Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.įor a bit more-and we really should let Paul Graham complete his thought-let’s turn to that giant house of cards which is on the verge of tottering.ĭifferent kinds of work have different time quanta. This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they turn from their screen to answer your question. Stuff that’s indispensable for carrying out knowledge work basically, the stuff that most all of us do nowadays, most all of the time.Īs related to those of us who are practitioners of the art of computer programming, check what legendary Lisp hacker Paul Graham has to say about working memory-the foundational stuff that it undeniably is-in his brilliant and highly readable book Hackers & Painters: Oh, did I tell you about the fine researcher-lad Alan Baddeley‘s use of the metaphor dealing with a company boss to describe the way in which the central executive operates? So…ĭon’t run away. The average memory span for normal adults is 7 items. At the end of a sequence, the person being tested is asked to recall the items in order. In a typical test of memory span, an examiner reads a list of random numbers aloud at about the rate of one number per second. One test of working memory is memory span, the number of items, usually words or numbers, that a person can hold onto and recall. Working memory is involved in the selection, initiation, and termination of information-processing functions such as encoding, storing, and retrieving data.Īs if that mouthful isn’t enough, they throw the following in just for good measure: Working memory is a system for temporarily storing and managing the information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. Meanwhile, taking a page (lyrics) from the tunes of Smokey Robinson, let’s take this one heartbeat at a time, starting with this decently-daffy definition: But we’re getting ahead of ourselves (If you truly can’t help yourself-curiosity is getting the better of you-then look up why it’s cool to find out more about our mental scratchpad.) We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.Ĭheck that crumpled-looking scratchpad in the pic above-the one impaled by a red paperclip even as it gets singled out by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”-hovering above our wonderstruck lad’s head? Ah yes, right there we have the essence of the wonders ( and attendant befuddlement) that accompany any mention of this critter called “working memory”.īrah, I wasn’t kidding either when I called out the “scratchpad metaphor” in the same breath as working memory.
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