At the start of the Industrial Revolution, Ned Ludd led an impassioned but ultimately futile protest against the use of mechanized looms. The looms had begun to destroy the livelihoods of skilled textile workers. The Luddites, as Ned’s followers came to be known, feared this new technology that threatened their incomes and devalued their skills. But technological progress could not be stopped and has gone on unabated ever since, shifting more and more jobs away from physical and skilled labor and into the sphere of information processing.

Today many of us work extensively with data and information. On a daily basis we use creative problem-solving skills and exert focused mental energy to move the economic wheel with our minds rather than our hands, making brain-power the most valuable commodity in the modern workplace. Ironically, meetings and conference calls, e-mails and instant messages divert and dilute our focus and attention, disrupting the brain’s ability to form memories and stimulate learning. Our jobs may actually prevent us from developing and deepening the skills we need to succeed.

As often happens, science has provided the solution to its own problem. Advances in neuroscience have demonstrated that the adult brain is not fixed and static, but can grow new brain cells and change to work more effectively in response to the right kind of mental stimulation. Recent studies have shown that we can even substantially increase our thinking capacity with carefully designed brain training exercises. We can use such exercises to increase our fluid intelligence and general problem-solving ability. These improvements then become valuable new assets in our current workplace or when we’re applying for a new job.

Last year a team from the Universities of Michigan and Bern developed a novel training method to progressively improve a person’s visual and aural working-memory, positing that this would produce a transfer gain in fluid intelligence. After only nineteen days the study participants recorded gains in working-memory and fluid intelligence over more than 40% (over and above the scores of those in a control group). The potential impact on our job performance of this kind of cognitive gain is immediately apparent.

Why work harder or longer when you can work smarter? Why put up with a mundane job when you can develop the brain power to move into a more challenging and rewarding field? And it goes without saying that improved job performance can also translate quite easily into improved compensation.

However, before investing time and money in brain training software, be sure to buy a program that will produce the gains you want. The novel training mechanism developed by the university researchers is the only one that has shown these kinds of improvements in fluid intelligence. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I was so convinced of the broad benefits of the dual n-back training method that my company uses it in its brain training software, Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro.)

In a downturn like this with unemployment on the rise and salaries stagnating, it makes sense to increase the value of your most valuable asset. This new training method can help us do just that.

Rob Fleming Can Drive traffic to your website or blog with his powerful SEO/SEM Article Promotion techniques. Find out how by sending him an email with his contact form. To change this standard text, you have to enter some information about your self in the Dashboard -> Users -> Your Profile box.