IF YOU’RE reading this on a train, while making a mental note of the shopping you need, watching for your stop and trying to ignore the motormouth in the seat to your left, your “working memory” is in full swing: it’s the mental space we use for dealing with the here and now, and it’s strongly linked to intelligence scores. Now a study claims to have found the parts of the brain responsible for deciding just what you let into your mental workspace – and what you ignore.
Working memory enables most people to pay attention to only three or four…
