One Brain's journey » working memory

Quickest Test For Visual/Non-Verbal Working Memory

Brian Rogers — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:41:58 +0000

Dr. Atila Turgay, one of the leading experts in Canada on ADD/ADHD passed away in April. He had been Chief Of Staff at Toronto’s Scarborough Hospital, although recently he had returned to private practice. He was also on the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto. You can read more about Dr. Turgay at Dr. Kenny Handelman’s blog here. I saw him just before he left his post at the hospital and set up his office at Davisville and Yonge in the heart of Toronto. My reason for being there was a review of medication I had been prescribed for ADD since the physician who was currently writing the prescriptions had not originally either prescribed them nor done the diagnosis. Dr. Turgay performed the shortest test I had ever encountered for the three aspects of working memory. The first two were not uncommon. He asked me to remember a string of seven numbers and then repeat them backwards. He did a similar one for verbal working memory. Then he sat right opposite me and asked me to observe him, without moving, until he asked me to replicate what he did with his fingers and hands. What he did seamed simple enough. His hands were reversed with one finger on one hand touching a finger on the other. But when my turn came to replicate it I could not–even after a couple of tries. I had seen Dr. Turgay describe this test in several lectures sponsored by the Attention Deficit Resource Network but this was my first opportunity to actually do it. His conclusion, after these three short tests, was that I had an impairment in visual/non verbal working memory. Some years ago I did a completed psycho-educational assessment valued at close to $2,000 and a similar component, lasting at least half an hour, had reached the same conclusion.

My visit only lasted a few minutes and the medical part of it was over before I knew it. He concurred with the medication I was taking and with dosages and schedules. Then he quizzed me on my background and interests, as it turned out, to see if I might be of service to the ADD/ADHD community. It wasn’t his suggestion but this meeting was one of the reasons I started this blog. I heard him speak on a couple of times and my appointment with him two years ago only lasted perhaps 20 minutes but I will miss him. Not only was he a great resource to the ADD/ADHD community he was, in my experience, a kind and caring individual.

It was on reading his obituary and remembering his visual/non-verbal working memory test that led to a mini-ah ha moment. I had always marveled that one of the profound and noticeable effects of even a small dose of ritalin would lead to a great improvement in my hand-writing. I’m no expert but I would bet that there is a large component of visual/non-verbal working memory skill in handwriting.

Mindfulness, Nordic Walking and Working Memory Part 2

Brian Rogers — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:48:24 +0000

In the last post, I promised to write more about a recent study on mindfulness and its effect on mind fitness. They study was conducted by Amishi Jha of the Department of Psychoogy and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania and Elizabeth Stanley of Georgetown University. Their conclusion was that mindfulness training made a measurable improvement on mood and working memory in a Marines training for deployment in Iraq. The program called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT) was designed to produce protective results on the psychological health in individuals who were enter into situations that would produce extreme stress (read combat) and was incorporated into pre-deployment training. Study participants included 48 males with an average age of 25 from a detachment of Marine reservists. The experimental group comprised 31 Marines with 17 in the control group. The MMFT group attended an eight week course. The effect of the training on mood was measured by the Positive and Negative Schedule (PANAS) while working memory improvement was measured using the Operation Span Task. Working memory capacity degraded and negative mod increased over time in the control group during training. The MMFT group, on the other hand, experienced improved working memory capacity and a decrease in negative mood. You can read more about the study in the journal, Emotion as well as the latest edition of Joint Force Quarterly, the advisory journal of the Join Chiefs of Staff.

Mindfulness, Nordic Walking and Working Memory Part 1

Brian Rogers — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:15:10 +0000

I have been fascinated by the idea of mindfulness ever since I first heard it described in a bar by a tennis pro who was trying to seduce my tennis partner…the most unlikely circumstances indeed. I have headed down a lot of blind allies since then including attending a class on mindfulness meditation by some well-meaning practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. For awhile I thought that I was confused about the idea of separating mindfulness from meditation or was it the idea that I could be meditating and doing something else such going for a walk or eating a meal? Recently, in bookstore specializing in psychology and spirituality I came across a most-unlikely guide–The Idiot’s Guide To Mindfulness. In this book was all that I had been searching for–instructions on how to practice mindfulness in any activity and completely removing it from its Tibetan Buddhist roots (not that I have anything against Tibetan Buddhism). Now it is quite possible that it is entirely coincidental but since I began reading the book and trying to be completely in the moment I have felt better, happier. In addition, a few weeks ago, I started Nordic walking in the cemetery right across the street from where I live. Nordic walking is an exercise that seems to lend itself to mindfulness practice.

While doing it, you are traveling much slower than you would if you were running. The rhythmic nature of using the poles and swinging your arms is quite natural and requires little attention from the conscious mind so you are more aware of your surroundings and you walk more upright than you would if you were…well just going for a walk. All of this adds up to the perfect setting for the practice of mindfulness. I have been seeing the cemetery in whole new ways and I have lived beside it, or near it, almost all of my life.

Now I have come across a study that concludes that mindfulness, which the study defines as the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility, improves working memory as well as mood.

In the next post I will talk more about this study.

