In this episode I’m going back to look at consciousness and cognition, and specifically one aspect of our mental capacity that sets us apart from other animals. It’s our ability to recall items in a sequence, for those of you who are software buffs, basically we have a short term memory buffer that acts like a linked list. We can remember a list of numbers (about 7 or so), or letters, or items in a particular order over a short timespan if we are not too distracted. This capability is called working memory.

Working memory can be roughly quantified to hold about 7 items at once in a sequence and allow conscious manipulation, consideration, and attention to about 4 of them at a time. These numbers are surprisingly consistent across all humans.

The size of working memory in humans is much larger than in our nearest relatives the great apes. The ability to remember sequence information also seems to be unique.

Some scientists speculate that the evolution of working memory is what separates humans intellectually from other intelligent animals. Working memory capacity is strongly correlated with fluid intelligence.

Héctor Manrique: graduated in Psychology in 1999, then he started his scientific career by studying ethanol metabolism in the brain and its effect on memory in rodents and got his PhD in Psychobiology in 2005. Hmm sounds a lot like my graduate work inadvertently studying the effects of alcohol on my brain. In 2008 he joined The Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany) where he investigated the cognition of the four species of great apes. After having occupied different positions in several Spanish universities he currently holds a professorship in Developmental Psychology at Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain.

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