Improving Working Memory

What is Working Memory? Can it Be Trained?

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brain working memoryYou have prob­a­bly noticed the increas­ing amount of research and media cov­er­age focused on “work­ing mem­o­ry”. What is work­ing mem­o­ry? Why do we care? How can we best enhance it?

Work­ing mem­o­ry is the abil­i­ty to keep infor­ma­tion cur­rent in mind for a short peri­od, while using this infor­ma­tion for the task at hand. Work­ing mem­o­ry is sup­port­ed by regions of the frontal lobes (in blue here) and pari­etal lobes (in yellow).

Let’s take a few con­crete exam­ples to under­stand in which sit­u­a­tions work­ing mem­o­ry is used. [Read more…] about What is Work­ing Mem­o­ry? Can it Be Trained?

Why working memory matters in the knowledge age: study

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Do you ever have days when you wake up and every­thing seems wrong with the world? Hope­ful­ly for most of these types of days are not the norm but the excep­tion. How­ev­er, there are some peo­ple who see every­thing as ‘half-emp­ty’ instead of ‘half-full. Using cut­ting-edge psy­cho­log­i­cal research, I am inter­est­ed in find­ing out if it real­ly matters–Does it mat­ter if we see the glass as half-empty?

We are on the cusp of a new rev­o­lu­tion in intel­li­gence that affects every aspect of our lives from work and rela­tion­ships, to our child­hood, edu­ca­tion, and old age. Work­ing Mem­o­ry, the abil­i­ty to remem­ber and men­tal­ly process infor­ma­tion, is so impor­tant that with­out it we could not func­tion as a soci­ety or as indi­vid­u­als. One way to visu­alise work­ing mem­o­ry is as the brain’s “Post-it Note”: we make men­tal scrib­bles of bits of infor­ma­tion we need to remem­ber and work with. For exam­ple, we use work­ing mem­o­ry to remem­ber direc­tions while dri­ving or someone’s name and phone num­ber. With­out it, we would be lit­er­al­ly lost; we wouldn’t know how to get to that impor­tant meet­ing and would for­get impor­tant con­tacts. Work­ing mem­o­ry is crit­i­cal for many activ­i­ties [Read more…] about Why work­ing mem­o­ry mat­ters in the knowl­edge age: study