Magnesium Improves Working Memory

Brian Rogers — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:58:21 +0000

I have been a fan of natural health products since I managed to lower my blood pressure with Omega 3 capsules and so am a little more friendly to reports such as this one from a study conducted at the Center for Learning and Memory at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Guosong Liu, the center’s director, found that magnesium, “led to significant enhancement of spatial and associative memory in both young and aged rates.” Magnesium is found in some fruits and most leafy vegetables but the study made use of a new magnesium compund–Magnesium-L-threonate (MgT)–but the new compound was just a more efficient way of delivering magnesium to the brain. Mr. Liu said, “Half the population of industrialized countries has a magnesium deficiency which only worsens with age.” He went on to say, “If normal or even higher levels of magnesium can be maintained, we may be able to affect cognitive function.” Mr. Liu is a former professor at MIT in Boston and is co-founder of Magceutics, a California-based company developing pharmaceuticals for the prevention and treatment of age-dependent memory decline and Alzheimer’s disease. He claims that if you consume less than 400 milligrams of magnesium per day, you could be at risk for allergies, asthma and heart disease.

Just last week, I was telling a friend about this research and he mentioned that he had been told by a natural health practitioner to take a magnesium supplement for Restless Leg Syndrome, (RLS) a condition in which, legs at rest, usually when you are just lying down to go to sleep, feel as if they are twitching. I have RLS and thought that perhaps a magnesium supplement would improve my cognitive functioning as well as my sleep if it could stop that dreadful sensation of leg twitches. I would love to report at the end of this post that I immediately went out to the health food store and got some but…I forgot.

Consequences Of Limitations On Working Memory

Brian Rogers — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:59:10 +0000

An interesting post on the blog tweetingdonal on wordpress here, quotes a study about working memory looking at its effects on other cognitive functioning, specifically decision making. The effect according to this site is known as cognitive load theory. The study asked volunteers to memorize two numbers and then walk down a hallway and, at the end, choose a dessert, either chocolate cake or fruit salad. A different sample was asked to memorize a seven digit number (pretty well the limit on working memory capacity) and then walk down the same hallway (while saying the number to themselves) and also choose from the same two desserts. Almost twice as many people in this sample chose the chocolate cake as compared to the previous sample who had only memorized two digits. The theory is that when working memory is filled to capacity, it either has to jettison one of the bits to access other cognitive functions such as decision making or suffer the consequences. In this case it would be “just give me the damn cake.” The blog does not speculate on why the choice was the cake but perhaps it was the most visible or the easiest to say. The important point, of course, is not the choice but how it was made without contemplation or consideration

This is scary to a person with working memory problems, namely me, as it suggests that my decision, perhaps even important ones, are not a result of choice but of expedience. I like to think that everything I do represents who I am and, more importantly, who I want to be. I believe the conclusion from the study based on what I do know about the way working memory functions. There is another down side to this and I’ll pursue it in the next post…

Didn’t You See The Sign?

Brian Rogers — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:50:43 +0000

How often have you been asked this question: Didn’t you see the sign? It usually follows an action that illustrates quick clearly that we didn’t see the sign. It’s an interesting question from a number of standpoints. If you answer “yes” does this mean that you are obstinate or malicious? Does it mean that you saw the sign and went ahead and did what the sign indicated not to do anyway? Almost always it means that you didn’t see the sign in which case the question is unnecessary, the action illustrates that you didn’t see the sign. The more important question is really why didn’t you see the sign and that leads to some rather obvious answers. “No I didn’t see it because your door is covered in signs.”
“No I didn’t see it because I wasn’t looking at the spot where you put the sign.”
“No it is one of 2,456 signs that I didn’t see today because I have better things to do.”

For me the answer is quite often, “I have ADHD and I spend large chunks of my day being distracted.” Or if I really wanted to tell the truth, “I have ADHD and I only see things that are of interest to me. Quite obviously your sign wasn’t one of them”

The real truth is that most of us don’t see things unless we are looking for them and there is a video on youtube that is making the rounds now that really illustrates this point. There is a group of men passing around a basket ball. Voice-over asks that we count the number of times the basketball is passed amongst the players wearing white. Then the voice-over asks if we saw the moonwalking bear. The video rolls back and plays again. Sure enough there is a guy in a bear suit moonwalking through the players and he literally walks from one side of the screen to the other. The lesson–we see what we want to see. In addition, working memory has a limited capacity and we use it to focus on one thing at a time. Some people claim they can multitask and therefor do more than one thing at a time but I doubt it. There is research somewhere, I believe, that demonstrates that no one really multitasks with any efficiency. I will try to find it for a future post.

Adults with ADHD can become warn out with people who ask, “Didn’t you see the sign?” And we are probably asked that question more than most. I now rest in the comfort that most people didn’t see the gorilla and they probably won’t see the sign either. People who ask that question will probably ask that question a lot and, who knows, maybe they just like to feel smug about it and that’s why they put up the sign and then repeatedly ask people, “Didn’t you see the sign?”

