Have you ever found yourself entering a room, and then pausing to ask yourself, “Why did I come in here?”
This common situation is an example of the limitations of working memory, an executive function of the brain.
I think of working memory as a little work table in your head. It is where you store your immediate thoughts to work with them. Fun fact: It is the only part of the brain you can be aware of using!
Like the other executive function skills discussed in this series, working memory is primarily associated with the prefrontal cortex.
However, there is a significant difference: the other executive function skills require choice or effort to activate them. Working memory, on the other hand, is hardwired into your brain.
It improves through childhood, plateaus in your mid-twenties and then declines in your forties. In your 60s+ it drops off so much that some seniors begin to worry about cognitive decline. It is the source of “senior moments”, where one seems to forget the simplest things.
There are two very important things to know about working memory:
1. It has a very limited capacity (regardless of your age).
2. Your level of working memory directly impacts all of your other executive function skills.
In terms of capacity, it is generally agreed that the little work table in your brain can only hold somewhere between 3-7 chunks of information at a time. That is not much!
This limited working memory capacity explains why you might repeatedly go to a room, stop and wonder why you are there.
Let’s say you are in the kitchen and have a thought, which you put on your brain’s work table: “Oh, I need to get that book to return to the library.” You start marching off to get the book but along the way, you have another thought, and then another, and another and another.
Your original thought about getting the book gets bumped off the brain’s work table by the newer thoughts. Poof! Gone from working memory.
So, how do you get that thought back?
The two best strategies in that scenario are:
1. Return to the room where you had the memory or
2. Recreate a visual “video review” of what you were doing when you had the thought.
While the original thought is gone from your working memory, thankfully it is also stored in a different location of the brain connected to a visual-spatial memory of your actions in the kitchen. Whew, that backup system in the brain is very useful once you know it is there! I use it all the time.
The reason working memory capacity impacts all of our other executive functions was described by a neuropsychologist friend this way:
If you think of all of the executive functions as highways in the prefrontal cortex, working memory is the tunnel that they all use to communicate with each other. If the tunnel is small or narrow, then there will be a traffic jam that negatively impacts everything we require our executive functions to do.
Another useful factoid I learned at a recent conference is that when your brain is in a state of anxiety, your working memory capacity lowers, which then hurts your executive functions.
This makes me think back to the early super stressful days of COVID. People who previously did very well with their executive functioning suddenly were facing challenges and not understanding why. Anxiety had undermined their normal working memory capacity.
Personally, poor working memory is my brain’s greatest weakness.
It has haunted me since I had a significant concussion as a child and has only gotten worse as I’ve entered my seventies. It is so frustrating, but I don’t let it stop me. I use a tried and true method to support my dismal working memory: writing things down. I write just about everything down to keep myself on track. Doing so helps me to feel capable and competent.
Writing things doesn’t take very long, and it saves a ton of time spent wandering from room to room, wondering what it is you are doing. It is worth the little bit of extra time to feel grounded and supported.
What do you need to write down to support your working memory?
Have a lovely September – One of my favorite months!
Marydee Sklar is the president of Executive Functioning Success and the creator of the Seeing My Time Program® and the Set Up Success and Seeing My Time® planners. She is an educator and author of three books on executive functions, as well as a trainer and speaker. Marydee has more than twenty-five years of experience working with students and adults with executive function challenges.
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12 Executive Functions of the Brain Spotlight: #6: Mental Flexility
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