In his Ted Talk discussing how working memory allows us to make sense of what’s happening right now, educational psychologist Peter Doolittle put it succinctly when he said, “Life comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it.”  That is what working memory allows us to do.  Working memory is essential for logic, reasoning, reading, and IQ.  It also plays a crucial role in learning new things, mastering new skills, and generally following directions.  Working memory is also essential for practically any job.  We use working memory to focus our attention, conduct mental math, solve problems, follow directions or instructions, encode and retrieve information into and out of our own long term memory, maintain stamina during complex tasks, and take notes while listening to a presentation or at a meeting.

Without working memory, we could not hold down a job.  And yet so little is taught about how working memory actually works, how to protect it or how to improve it.  The truth is that we do little to protect our working memory from impairment and even less to enhance it even though it is one of our most critically-important cognitive functions.   It is just one of those things we take for granted, and then blame “old age” when it starts to deteriorate.  But, it does not have to!

Ben Pridmore needed only an hour to store the order of 28 decks of cards. Simon Reinhard could match 181 names to faces.  And Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein, memorized a deck of cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds.  These men were not geniuses or special in any way except that they did exercises to boost their working memory.  Indeed, there are things we do that impairs our working memory and things we can do to improve it.

What Impairs Working Memory?

Working memory, like most other cognitive functions, works better or worse depending on certain conditions.  There are things that impair working memory.  The U.S. National Library of Medicine of the National Institute of Health identified a myriad of factors that have been shown to either vary or influence working memory performance.  Those include some over which we have no control such as:

• Intelligence
• Gender
• Age
• Mental illness
• Medical condition
• Personality (which we can alter a bit but is mostly preset)

But there are many that we can control.  We can group them into a few broad areas:

Fitness

1. Diet / Weight – obesity impairs working memory
2. Sleep – not getting at least 7 hours of sleep impairs working memory
3. Cravings – diets high in salt, sugar and/or fat affect working memory long-term
4. Exercise –physical exercise that requires following directions, such as step or dance classes, boosts working memory

Emotional Well-being

1. Stress / Anxiety – stressful situations negatively impact working memory
2. Motivation – lack of motivation impairs working memory
3. Stereotype threat
4. Brain Stimulation – strategic games, music, art and reading all help improve working memory

Environment

1. Temperature – extreme temperatures impairs working memory; extreme cold slows down problem solving and heat dehydrates the body causing confusion
2. Mindfulness training
3. Practice – practice that uses working memory increases working memory capacity over time
4. Bilingualism – learning a new language boosts working memory
5. Musical training – learning how to play an instrument boosts working memory
6. Altitude / Hypoxia – altitude impairs working memory because it limits oxygen to the brain and makes it harder to follow directions (which is why mountain climbing can be so dangerous)
7. Pharmaceutical Substances – no surprise that most pharmaceuticals that are not prescribed (and many that are prescribed) impair working memory

Strategies for Improving Working Memory

The good news is that just as working memory can be impaired, it can also be improved and strengthened.  There are strategies that make it easier to properly encode, retrieve and use stored information.

1. Visualize – Visualization works by decreasing the working memory load associated with a challenging task. You do this by creating a personally meaningful link between what you need to do and the kind of thing your brain naturally thinks about. Then, when it’s time to get to work, the brain can follow these links and access the important information more efficiently.  The goal is to build a more visual representation of the task at hand.
2. Use your Inner Ear and Inner Voice – If you are trying to remember instructions for doing a wire transfer, you can store the steps temporarily, but you’ll need to keep repeating it mentally with your “inner voice” to hear it with your “inner ear” and hold it in storage until you actually do the transfer.  You are basically replaying the instruction like a sound recording.  This works with recalling phone numbers, addresses, etc.  This is a good exercise to strengthen working memory.
3. Try Chunking – Chunking refers to the process of taking individual pieces of information and grouping them into larger units. By grouping each data point into a larger whole, you can improve the amount of information you can remember. Probably the most common example of chunking occurs in phone numbers. For example, a phone number of 2126617818 would be chunked into 212-661-78-18.  To make it easier, associating the area code to NYC would make the first chunk even easier to remember.  Then there are only three chunks to remember.
4. Practice Recalling a Series of Information – Try recalling a series of items like a grocery list, list of islands in the Caribbean or list of family birthdates.  As you become better at remembering a list of 7, try for 8, then 9, etc.  Challenge yourself to remember even more.
5. Use Mnemonic Devices – These are strategies that help with recall.  One is looking for connections such as ways to relate units to each other in meaningful ways.  Think about what those items have in common? Group items by characteristics like having the same number of letters or start with the same letter.  Cherries.  Cantaloupe.  Corn. Cabbage.  Celery.  Coconuts.  Cauliflower.  Carrots.  Cassava.  Capers.  See how many you can recall.   Or make associations by linking groups of items to things from your life.
6. Meditate – Your working memory can be reduced down to your ability to concentrate. If you are really focused on instructions as they are given, they will remain in your consciousness long enough for you to use them. One way of improving concentration is through meditation.  To meditate, find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably, then slowly breathe in and out, focusing all of your attention on your breaths. You can count each one to keep your mind focused. Doing this regularly will improve your ability to concentrate when you are being set with tasks, thereby improving your working memory.
7. Play Memory Games – Your mind like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. When given lists of random words, most people can only recite seven of them even immediately after hearing them. Try and beat this score.  Ask a friend to list random words and try to score 10 or more. There are many online brain training games as well as smartphone apps that will make testing your memory a fun free time activity.
8. Write Things Down – When receiving instructions orally from a manager or coworker, be sure to write things down. While listening to a talk, only the auditory section of the brain is engaged. The brain is unable to discriminate between important information and irrelevant information in terms of what to commit to memory. However, writing forces you to pick out the important information. So, a different part of the brain is engaged, and is only processing and memorizing relevant content.  In this way, writing helps with working memory.
9. Use Visuals – It is useful to use as many parts of the brain as possible. Usie pictures – not just words — to create a visual connection.

By working at it, you can beef up your working memory.  One memory experimenter challenged himself to improve the number of items he could remember in his working memory.  Initially, he was only able to remember seven items (like most people).  But with practice, he increased this to 80 items of information (11x as much information!). He devoted an hour a day, four days a week, for a period of 20 months to this task.  He did exercises to improve his working memory, and it worked!  Practice really does make perfect… or at least a whole lot better!

Next week, we’ll take a look at another Executive Function and discover ways to improve those cognitive skills.  Stay tuned.

Quote of the Week

“The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.” Joshua Foer

© 2022, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.