Sometimes I can have some fun with it and the dialogue goes like this:

“Didn’t you see the sign?”
“What sign?”
“That sign.”
“You mean this sign?”
“Yes, that sign.”
“No I didn’t see it. Was I supposed to?”
“Of course you were supposed to. Why do you think I put it there?”
“I don’t know. Why did you put it there?”
“I put it there because I want people to (whatever the sign says).”
“Then why wouldn’t you put it where I could see it?”
“I did.”
“Well obviously you didn’t or I would have seen it.”

Try it next time. At the very least you will make the sign person angry, or hopefully embarrassed but I’ll bet you won’t be shamed by the question, “Didn’t you see the sign?”

Thinking While Driving Can Impair Performance

Brian Rogers — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:28:18 +0000

With the new mobile phone law coming into effect in Ontario (many jurisdictions in North America already have similar laws in force) distractions while fiddling with the phones should be severely reduced but a new study shows that most of the distraction is still present while using hands-free devices. The problem has to do with working memory or rather the way it works talking to someone in the car versus someone who is not. There have been a number of studies to show you can be just as distracted while holding a mobile phone as you are using a hands-free device but a new study speculates on why this is so. Working memory may be quite taxed in a conversation and some of it needs to be freed up to cope with an emergency situation such as a road hazard. Working memory is one aspect of the human brain that has a limit on how well it will work and an earlier post on this blog suggests this is somewhere between seven and nine items–such as numbers, words or visual relationships for everyone. The study used a driving simulator while the test subjects held conversations with passengers who were in the car and with others who were not. Those who had conversations with others who were not in the car demonstrated slow reaction times in speed of braking responses and hazard avoidance. What the researchers found was that when the other party was in the car they demonstrated “conversation suppression”. In other words their speech slowed down in reaction to hazards they could see being in the car with the driver and this allowed the driver to free up working memory and shift focus to the road. Of course other parties in conversations with the driver who were not in the car demonstrated no such conversation suppression because they could not see the hazards. As an end-note the researchers say that talking to an in-car passenger might actually improve driver performance because both parties are able to see any hazard on the road that might present itself and the passenger can provide a verbal warning to the driver and even point to the hazard focusing the driver even more.

Working Memory Located In More Than One Place In The Brain

Brian Rogers — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:21:40 +0000

A recent study by British and German scientists found that the part of the brain usually associted wtih long-term memory may also be associated with working memory. The study focused on the hippocampus which has traditionally been thought to have a role in long-term memory, spatial memory and navigation. This is also one of the first parts of the brain to suffer in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

The study looked at patients with temporal lobe epilepsy which causes problems in the hippocampus leading to short-term memory problems. The researchers said, “The patients could not distinguish the studied images from new images after 60 minutes but performed normally after five seconds.” Professor Emrah Duzel of University College London went on to say that a striking deficit emerged even at five seconds when the subjects were asked to recall the detailed arrangements of objects within scenes in photographs.

The study concluded that there are two distinct short-term memory networks within the brain. The other one that is separate from the hippocampus remains intact in patients with hippocampus-related disorders.

Nathan Cashdollar, also from University College London said, “This is the fist functional and anatomical evidence showing which mechanisms are shared between short-term and long-term memory and which are independent.”

The findings of this study, I think, are interesting in showing that there are distinct elements to short-term memory and that they are located in different areas of the brain. When I was in Dr. Attila Turgay’s (one of the leading experts on ADHD in Canada) office last year he did three separate tests for short-term memory: verbal, numerical and spatial. It was only spatial short-term memory with which I had trouble. If indeed this function is located in a different part of the brain than either verbal or numeric working memory it does make sense that one aspect of working memory would by dysfunctional while the other two are intact.

Facebook Is Good For You Twitter Is Bad

Brian Rogers — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:48:39 +0000

A new study from Dr Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, suggests that using Facebook has beneficial effects on working memory while Twitter can be detrimental. She describes working memory as “the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information in short-term memory.”

Dr. Alloway, one of the leading researchers in the working memory, said that Twitter provides an endless stream of information but that it is also quite succinct so you don’t have to process the information. “Therefore,” Dr. Alloway said, “Your attention span is being reduced and you are not engaging your brain and improving neural connections”

Dr. Alloway has conducted many studies about working memory and believes that it is far more important than IQ when it comes to living in the world and that it is the real foundation for learning.

She said, “It doesn’t matter if your mother left school at 15 or got a PhD, it’s a level playing field. Not only does working memory have a profound impact on every aspect of our working lives but now there is exciting evidence that we can train it and improve it.”

Cogmed Training Works Even Better With Stimulants

Brian Rogers — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:50:31 +0000

A new study, that will be published in the August edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology, conducted at the University of York in the U.K. shows that stimulant medication significantly increases visuo-spatial working memory but that Cogmed Working Memory Training leads to significant improvements in all four critical measures of working memory: verbal and visuo-spatial short-term and visuo-spatial working memory. In addition the training effects were still in place when the subjects were retested six months later.

The subjects were 25 children with ADHD. The study is the latest from the team of Joni Holmes Ph.D and Susan Gathercole Ph.D who have been performing independent research examining the impact of Cogmed training on subjects with ADHD and working memory problems.