Dr. Mark D'Esposito

I could hold up, you know, I can pull up my own, if I'm filling out a form and I want to pull up my social security number, I can hold that in mind too until I put it down.

So when you think about it, it's a very important, you know, ability that we have that we do very flawlessly.

And

what i've learned more about working memory is is the working part of it it's not just this passive holding information in mind but it's being able to do things with the information it's being able to um you know when we when we do a math problem which we don't do that much now that we have calculators but if you do that in your head you're able to sort of manipulate the information and do the different parts of the problem or even if you're

You know, you're trying to find someone in a crowd and you're holding on to some face.

You're able to hold that face in mind and cross-check it and search.

And so there's operations to working memory.

It's not just, you know, it's not just this passive maintenance.

So when we started to think about working memory in that way, we started to realize how important it is for... You know, I think of it as the foundation for cognition.

Just think about...

reading comprehension.

You can't understand this conversation if you can't hold in mind what's going on, you know, earlier in the conversation or when you're reading a book, you know, remembering the sentence before it.

So it just predicts all these abilities that allows us to read, to plan, to organize, and all the sort of executive functions that we're doing, right?

We have to hold in mind rules.

We have to hold in mind goals.

We have to hold in mind all of these things in order to just carry out behavior.

So it's really come a long way in terms of how people are thinking about it.

I know that Matt Walker said that sleep is our superpower, but I guess one way to sort of use this term, while we're awake, working memory is really our superpower because it allows us to translate, as we said, sort of our knowledge into action by holding this information in mind as we're thinking about what we want to do.

Yeah, let me start with the working memory, the circuitry for working memory, because one of the important things about working memory is the other type of memory is long-term memory.

Working memory is short-lived.