The more efficiently the subjects’ brain worked, the bigger their memory capacity. This is not to say that people who can’t screen out stimuli are dumber. As Vogel noted, ‘Being a bit scattered tends to be a trait of highly imaginative people.’ The more you rattle the marbles around in your brain, the more creative new connections you make, as it were — connections that might be lost on those focusing intently on just the red ones.
So now it turns out that smarter people are better at ignoring/ throwing out the irrelevant information. Its funny, but I always thought that that was pretty obvious. Simply having larger and larger hard disks is no good, coz then you need to spend more CPU power indexing the stuff and keeping track of what is where. Instead, stick to regular disks, throw out what you don’t need, and things will be so much more so manageable! Same philosophy applies to our brains too, right? §
