The Limits of Working Memory

Working memory is limited in duration and capacity. It can hold on to things for about 10 to 20 seconds if you don’t do something with them. And there can be no more than four things in the working space at any one time.

One of the interesting things in studying working memory is that back in the ’50s, the belief was that a person could hold seven digits in their short-term memory long enough to dial a phone, which is why all of our home phone numbers have seven digits in them.

Zoom fast forward to now, because of quite a few things in the medical field, scientists know a lot more about working memory. And the number now is four things in the workspace at any one time. However, if you have four things in the workspace, the attention is divided between all four, which means that 25% of the working memory is on each one, or if two things, 50%. But if we can have one thing in the workspace, 100% of the working memory can be focused on that one thing – in our instance, where and how we want to break the target.

The majority of most people’s workspace is taken up with the first 85% of the shot. What we have found by using the word associations is that when using them, there’s only one thing in the workspace – it’s a visual memory of exactly how we want the shot to come together in our chosen breakpoint.

But this means that you have programmed through deliberate practice visualizing the shot and using your word association and pointing to the breakpoint so that your brain is clear about where and how you want the shot to be taken.

When using the primers or word associations (“challenge it there,” “catch it there”) the two things become a sequence of events or a beginning and end of only one thing. There’s only one thing in the working memory workspace.