Читать книгу The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster - Tracy Alloway - Страница 45

One final basic skill that contributes significantly to success in life and in which your working memory Conductor is integral is assessing risks and rewards in a variety of situations. Do you quit your dead-end corporate job to take a position with a start-up company that could either put you on the career fast track or leave you jobless if the business fails? Do you follow the family tradition and go to your parents’ local alma mater, or do you enroll at a small liberal arts college thousands of miles from home? Do you accept the first job offer you get out of college or wait to see if something better comes up?

Risk assessment is also fundamental to the more menial aspects of our daily lives. Things as ordinary as driving regularly require a great deal of risk calculation. Should you speed up to make it through a yellow stoplight or slam on the brakes? Deciding requires your working memory to quickly assess the oncoming situation, the presence of any pedestrians in the crosswalk, and the possibility that a police officer might be lurking ahead. It’s our working memory that allows us to juggle all this information in a split second. Think of all the daily tasks you do that require a similar assessment of risks, and you will realize how important working memory is.

So we’ve seen how important working memory is to the core life skills that allow us to achieve success, whether in school or work. In the next chapter, we introduce a fascinating set of findings that revealed that working memory is crucial to success in another fundamental aspect of our lives: our general happiness.