In this video, let's go over the connection of memory and your intelligence. And memory is one of the very underrated elements of intelligence. And I'm going to explain just how you'll sit by the end of this video, you'll see just how important your memory is for your intelligence. First, let me explain what kind of meant both kinds of memories there are. There are short term, long term and what's called working memories. Let me explain to you what they are, how they play well together, and it will be crystal clear of how this is related to intelligence.

First of all, what's your short term memory? Now, all the time, every second, you're bombarded with a lot of stimuli, a million things maybe on your desk in your immediate office environment. going on outside is a lot of stuff. Every time you go out on the street, there's trees, there's cars, there's so much stimuli in your brain only pays attention to a few things takes him with what's called Miller's law about seven things, and for different individuals, it's plus or minus two. So it's average seven things at once you can hold in your short term memory. And you can some people hold a little less, some people hold a little few, a little more, but seven items.

And you can only hold that you only have it for a few seconds, maybe seven or 10 seconds. And you this only for holding and noticing things like the most important stimuli that you that you're getting, that's what you're holding in your short term memory. And a lot of them quickly go away. Now, and you cannot manipulate you cannot process this stuff you cannot think about it is just memory sitting there. Now, what happens right after that I'll get back to in a second. But on the other side of that is your long term memory.

Some things that that you remember, you remember you can remember some things from your childhood for years, and of course the way to long term memory stayed there for years and years and years, once something actually makes it to your long term memory. And of course, the way to make something even more memorable is to go over it again and again, over time, you know, something you actually use builds stronger and stronger neurological connections were something that's in your long term memory, but you never get back to really, then that that weakens over time. Now, how do things get into the long term memory, they're in between the short term memory and the long term memory there is what's called working memory. This is really important. And this is the element that's really strongly tied to intelligence. Because this is where we are temporarily holding information.

It's still not in our long term memory, but we're holding it and the difference here is that we're able to process it. This is what we're thinking about. So after the first few seconds after the information that gets into your brain for free Few seconds. As you focus on some stimuli, you're able to reason and make decisions based on that stimuli, you're still only able to hold about seven items plus or minus two, for about 30 seconds. But the major differentiator here is that you are able to reason over this you can manipulate the information and use it. So the more you can, the more items you can hold in your working memory.

And the longer you can train your working memory to work, to hold those items and to process those items, then of course, the better your your thinking will be. This is essentially your consciousness right? That that immediate information you're holding a manipulated manipulating for the current 30 seconds. That's your consciousness. That's what you're thinking about. And if you can hold a lot and process a lot, your, your, your cognitive, cognitively a lot stronger.

If you able to hold less, you're obviously cognitive, a little weaker. And so, of course, there's factors that play into this. We'll talk about them later. But, but you generally want to work up, right. So if you get distracted a lot, that makes your temporary working memory a little weaker. You read a lot of play games like chess, practice, you know, like thinking and reasoning, then your working memory will become a little stronger and longer.

And then of course, you'll be able to process more. So that's the kind of so that's really the value of the working memory is that this is your ability to essentially think and process more things and process them stronger. Now, a little example, imagine if you are a compare person who's a person of action versus a person of, not of action, the person of action Something that may be a factor in their, in their, in their being a person of action is that they might not process enough information to process the risk of the action like the people, you know, going into the fire, they go into, you know, risky situations that requires for the woman thinking there may be good at that. But at the same time, it may be because they're not able to process the risks, people who hold more information longer, when they think about the risks, the risks tend to scare them, and they tend to become less people of action, and hold off on doing those tasks.

So that's one of the very common things like athletes tend to tend to not be in all of us can be a little bit of like athletic but professional athletes, they tend to have the tendency to have like a short, slightly shorter Working memory because, you know, other people might think, Oh, I'm going to get injured. If I was to play here, I'm going to get, you know, I don't want to do this. This is dangerous, but the athletes, they just go into it. And because they're just going through without thinking, they go into it really well, they execute the actionable part well, so sometimes a part of physical intelligence, and being athletic is at the detriment of being kind of having this more be more of a thinking person. So you know, it's really hard to have both in one person when one person has it, it's very, it's considered very special.

So not to go off on this example too much, but I just wanted to make sure that you understand that the more you can process in your working memory, the more and better you can think and obviously this has a tremendous impact on your overall intelligence.