Latest Issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank + (ISSN 2434-1002) 3 MindBrained Bulletin Think Tank Work Mem Mar 1 2 | Page 3

Think Tank:
Working Memory
Mike Kelland
The Role and Restrictions of Working Memory
“increased mental activity acts as a bottleneck through which information must pass”
Today I will talk about the role of working memory and the ways in which individual
variability in working memory capacity impacts our lives, and those of our students
within our classrooms. Peter Doolittle gives a great overview in a lighthearted way in
this short TED talk, explaining how we go about making sense of the world around us.
By taking on his ideas, I have outlined some of his main points and combined them
with those of other recent research projects on working memory to offer some ideas
for reducing the mental load of language lessons within classrooms, which can
impede learning.
My wife, rightly, never lets me leave the house without a shopping list. Too many
times I have ruined a planned meal by turning up with random wrong items, an all-
too-familiar scene being me finding myself staring at shelves in a supermarket, with
not a clue as to what it is I was charged with buying.
Within the working memory, we have systems focusing on both visual and verbal
content, the former, called the phonological loop, doing the silent repeating done
within our minds to try to keep the information within our limited-term working
memories from being lost – i.e. me leaving the house repeating over and over
“daikon, tofu, mira, bara.” They enable the storage, processing, and manipulation of
information and are often referred to as the inner eye and ear, the latter being
fundamental in language learning,
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