Comment by Glyptodon
3 days ago
Working memory is waaaay more critical than you might think to all levels of functionality. There are many basic tasks, like walking to another room to get something and noticing something minor, like a pen on a table that should be put away, and doing both tasks, that depend on working memory. The same with mentaly reasoning through a complex system. The reason abstractions are so valuable is that they allow for compression of something into working memory.
For me, personally, this is why I often approach things by scaffolding them into relationships with existing structures (mentally) - by integrating with an existing structure, I avoid a sort of fragmentation overload in my working memory.
Anyway, I think it's one of those things you don't really notice until it goes bad somehow.
Multiple small kids are incredibly disruptive to this. Just, a continuous "happening", constant out-of-context asks and "situations". 5 different things can happen between noticing or thinking of a task and being able to do anything about it. God help you if you have to go from one room to another because that in itself requires explanations (the best case is they quietly follow you to find out whats going on).
There are long stretches of my day where functionally, I have no free working memory at all. The main way I stay barely functional is by keeping memory "in the state of the world". The way I remember I promised to fix the tap today is by placing the tool kit prominently next to the tap, etc. As a last resort I try to write things down.
> keeping memory "in the state of the world"
This is what I do as well. If things aren't exactly where I left them, I'll not only never find them, but I'm likely to forget they ever existed.
Not likely to be a workable system in a home with children, then
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Checklists are the only way I survive. Todos yes, but also basic checklists of "don't forgets"
“Don’t fuck with my mise” (Anthony Bourdain’s paraphrase of a line chef co-worker)
mise is kitchen French for like the IDE of a cook’s station
The full term is "mise en place" and your analogy with the IDE is not far off, but there's an interesting nuance that's very useful to adopt when programming too. Mise en place is an ephemeral thing, you do it every time you start cooking and you look ahead at all the things you will need and arrange them in an optimal way for the steps you will take. It's an activity that encourages you to:
- always start from a clean state
- chunk your time
- give a bit of forethought to the work ahead
- do a little bit of workflow optimization
Over time, this is one habit that can have impressive compounding benefits.
Working memory being terrible is one of the biggest issues I experience with my ADHD.
I forgot why I went somewhere, or worse I do something different upon arrival.
> The reason abstractions are so valuable is that they allow for compression of something into working memory.
I wonder if people with smaller working memory necessarily have more organized mental models, to facilitate the compression. People with autism [1] and ADHD [2] tend to have decreased working memory. Are their mental models more "optimized" for compression?
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7071553/
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7483636/
...or do they just perform worse on these memory-intensive tasks? The latter seems more likely to be common.
But the uncommon case is interesting though. Some deficiencies might lead to a certain kind of problem-solving that occasionally produces exceptionally useful solutions. Isn't that why we valorize laziness in programmers?
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> Anyway, I think it's one of those things you don't really notice until it goes bad somehow.
So true!
Yeah, totally agree, working memory is basically the brain's RAM, and when it's running low, everything slows down.