#105: Is Scrolling Hijacking Your Executive Functioning?

How could scrolling impact working memory? So our working memory really is an opportunity for us to process to some extent, right? We're processing a little bit the information so that we can encode it into long-term memory.

What I'm finding is with scrolling, it's not giving you the processing time, right? to be able to place things into long-term memory.

And so a lot of people that truly are scrolling with no pauses and without taking notes, they might have these little dopamine hits like, oh, that's a cool idea, or that's really interesting, but they don't have the time to be able to encode it so that it's useful beyond the moment.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so I think it's useful to think about, for those who haven't really talked about working memory very much, it's like working memory is a part of short-term memory.

So you've got your memory, you've got working memory, short-term memory, long-term memory.

The division between them is not aligned, but there are key differences between working memory and your memory.

Working memory is very temporary, and it's kind of like the...

the lobby of your mind.

If something gets accepted or rejected, that's the place it gets accepted or rejected.

And if it gets rejected, it gets deleted and it's gone.

It's as if you've never experienced it.

It's just basically deleted.

And so what you're basically saying is this working memory is this temporary holding place for that information, if it doesn't go somewhere and your brain doesn't decide that's important, I'm gonna put it somewhere, it just gets deleted.

However, the experience of it doesn't necessarily get deleted.

I imagine if you're scrolling through something, you see something, oh, that's great or whatever, you still feel it, you still have that moment or whatever that has that dopamine effect or whatever, but the actual content hasn't been placed on a shelf in your memory and so it's gone and deleted.

So that's the context, isn't it, in terms of neuroscience that we're talking

about? And, you know, there are these tools within working memory where we can keep information alive in working memory.

Yes.

And that is our inner voice.

visualization and spatialization.

Spatialization is imagining yourself moving through space.

So all of these enable you to keep it in working memory so that you can work with it before you encode it into long-term memory.

So it's a little different than short-term memory.

It