Somatic Working Memory is A Thing, A Really Cool Thing!

It’s another mind-numbing day at an educational testing facility, where well-meaning professionals with clipboards and standardized tests are about to completely misunderstand how a child’s brain works. Again.

You see, we’ve gotten ourselves into quite the pickle with this whole “working memory” thing. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that the only way to measure this complex cognitive process is by having kids repeat sequences of numbers backward while sitting perfectly still in a chair — because obviously, that’s exactly how our ancestors used their working memory while tracking migrating herds across the savannah for days on end.

This is where it gets interesting (and by interesting, I mean stupefyingly wrong). Traditional working memory tests are about as ecologically valid as testing a cheetah’s hunting ability by having it fill out a multiple-choice quiz about gazelles. The brain, in its infinite capacity for spite, has developed multiple parallel systems for maintaining and manipulating information, and — you won’t believe it — not all of them involve sitting quietly at a desk.

The neuroscience is clear on this. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) — the star of traditional working memory tests — is doing its thing, there’s a whole other party happening in the sensorimotor circuits…