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。

　　Daniel Levinson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, said that those with higher working memory capacity reported “more mind wandering during these simple tasks”， but their performance did not suffer。

　　The results, published online in the journal Psychological Science, appear to confirm previous research that found working memory allows humans to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously。

　　Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing。”

　　Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores, and also offers a window into the widespread, but not well understood, realm of internally driven thoughts。

　　Dr Smallwood added: “Our results suggest the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they are on the bus, when they are cycling to work, when they are in the shower — are probably supported by working memory。

　　“Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems。”

　　研究顯示，那些愛走神的孩子也許腦子更靈活。

　　一項研究發現，那些似乎老走神的人擁有更多“工作記憶”，讓他們能在大腦中儲存許多信息，并能在大腦中對其進行操縱。

　　學校中的孩子每日需要這類記憶來完成各種任務，例如遵從老師的教導，或記住聽寫的句子。

　　在研究過程中，研究人員讓志愿者執行兩個簡單任務的其中之一，并在執行過程中不時詢問參與者是否在走神。

　　最后，參與者用自己對穿插著簡單數學題的一連串字母的記憶力來測算自己的工作記憶容量。

　　美國威斯康星大學的心理學家丹尼爾•雷文森說，報告顯示，那些工作記憶容量更大的人“在執行這些簡單任務時更常走神”，不過他們的成績并沒有受影響。

　　這一研究結果似乎證實了先前的研究發現，即工作記憶讓人類能夠同時思考多樣事情。《心理科學》雜志在網上發布了這一研究結果。

　　德國萊比錫馬克斯•普朗克人類認知和大腦科學研究所的喬納森•斯默伍德博士說：“這項研究似乎表明，當完成任務的環境不是很困難時，有多余工作記憶容量的人會運用這部分容量來思考所執行的任務以外的其他事情。”

　　工作記憶容量還和閱讀理解和智商得分等智力衡量通用方法相關，并為我們了解內部驅動的思想王國開啟了一扇窗。盡管大腦人人都有，但是我們對它的理解卻很不夠。

　　斯默伍德博士補充說：“我們的結果顯示，人們經常在日常生活中——在巴士上、在騎車上班時，或在淋浴時——構思的種種計劃很可能就是工作記憶支持的。

　　“他們的大腦試圖把資源分配到最緊迫的問題上。”