Improving your Working Memory

A workout for working memory

New research suggests that mental exercises might enhance one of the brain 's central components for reasoning and problem-solving

People may be able to remember a nearly infinite number of facts , but only a handful of items--held in working memory--can be accessed and considered at any given moment . It 's the reason why a person might forget to buy an item or two on a mental grocery list , or why most people have difficulty adding together large numbers . In fact , working memory could be the basis for

general intelligence and reasoning : Those who can hold many items in their mind may be well equipped to consider different angles of a complex problem simultaneously

If psychologists could help people expand their working-memory capacity or make it function more efficiently , everyone could benefit , from chess masters to learning-disabled children , says Torkel Klingberg , MD , PhD an assistant cognitive neuroscience professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden . Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity dis (ADHD , for example , might especially benefit from working-memory training , says Rosemary Tannock , PhD , a psychologist and psychiatry professor at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto "It could be that working-memory problems give rise to observable behavioral symptoms of ADHD : distractibility and also poor academic achievement " she says . Working-memory deficits might also underpin some reading disabilities , as it controls the ability to recall words read earlier in a sentence , says Tannock

But how--or even if--working memory can be expanded through training remains a of hot contention among psychologists . Some argue that working memory has a set limit of about four items , and that individual differences in working memory arise from the ability to group small bits of information into larger chunks . However , new research suggests that working-memory capacity could expand with practice--a finding that could shed new light on this central part of the mind 's architecture , as well as potentially lead to treatments for ADHD or other learning disabilities

Functional limitations

One such study--by researchers at Syracuse University--hit upon the potential trainability while attempting to resolve a debate in the literature on the limits of working memory

Since the 1950s , psychologists have found one aspect of working memory--sometimes referred to as the focus of attention--to have severe limitations . For example , George Miller , PhD--a founder of cognitive psychology and a psychology professor at Princeton University--established that people generally can 't recall lists of numbers more than seven digits long . Those who exceeded that limit tended to make smaller groups of numbers into larger ones , using a process called "chunking " For example , people familiar with U .S intelligence agencies would see the letter group "FBICIA " as two chunks rather the six letters , and that set of letters would only occupy two slots in a person 's memory , rather than six

In recent years , however , evidence is mounting that the limitation of working memory is somewhere between one and four information chunks . The downward revision results from new techniques to keep people from chunking information , which can create...