These are multifunctional areas of the brain, these are not the jazz areas of the brain.

If they were then you might have a confound in your study. So lets go back and look at the scatter plot, relating working memory capacity SAT.

And, the, variable that I want on the y axis comes first, so it's pi, y till the, x.

But with that as sort of the base and that idea of working memory, they've then sort of extrapolated that and said, let's talk about something that they call enhanced working memory.

Also, the working memory score. Not quite as bad, but still sort of skewed.

So the maximum score you can get is 2400. So that's on the, on the Y axis here.

Let's just assume that.

What this line represents here is known as the regression line and that tells us how strong the relationship is between working memory capacity and SAT.

You've very weak correlations between working memory and SAT in Ivy League schools.

Now, they've made the argument that even on a very basic level chimps probably do have some working memory as well.

It's called working memory training.

But I think really what neuropsychologists and what people working on evolution are working towards, is the idea there's probably not one spot.

So in my own research, I'm interested in individual differences in intelligence, and working memory capacity.

That's when the subject would have to say, yeah.

But what you see is over many, many training sessions over weeks. Subjects get up to like 5, 6 back.

That would of been a better design. And again, as of today as

And I've been doing this for two decades and I've seen over and over and over again that scores on our tasks that we design to measure working memory capacity they're strongly correlated with scores on standardized tests like the SAT.

Here's sort of a typical scatter plot showing scores on working memory capacity tasks.

That's probably just a practice effect. But people in the training group went up even more. So there's some evidence that this working memory training seems to enhance intelligence.

Because in the study I showed you, there might have been confounds. It also wasn't double blind.

So here in the U.S the SAT is used by admissions officers to decide who is admitted to certain colleges.

So, there's not a lot of examples of chimps reusing tools or sort of behaving in exactly the same way as what we see with Homo habilis.

If I wanted to predict an individual person's SAT score on the basis of their working memory capacity, say this person, right here.

One of the regions I'm going to point out to you is here in the front of the brain, it's the area that's important for working memory and executive decision making and what was interesting about it was when we actually plotted the data versus their ages.

So, there are some researchers in my field, especially a fellow by the name of Thomas Wynn, has teamed up with a neuropsychologist, by the name of Frederick Coolidge, and the two of them have talked about something called working memory.

The interpretation here is that the type of university moderates the relationship between working memory capacity and standardized test scores.

And so it's not surprising that we have a negatively skewed distribution with respect to SAT scores.

So to take an example from my own research, we know that scores on tests of short term memory capacity, or what I call working memory capacity, are strongly correlated with scores on standardized tests like the SAT.

This is a pretty radical idea within the field of psychology because conventional wisdom, up to, the last sort of decade or so is that, once you become sort of, an adult, once your, your brain is matured, once you reach about 18 years old or so, that your level of intelligence, your working memory capacity is sort of fixed, relative to the rest of the populatioin.

The experimenters knew, the subjects knew, and the experimenters clearly wanted a particular outcome.

The way I do that is I would go to their working memory score which is around 0.7 then go to the regression line and then over to SAT and I would predict that they'd get about 2100 on the SAT on the basis of their working memory score.

So what Jaeggi et al did is they had four different groups of subjects trained in the working memory training procedure, some of them trained eight sessions, some of them twelve, some of them seventeen, some of them nineteen.

So a better experimental design here would have been to have a control group that also went to the lab everyday and engage in some task that was rewarding and made people feel better about themselves but didn't engage working memory.

And is about mechanisms that link independent variables to dependent variables, and my whimsical phrase is, it's our best way of getting at why stuff happens, and if we can understand why stuff happens, we can predict stuff.