Cognitive Flexibility: Importance and Challenges

Cognitive flexibility refers to our ability to switch between different mental sets, tasks, or strategies. The easiest way to think of ‘cognitive flexibility’ is having good mental agility. It is not to be confused with ‘multi-tasking’ which is a myth; as the brain is not capable of carrying out multiple tasks simultaneously.

It’s a crucial skill to develop as the changing world of work demands you carry out a broader set of tasks than your job description implies. Therefore, placing importance on your ability to switch between activities.

Cognitive flexible individuals will be able to solve problems more creatively; acquire new skills more quickly and not feel overwhelmed when presented with new challenges.

Phenomena related to cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility is related to four other concepts: cognitive blockade, cognitive hysteresis, functional fixation, and functional reduction;

Why cognitive flexibility is important

Enhances your problem-solving capabilities

Being cognitive flexible allows you to analyze a situation and come up with alternative plans to meet your goals; or requirements. It’s important to possess this skill so you don’t end up frozen in a situation where you can’t move forward to your next task.

Increases your likelihood to succeed

Being cognitively flexible increases your likelihood of success, too. This ability to quickly adapt to new situations increases one’s brain function and resilience to stress. Cognitively flexible people tend to have increased fluency and comprehension while reading; they also have an expanded sense of awareness. Being cognitively flexible allows you to see different points of view with empathy and understanding.

Challenges to cognitive flexibility

Memory

To think flexibly, you must be able to draw from multiple reserves of knowledge and memory. You need an ability to reach deeply into the past and not just draw your immediate reserves; which requires a very good declarative memory.

Confirmation Bias

We struggle to latch onto truly new ideas. We tend to shape them to match info we already know and therefore miss out on the really valuable part of learning.

Salience

There’s an entire part of the brain, the Salience Network, devoted to noticing things which stand out in our environment. It requires cognitive flexibility to determine which of these things are worth paying attention to.

Low latent inhibition

Latent inhibition is the name for the fact that it takes us longer to prescribe meaning to a familiar stimulus than to a new stimulus. For example, we may pass by the same houses on our street every day and prescribe little meaning to them unless our attention is drawn to them for a particular reason. This is normal and allows our brain to ignore old information so it can focus on new information.

Individuals latent inhibition have a harder time placing those houses in the category of “old information” and moving on. Individuals with autism become easily overwhelmed by stimuli that other people consider familiar. Poets, writers, and other artists also tend to get caught up in the details of things, which allows for greater creativity but also may sometimes prevent the brain from seeing the bigger picture or moving on.

Information bottleneck

Sometimes our cognitive flexibility suffers because we’ve got so much on our mind or so much information or experience stored in our knowledge reserve that a bottleneck occurs.

Rigid thinking

Rigid thinking is the opposite of cognitive flexibility. It’s what defines mental conditions like depression and anxiety: We get stuck in a loop of rumination and can’t seem to think about things a different way. Becoming aware of the pattern of our own thoughts is a huge step forward in seeing things from a new angle and feeling more positive about the world.

Reinforcement

Thinking is like walking: you leave a print wherever you go, and the path becomes increasingly well-trodden the more you go down it. Neural pathways are the same way. Our brain remembers what we reinforce in our neural pathways, so if we’re using the same facts or telling the same stories all the time, we’re branding our neural pathways with them, which means we may end up repeating the same story to the same person and responding with less cognitive flexibility to situations and tasks.

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