A vaguely related anecdote: working memory was one of the things that was damaged after my stroke; for a while afterwards I was incapable of remembering more than two or three items when asked to repeat a list. I wasn’t exactly stupider than I am now, but I was something pretty similar to stupid. I couldn’t understand complex arguments, I couldn’t solve logic puzzles that required a level of indirection, I would often lose track of the topic of a sentence halfway through.
Of course, there was other brain damage as well, so it’s hard to say what causes what, and the plural of anecdote is not data. But subjectively it certainly felt like the thing that was improving as I recovered was my ability to hold things in memory… not so much number of items, as reliability of the buffers at all. I often had the thought as I recovered that if I could somehow keep improving my working memory—again, not so much “add slots” but make the whole framework more reliable—I would end up cleverer than I started out.
A vaguely related anecdote: working memory was one of the things that was damaged after my stroke; for a while afterwards I was incapable of remembering more than two or three items when asked to repeat a list. I wasn’t exactly stupider than I am now, but I was something pretty similar to stupid. I couldn’t understand complex arguments, I couldn’t solve logic puzzles that required a level of indirection, I would often lose track of the topic of a sentence halfway through.
Of course, there was other brain damage as well, so it’s hard to say what causes what, and the plural of anecdote is not data. But subjectively it certainly felt like the thing that was improving as I recovered was my ability to hold things in memory… not so much number of items, as reliability of the buffers at all. I often had the thought as I recovered that if I could somehow keep improving my working memory—again, not so much “add slots” but make the whole framework more reliable—I would end up cleverer than I started out.
Take it for what it’s worth.