is most likely due to the support of RAM,” Smallwood said. “At the same time, people's brains try to allocate their resources in this way to address, first and foremost, the most pressing problems.”