Peter James

Working memory is essentially the ability to keep in the attentional foreground a piece of information while you turn your attention to something else. If while I’m writing this section of my book, my wife interrupts me with a question, I may discover after a brief discussion with her that I have forgotten what I intended to write next before the interruption—one of the reasons writers don’t like to be interrupted while writing, unless for emergencies. This “interference effect” results from a failure in working memory. In this case, I failed to keep in mind the point that I was intending to make in the paragraph I was writing at the moment I turned my full attention to my wife’s request. As a result, when I then returned back to writing I was unable to retrieve what I intended to write before the interruption.As the form of memory most highly evolved in humans, working memory involves the active storage and manipulation of information. Mental arithmetic is a good example. When mentally multiplying two-digit numbers, it is necessary to add the sums from each of the digits and then add them together. Some people have great difficulty doing mental multiplication and require either pen and paper or a calculating device. The demand on working memory is even greater when multiplying three-digit numbers and remains beyond the capacity of most people, even though the mathematical process is exactly the same as with two-digit numbers. The increased difficulty with three-digit multiplication stems from the increase in information that must be actively stored and manipulated in working memory in order to come up with the final product.The more you can remember of the events of your life, the greater your chances of making unexpected and liberating personal insights. Speaking metaphorically about the power of memory, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has written “People’s memories may be the fuel they burn to stay alive.” Murakami is referring principally to working memory. Enhancing working memory in childhood is important since deficits in working memory lead to poor school performance, especially in reading and mathematics. That’s because, absent an efficiently functioning working memory, it’s hard to follow detailed instructions, mentally manipulate numbers, or process lengthy passages of text. In computer terms, it’s as if the passages encountered earlier in the text cannot be held “online” and integrated with what comes later.Thus working memory serves as bottleneck for taking in information and storing it. When one cannot integrate what has been heard and read only moments earlier with what one is currently encountering, learning and the subsequent establishment of memory are severely compromised. That’s why the quality of a person’s memory has a lot to with their success in life. For one thing, intelligence—as measured by standard IQ tests—is associated with a finally honed working memory; in general, the smarter the person the more efficient their working memory. Isn’t this reason enough to make efforts aimed at increasing your working memory?Working memory is often metaphorically compared to juggling. A good juggler keeps within his attention span and memory a varying number of balls in the air. Working memory is like that. It involves a relatively small number of items (averaging three or four for a visual working memory) that are simultaneously kept track of. Just as some people can juggle more balls than other people, the numbers of items for working memory varies from one person to the next.For reasons that aren’t completely understood, but illustrated by the Zeigarnik effect mentioned earlier, the brain tends to remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. So if you want to remember something, it’s best to take a short break before you finish reviewing it. By temporarily turning to some relaxing diversion (a short phone call, conversation etc.), you will wind up with a stronger memory for material than you would if you plodded on without a pause. Psychologists speculate that during the process of establishing a memory the brain maintains a creative tension, which is only relieved when the learning process ends and the memory is established. Because this tension is continued during your break, your memory for material reviewed both before and after the break will be more readily accessible, or easily learned and more successfully remembered.Another highly effective technique for improving your memory is to keep retesting yourself on the material you want to remember. Even after you have learned something, your long-term memory for it will be strengthened if you repeatedly challenge yourself to recall it again and again.In one experiment establishing this rule, English-speaking students learned pairs of Swahili and English words. For example, if they were given the Swahili word “Mashua” they had to provide the correct response “Boat.” Since the students had no previous exposure to Swahili, they couldn’t rely on background knowledge to help them establish a memory for the Swahili-English combinations. One group retested themselves repeatedly in all of the word combinations including those they had successfully identified on previous testing. Another group stopped testing their memory for word combinations once they had identified them correctly on the test.The memory difference between the two groups on their final examination was dramatic. Those who stopped testing themselves for word combinations once they had correctly identified them on an earlier test, could only remember about 35 percent of the word pairs compared to an 80 percent remembrance rate for those who kept testing themselves for all the word pairs throughout the experiment. Bottom line: The more times an item is retrieved from memory, the more likely it is that the term can later be recalled. Frequent retrieval, it turns out, is even more effective in establishing a memory than relying on additional studying.Now let’s reconsider what happens when someone tells you a series of actions to be taken at work. You won’t be able to do them unless you keep in mind the correct sequence from start to finish. What you are doing essentially is encoding one item while retaining access to items encoded moments earlier. This is referred to as working memory in action. Experts consider it the basis for reasoning. In general, those people who can hold the greatest numbers of items in mind are best at considering multiple aspects of a problem simultaneously.Word processing on your PC provides a good analogy for what happens during failures of working memory. As you switch from document one to document two on your word processor, the unattended document (one) is still accessible to you. All you have to do is toggle from document one to document two in order to keep both of them “in mind.” But if you close the first document as you move to the second document, that first document will no longer be available for redisplay. A failure in working memory is like that: you close the first document in your mind and you switch to another instead of holding that original document online.