Has someone ever given you a set of instructions and then as you go to do them, you can’t remember them? Or have you ever walked into a room to do something and can’t remember why you are in that room? That is your working memory letting you down.

Working memory is where we temporarily hold information while working through a problem. Imagine if I asked you to go to your math teacher, ask for a book and then drop the book off at the library. That seems pretty simple? The problem is that you bumped into a friend on the way to the math teacher and they said they couldn’t wait to see you on the weekend. Boom, that fills up a space. Then you see a bird circling and ask yourself, “What are they doing?” That takes up another space. Before you know it, all the instructions are gone and all you remember is that you had to go to the math teacher.

Your working memory gets overwhelmed quickly with lots of irrelevant information, and all the new information kicks out the old information you are trying to remember.

The interesting thing about working memory is that once it is gone, it is gone forever. When I was teaching, I used to ask my students to try harder to remember – “I just told you the five instructions; what were they?” But what I didn’t realise at the time was, I gave them too many instructions and as they were doing the first one (find a partner) it overloaded their working memory and they forgot the rest, forever.

You can’t change working memory, but you can work around it. Here are some of my best strategies:

1. You have about 4-6 spaces in your working memory to hold information and less if you have attention problems. Use the spaces carefully.
2. Work things out on paper rather than working things out in your head. You will be much more successful. It is like your brain’s notebook.
3. If you have something important to remember, just write it down. Leaving it in your working memory will take up valuable space.
4. Focus on one task at a time. For example, what content do you want to include if you are writing a story or essay first? Then, think about your order of the content. Then, think about spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Don’t do them all at once.
5. Practice/rehearsal is the magic solution. Once things are in your long-term memory, you don’t load up your working memory. For example, if you know your times tables, it is easy to do fractions as you aren’t spending all of your energy working out the table. If you are reading and know lots of words through practice, you aren’t spending all of your time decoding but can try to understand the text. Ten minutes daily is a great start – read and do your tables.
6. Verbal noise interferes with your working memory. Any conversation while trying to think knocks something out of your mind (and remember you can’t get it back). Try noise-cancelling earphones or music without words. It works really well.

Working around working memory changed my life. I can’t add more boxes, but I can use the ones I have a little better.

Dr Mandie Shean
College Psychologist