It’s never been one of my strengths. I always liked math and physics because they didn’t require much memorization — I could just rederive formulas on the fly. One of the reasons that I never seriously considered being a doctor was the amount of memorization required. And I think that for that profession in particular, memory is important, and apparently more so than intelligence or processing capability, because I’ve met doctors who I didn’t think were all that smart, and I don’t intrinsically respect them just because they’re doctors. At least not as much as they and society thinks I’m supposed to.
7 thoughts on “Having A Good Working Memory”
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I think working memory can be improved through practice, though I can’t back that up with any studies, just that top waiters and waitresses soon learn to memorize vast and complicated orders just by practicing. There were other studies of attempts to memorize faces that showed a similar ability to train yourself to remember.
Once I was so bored on a job site that I started trying to memorize Robert Fagle’s translation of the Iliad. I fairly quickly got to the point of reciting for about 30 minutes of it without error, and could pick up at any point when prompted by a partial sentence.
“Rage, goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son, Achilles. Murderous. Doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls, great fighters souls, but made their bodies carion, feasts for the birds and dogs.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed…” etc. etc.
The odd thing about turning myself into an endless tape loop was that I didn’t have any ability to process the vast string of information I’d committed to memory. I’d be doing a New York Times crossword and hit an Iliad question, often something like “Who was the father of so and so.” I knew the answer was in my head somewhere, and I knew the approximate location in the Iliad where it was mentioned, so I’d recite from a bit prior to that, listening to what I was saying, until I’d spoken the relevant piece of data. Then I’d pencil in the answer. I had rewind, fast-forward, and play, but no random access.
Memory can be a strange beast.
I had a great comment to post, but it’s completely escaped me now….
Google has made me a super genius. “Never remember something you can look up,” said Albert Einstein. Back in the day of dBase II multiuser (which never got past beta and was never released as a product) I had written a program of about ten thousand lines. I had the whole thing memorized. The customer was in Ohio and I was in NYC. I used Edlin to do blind updates to the code. It was impossible for me to see the result of my remote edits (using Edlin and a terminal program.) I had to have the customer tell me the results after I finished. Later at another company I worked with a team of programmers where individual modules were bigger than that dBase program with more than a million lines of code overall. I didn’t have all of that memorized, but it was surprising how much of that I did. Now I couldn’t tell you the first line of this comment…
Working memory and long term memory are totally different things. They very likely do not even share a mechanism. Short term memory is 7+/-2 for almost all human beings. The ‘7’ refers to ‘chunks’ basically like having 7 registers in a computer than can contain address pointers to long strings elsewhere.
Memory training consists of learning good chunking strategies, ways of turning sequences of numbers or words read to you rapidly into a chunks for which only one pointer is required. Mnemonics is another trick; one memorizes in long term memory a ‘walk’ past familiar locations and attaches things to be memorized to each location, preferably as strange pictures. I still remember Kennedy’s Postmaster General from a demonstration of this in Junior High School. The picture was too humorous to ever forget.
So you can learn to *use* your registers better. It does not seem too likely to me that you can change your CPU structure in the plus direction… although with age you might well have some registers fail. [Full disclosure: I studied Cognitive Psychology as one of Herbert Simons grad students]
I’m struggling with the retention issue at my current contract assignment. I know the CAD software very well, having used various versions of it since 1994, but the client insists on our using a legion of tracking and data management programs to keep track of our work. There are at least 6 different tracking programs that need to be filled out for each package, with lots of layers in each. And now, the contract agency is forcing us holdouts to use their own tracking and storage system in addition to that of the client. Currently, a package that takes me 5 hours on the CAD end takes at least another 30 hours to go thru the various tracking programs, not to mention pushing the package thru the checking and engineering functions. I’ve got cheat sheets for each program that help, but I still get mixed up more than I like, and the result is that I go into work every day with severe trepidation. I keep repeating the mantra “At least I have a job…”
@Don, add the time spent on the tracking software to the entries in the tracking software. Let them know how much time you are billing them for just to track the time you are billing them for. I do.
I worked a summer job with a significant list of things to do (list of auditing/accounting stuff for a smaller location at at national park). At first, I couldn’t remember what was on the list so I more or less slavishly checked things off on a big list that they had printed up. As time went on, I remembered more and more to the point that I never needed to consult the list.
I imagine something similar could be applied to Don’s job. Create a master checklist for all the tracking/data management programs and run through the list. If something gets missed, then add it to the list. It’d also help a great deal, if Don ever had to train someone else for the position.