Just as we break up telephone numbers into 'chunks – 01208816035 becomes 01208 81 6035 - the easier to recall them,
so, schizophrenia sufferers with reduced working memory capacity should be able to break up their day and week ahead into 'chunks' instead of an amorphous blur.
The marker 'chunks' are the days in the week and day when there is a timetable to assist intention.
The 'chunks' are the marked out sessions in the week - monday wednesday friday - when there are activites of interest that take schizophrenia outside itself, into engagements that become a routine, to be built up after repetition into a store of internal expectation.
They become the stored away 'automated memory' always there onto which attention returns after wandering off line.
Schizophrenia is able to 'chunk' as well as anybody.
Their working memory difficulty is to do 'two things at once ' have something to holdonto in mind , to be done or thought about sometime soon , that is different but alongside what is the main progression at the time.
Chunking allows for'automation' - the repetition - that establishes, with reduced cost to the working capacity,
A collected together scaffolding of memory, a base line to be recalled, on which to organise the day and week ahead, instead of drifting into illness led asides.
It is to anchor attention upon reality expectation.
back to brain in schizophrenia
Van Raalten
Working memory (WM) dysfunction in schizophrenia
is characterized by inefficient WM recruitment and reduced capacity,
but it is not yet clear how these relate to one another.
In controls practice of certain cognitive tasks induces automatization,
which is associated with reduced WM recruitment
and increased capacity of concurrent task performance.
We therefore investigated whether inefficient function and reduced capacity in schizophrenia
was associated with a failure in automatization.
FMRI data was acquired with a verbal WM task with novel and practiced stimuli in 18 schizophrenia patients and 18 controls.
Participants performed a dual-task outside the scanner to test WM capacity.
Patients showed intact performance on the WM task, which was paralleled by excessive WM activity.
Practice improved performance and reduced WM activity in both groups.
The difference in WM activity, after practice, predicted performance cost in controls but not in patients.
In addition, patients showed disproportionately poor dual-task performance compared to controls,
especially when processing information that required continuous adjustment in WM.
Our findings support the notion of inefficient WM function and reduced capacity in schizophrenia.
This was not related to a failure in automatization, but was evident when processing continuously changing information
This suggests that inefficient WM function and reduced capacity may be related to an inability to process information requiring frequent updating.
This research shows that automation involves a dynamic distribution of processing resources
that allows organizing and structuring of the large amounts of complex information present in our environment. This enables more efficient processing, thereby possibly increasing the capacity to process otherwise interfering information.
Severely limited processing capacity in schizophrenia however
was not explained by a deficit in automatization.
Here we postulate that due to an inability to process frequently changing information,
patients with schizophrenia will tend to engage in automatic behaviours,
resulting in limited capacity
to process information that require flexible and adaptive cognitive strategies.
[ maybe you cannot update if you have not registered and held on to previous perceptions that might have been significant ] ...What is holding on in the brain, what is and where, is there a fault in it for those with schizophrenia ... it must be in the hippocampus dentate gyrus, the neurogenesis there, that is necessarily available to deal between the person and what is going on in the world.]
Pernille J Olesen Helena Westerber & Torkel Klingberg
Abstract Working memory capacity has traditionally been thought to be constant.
Recent studies, however, suggest that working memory can be improved by training.
In this study, we have investigated the changes in brain activity that are induced by working memory training.
Two experiments were carried out in which healthy, adult human subjects practiced working memory tasks for 5 weeks.
Brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before, during and after training.
After training, brain activity that was related to working memory increased in the middle frontal gyrus and superior and inferior parietal cortices.
The changes in cortical activity could be evidence of training-induced plasticity in the neural systems that underlie working memory.
Licznik Odwiedzin, Licznik Wizyt