Tools to Enhance Working Memory & Attention

I can think of two specific categories of supplements—that is, over-the-counter compounds that, at least at this point in time, are legal in the United States—that can increase dopamine levels. Those two are l-tyrosine, which is an amino acid precursor to dopamine, and mucuna pruriens.

Now many of you have perhaps heard that getting in a cold plunge or taking a cold shower or, provided you can do it safely, getting into a cold ocean or a cold lake can significantly, maybe even double or even triple, your circulating dopamine levels; and indeed, that is true.

It is the case that when dopamine levels are lower... that working memory performance tends to be lower as compared to conditions where dopamine release or the availability of dopamine is higher. However, it is not the case that more dopamine is always going to equate to improved working memory.

After performing a Yoga Nidra protocol, the baseline levels of dopamine... was increased by as much as 60% as compared to individuals that did a different protocol, not Yoga Nidra, not NSDR.

It has been shown that when people get into cold water, typically up to their neck, and that cold water, by the way, can range in temperature anywhere from low 40s to low 60s, depending on how long you stay in, that there is a significant increase in the so-called circulating catecholamines. What are the catecholamines? The catecholamines are dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine.

If you've heard of, say, 15-Hz binaural beats or 40-Hz binaural beats... there are several studies that show not enormous—okay, I want to be clear: small to moderate—improvements in working memory performance, but in some cases, significant improvement.

In fact, when one looks at all of the data in this paper, what you find is that supplementing with l-tyrosine, as they did in this study, did indeed lead to improvements in working memory under multitask conditions ... The dosages of l-tyrosine used in the study are really big. They had subjects take 150 milligrams per kilogram of l-crystalline tyrosine.

Now, for those who are curious about and perhaps even want to try mucuna pruriens, please absolutely talk to your doctor first. Mucuna pruriens is essentially the equivalent of l-dopa. L-dopa is a prescription drug, as I mentioned before, and mucuna pruriens potently increases dopamine ... If your healthcare provider approves it and you decide to try it, I would suggest starting with a very, very low dose.

There are a bunch of neurons that manufacture dopamine back in the brain stem that send their axons, those little wires, up to the prefrontal cortex. And that the amount of dopamine released per unit time... strongly dictates the extent to which working memory capacity is going to be high, medium, or low.

Levels of dopamine being released in the prefrontal cortex during working memory tasks correlates very strongly with capacity to perform working memory tasks. Lower dopamine, lower working memory span—as it's called; higher dopamine, higher working memory span.

The relationship between dopamine and working memory follows an inverted U-shaped function ... Meaning, if you have low dopamine availability in the prefrontal cortex, working memory span is short. As you increase that amount, working memory becomes greater. But if you increase the amount of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex too much, working memory span actually drops significantly below the baseline that you started with.

Now what sorts of daily activities and life activities would require working memory? The answer to that is basically everything that you need to do but that you don't want to remember.

Working memory is basically the taking in of information that's critical for you to sequence your actions over a short period of time and then forget that sequence.

What we know is that if people have damage to their hippocampus of any kind that people have trouble accessing or forming long-term memories, sometimes both.

Only a small percentage of what we perceive, what we see, what we hear, etc. gets passed into short-term memory; and then only a fraction of that gets passed into long-term memory.

Long-term potentiation, or LTP, as the acronym goes, is the strengthening of connections between neurons as a consequence of their repeated firing very closely together in time.