Children whose minds wander ‘have sharper brains’

Source: The Telegraph

A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.

Children at school need this type of memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering dictated sentences.

During the study, volunteers were asked to perform one of two simple tasks during which researchers checked to ask if the participants’ minds were wandering.

At the end, participants measured their working memory capacity by their ability to remember a series of letters interspersed with simple maths questions.

The discovery is particularly significant as the prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain said to be key to what makes us human

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Categories: Children, Education, Research

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