People who have better "visual working memory" (correlated with performing well on many cognitive tests) aren't better at remembering things — they're better at ignoring unimportant things. Researchers at the University of Oregon used new brain-measurement techniques to determine that high scorers for visual working memory tests aren't cramming more material into their brains, but rather are ignoring lots of items.
Most of what I do from day to day is ignore stuff — quickly deleting emails that I won't be able to answer or don't need to read, skipping through RSS to get at the good stuff, separating small quanta of wheat from mountains of chaff. I can totally believe that the key to survival in the information age is not paying attention to unimportant stuff.
The findings turn upside down the popular concept that a person's memory capacity, which is strongly related to intelligence, is solely dependent upon the amount of information you can cram into your head at one time. These results have broad implications and may lead to developing more effective ways to optimize memory as well as improved diagnosis and treatment of cognitive deficits associated with attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia…
"People differed systematically, and dramatically, in their ability to keep irrelevant items out of awareness," Vogel said. "This doesn't mean people with low capacity are cognitively impaired. There may be advantages to having a lot of seemingly irrelevant information coming to mind. Being a bit scattered tends to be a trait of highly imaginative people."
(via Collision Detection)
