But intelligence is not the whole story. Working memory is involved in a lot of other things, including impulse control.
To buckle down and study, complete a work task, save for the future, make better dietary choices, lose weight, exercise, etc. Nearly every aspect of life involves managing the various biological impulses that draw effort and attention away from the task at hand.
It makes sense that working memory is involved in impulse control, because staying on the straight and narrow towards a distant goal requires planning and control, which is the realm of executive function, which involves working memory.
But impulse control happens largely at a subconscious level. You don’t always have to deliberately rein in a biological urge. It seems to happen on its own. And that too involves working memory.
This is evident when something breaks. Patients with damage to their working memory may show a lack of impulse control:
– They may develop a sweet tooth, polishing off a bowl of M&Ms in minutes, even though they never had much interest in sweets before.
– They may become aggressive, picking fights with strangers, cursing up a storm, even though they never had a proclivity towards aggression in the past.
– They may turn sexually uninhibited, even aggressive, chasing after members of the opposite sex, and going about it in odd and highly inappropriate ways.
In a lot of these cases, the patient exhibits impulsive behavior that they never had before. It’s as if their personalities have changed.
Working memory takes care of impulse control long before we’re even aware of it, or have to rein it in consciously. It’s when something goes wrong that we notice the quiet work that working memory does behind the scenes of consciousness, on our behalf.
But working memory is still a physical system, and when overloaded, it can’t do its job as effectively.
This makes sense, since whether by injury or activity, if the full resources of working memory are not available, performance would necessarily suffer.
Example: In one experiment, simply having to remember a bunch of numbers resulted in more impulsive, and less healthy, food choices.
How much more so with major life decisions on our mind, looming threats and anxiety, and self-inflicted multitasking.
Taxing working memory makes it less able to do all the silent work it does behind the scenes. When working memory is not fully available, the default, impulse-based responses take center stage. Things don’t get done on their own, subconsciously, behind the scenes, any more. Instead we end up in the realm of force, and will power.
That’s when life turns into a grind.
But when working memory is focused on one task, firing on all registers and with all its resources directed to the task at hand, the experience is nothing short of miraculous.
And that brings us to the phenomenon of flow.
