Читать книгу The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster - Tracy Alloway - Страница 46

MARIO SEPULVEDA, one of the thirty men rescued from a collapsed Chilean coal mine in September 2010, became famous for making jokes. During the sixty-nine days he and his coworkers were trapped in oppressive heat and total darkness deep in the heart of a dangerous mine, the forty-year-old’s infectious sense of humor helped to keep the group from devolving into chaos. Even on the gloomiest days before the miners heard the sounds of drilling and a showering of rocks signaling that a rescue effort had begun, Mario found happiness by focusing on what he would do when he got out. He tried hard not to let the dusty air get him down and didn’t complain about sleeping on damp cardboard with no sense of whether it was day or night.

Instead, he led efforts to find potential escape routes, made jokes to maintain his sanity and hold up group morale, and supported the younger miners who were often scared and hysterical. Whenever Mario got depressed, he kept his tears private so that the group would not lose their faith. After the tense rescue effort came to an end and the miners were lifted to safety, Mario gave the rescue workers rocks wrapped in tin foil as a gag gift for their hard work.

“We knew that if society broke down we would all be doomed,” he told a reporter for the Daily Mail. “It was important to keep clean, to keep busy, to keep believing we would be rescued.”

The international headlines dubbed him “Super Mario” because he was the one who kept the group from falling apart. They celebrated Mario’s natural charisma, leadership, and positive outlook. But we have a slightly different take on the matter: we expect that Mario mobilized a healthy working memory to stay focused on the positive.

Although the understanding of the relationship between working memory and happiness is still developing, a growing body of evidence shows that working memory is involved in our ability to keep a positive outlook, even in stressful, threatening situations like the one Mario and his fellow coal miners faced.