To help combat the mental stress that police officers face on the job, the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas has developed a program to help police in Dallas make better decisions.
The Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training program, also known as SMART, is designed to help officers deal with information overload, says Jennifer Zientz, the head of clinical services at the Center for BrainHealth.
"SMART is built to help individuals to become more agile thinkers, better complex problem solvers, to become filterers of information," she said, "but also to be deep-level thinkers and innovators."
Interview Highlights: Jennifer Zientz
On what the SMART program does
What we want to do is teach police officers to have the kind of resilience that they want before — so that they build a stronger system — so that when they actually need to be called upon, they've got it there. An amazing amount of tactical training goes into each one of these people. What we're doing is giving them some cognitive tools to help them think about the information — not to undermine or change or alter their training whatsoever — but to enhance what they're doing.
We worked a lot in the leadership command. They're inundated, and it's up and down all the ranks; so much information coming in all the time. What we want to teach them to do is to be able to take in all of the information, whether it's sensory, verbal, and think about what is really important here. “What is the stuff that I need to be paying attention to? What is the stuff that I can filter out? And how do I take that information, draw meaning from it, and then innovatively determine how I'm going to solve the problem or respond in a decision-making moment?”
On the response from officers
A lot of them talk about just the way they do their jobs day in and day out actually has shifted. And it’s not from the tactical, in-the-moment, you know, “I have to deal with this,” but it’s how they’re going throughout their day and how they’re being proactive about what they choose to respond to and what they choose not to respond to. Don’t get me wrong — they have tons of emergencies, always fires, but understanding when and how much cognitive effort they actually want to exert, they can rely and fall back on their training, which is so well engrained.
On the myth of multitasking
We all thought for many, many, many years that multitasking was the ultimate ability. And science is showing us that multitasking is toxic for the brain. And there’s overwhelming evidence of this. There is a cognitive cost, a brain energy cost. The whole idea about “use it or lose it,” I think about it not so much as if we don’t use it, we’ll lose it, but how we use it. Do we overuse it? Are we using it in non-strategic ways? Do we try to go full power all the time? Just because you think multitasking is great doesn’t mean that it is. We didn’t know that before; we didn’t have the technology to be able to know look and see what’s actually happening in the brain.
Interview responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
