Elizabeth Buchen, neuroscientist, science writer and advisor to Lumos Labs, explains why working memory is such a critical cognitive process, and how it works:
In an earlier post, I described the cognitive process of “attention,” which allows the brain to manage the surfeit of the world’s information by selecting only the most relevant information at any one time. What happens to this information once it successfully passes through the attentional funnel?
If cognitive processing ended at attention, you would conduct your life strictly from information received at the present instant, without any internal state of the mind or abstract thought. The words of this sentence would dart ephemerally in and out of your brain, becoming wholly devoid of perceptible meaning…
Instead of this mercifully unlikely scenario, however, your attention grants the words access to your brain’s working memory, which briefly holds and evaluates them for the duration of their relevance (i.e. until you have finished the sentence or idea).
Working memory, though operating over a timescale of mere seconds, is central to human thought processes. It allows you to temporarily hold and evaluate information in your mind, whether from the environment, stored memories, or internal state, thus allowing you to process the world within your personal context. Thus, working memory not only allows you to remember a phone number and find your way home, but is also central to language, reasoning, and most of the mental functions associated with human intelligence.
So what is the neural manifestation of this extraordinary ability? Working memory requires cooperation between multiple brain areas (depending on whether the information comprises locations, objects, or words), but the critical orchestrating structure is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Lying directly behind the forehead at the front of the brain, the PFC contains neurons that exhibit the special properties of working memory; that is, they are activated by a specific stimulus, and remain activated for the duration of the stimulus’s relevance.
Consider, for example, the Lumosity Birdwatching game. When the bird flashes onto the screen, a certain population of neurons in your PFC will experience a surge in electrical activity. Importantly, these neurons will continue to fire at this elevated rate even after the bird disappears, allowing you to maintain a memory of the location while you move your mouse cursor to the proper location and “take a picture.” Moreover, in a different location of your PFC, another set of neurons remembers the letter that flashed in the middle of the screen, remaining electrically activated during the same time period.
The activity of these neurons allows you to maintain the bird’s location in your mind even when the visual stimulus is gone, exploiting the basic, fundamental mechanisms of your working memory. In your daily life, these mechanisms allow you to evaluate and manipulate select information from the world in the framework of your internal state and stored memories. Accordingly, working memory is crucial for effective decision-making and for the elaboration of goals and intentions; it enables you to manipulate abstract ideas, form coherent lines of reasoning, and overall act like the intelligent being you are.
16 Comments
I just wanted to say thanks for this explanation, Elizabeth. A lot of articles/studies refer to working memory, but don’t really explain what it is, leaving us lay folk guessing. It’s good to feel a little better informed, today, having read this : )
TELEPATHY
Can we use Telepathy for Brain Training?
Please explain in Detail.
Thank You
Hello! I’m new to this site, and have just read about these brain games, ya’ll offer. What I would like to know is how accurate these games are to helping the brain cells, especially for us that have Grand-mal seizures? Since I have been told by my doctor that when a person is attacked with such seizures, and last from ten to fifteen minutes, will cause the brain to start working slower. Since I tend to get these kind of seizures quite often, which causes me to lose my train of thought, as well as my memory. This is very disturbing for me and very hard since I’m past thirty years of age, and as it is my memory, and thinking are not really well, as it is. I need some more input on these games, and if they can work well for those like myself. Considering the situation that we may have. I hope to hear back from you, and get the info. that I need.
I can’t speak to the benefits for people that have seizures, since we haven’t done that research. However, most people - with a variety of different strengths and weaknesses - improve their cognitive abilities with these games. I’m skeptical, though, that it would provide much benefit _during_ the 10 minutes that you’re actually having a seizure.
Comments do not explain how a memory works.
DeBono has stated that any physical change or perhaps even a change in an EM field constitutes a memory, but such a change has to be interpreted by something else to constitute a complete memory.
how can i ready for trainig.
i am a very bad and weak students inour class i can never share my griefs to my elders .
i’m writing to share my solutions to difficulties with others who may have similar difficulties. my story starts with a the difficulties i had with a program that is not lumosity. lumosity’s carefully structured sequences, have enabled me to use both approaches. without lumosity, i can do neither.
i was given the proscience brain fitness program that works with hearing as a gift. although it’s a very effective program, i ended up with terrible headaches whenever i tried working with it consistently.
i stopped doing brain exercises with a computer interface until discovering lumosity. first, lumosity allowed me to test out the program. this was great!!
the structure of the lumosity program, allowed me to could pace myself, observe effects, and learn the best way for me to build capacity. eventually i decided to treat these brain exercises the same way i treat exercise from the neck down.
due to health issues, i have to add other kinds of exercise very carefully — in tiny, tiny increments, with at least a week to integrate any addition. so i used the lumosity program to slooowly increase the number of games i could play at one sitting.
starting out playing only part of a lumosity game, getting up to walk around or get a drink, and going back to it, i worked towards being able to play the whole game. then i limited myself to a single game for a week.
at the beginning i didn’t notice the discomfort and difficulties. i had habitually pushed through them for so long that i no could longer recognize what was happening inside me.
when i first added the next game, i made sure that there was an interval of at least four hours between games, again maintaining this schedule for a week once it became comfortable.
the next step was to play both games back to back for a week. then another was added at least half a day later. and i continued this step-wise process until i could play a whole training sequence at one sitting.
in this way i built up my brain’s capacity to handle the physiological demands of the changes these games promote. gradually the lumosity games have become as important to my sense of well being as physical exercise.
in the process, i also learned to recognize and honor bodily needs that had been ignored for far too long. now i can see the problems coming with enough forewarning to keep them from becoming distresses. this is an awfully important fringe benefit for me.
a whole lumosity training session takes as long as a single componenet of the brain fitness program. after a month of comfortably working with that level of lumosity games, i started adding pieces of the other program a little bit at a time. i want to be able to participate in conversations in noisy environments again.
i gradually built the capacity to do one 15-minute bfp session at a time. but the lumosity program is still essential to my progress. my brain needs to be treated at least as well as a horse. you cool a horse after running by walking for a while to help everything inside slow down to maintenance level. that’s how i use the lumosity games.
without lumosity, i still get painful headaches from the brain fitness program, no matter how slowly and carefully i proceed. with lumosity, i can do both without negative effects, and i really enjoy the way the lumosity games make me feel.
it took patience, persistence and time to get to the point where i can say that i really enjoy these games. it was well worth it.
sandi
This was a very nice explanation of working memory. I am puzzled by one thing though.
Regarding the neurons in the PFC that correspond to keeping the bird and the letter in memory: do these active neurons actually represent the letter and the bird, or are the representations elsewhere in the brain and the PFC neurons are just associated with the representations that are elsewhere?
It seemed that the blog post said the first interpretation is correct, but I have trouble understanding how the PFC could represent absolutely anything that is in working memory (auditory, visual, olfactory, etc.) when different types of phenomena usually are represented in different parts of the brain. If the PFC merely registered that the representations are active and related them to each other or bound them together, and if the actual representations elsewhere were pointed to from the PFC, that would make more sense to me, but that’s just my uneducated intuition.
Thanks for any further explanation.
elizabeth thank you for this information.i am student of bachelor.i have no time for brain exercise.in my free time i watch t.v.but thank God i am the best student of my college.o.k bye
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Is there a tradeoff between working memory and long term memory?
I have an extremely good long term memory but on the games, it’s the working memory that I’m doing the least well in.
And if there is a tradeoff, does that mean that if I improve my working memory that I will start forgetting things that happened long ago?
My wife is suffering ALZIMER from last 5/6years & mild to moderate condition kindly
kindly sujest the remedy if any
hi!
I’m from IRAN , my trial period expired on May 15, 2008,i like youre site , but i can’t pay any money because our banks arn’t joined international systems.
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Beginning today, you have the option to pay by paypal: https://www.lumosity.com/purchase
Hi Shrawan,
Although there is no known remedy for alzheimers there are some things that might help.
Here is a preview from our upcoming knowledge center:
http://www.lumosity.com/blog/alzheimersalzheimers/
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