Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black.

And I'm Laura Owens, and Tracy Allaway is an award-winning psychologist, author, TEDx speaker, and TV contributor who has spent her career studying working memory.

Her research on the topic has been featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Forbes, and Newsweek, as well as in countless journal articles.

She's a blogger for Psychology Today and The Huffington Post and is currently an associate professor at the University of North Florida.

Tracy, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this.

We mentioned that you're an expert on working memory. What is working memory?

Working memory is our ability to work with information. I like to think of it as our active

memory. It's a memory that we use when we're talking to someone and we have to pull a fact

from our long-term memory and match it up with what's going on directly in front of us. So it's,

it's almost like that post-it note that's, that, you know, that memory that you're using at the moment in a job interview,

when you're having a conversation with someone, when you have to remember something at that moment.

And is good memory a heritable trait?

I think that's what we're discovering.

Is it definitely something we get from our parents or something else you can blame your mom or dad for.

Always looking for those, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But the good news is that there's also growing research to suggest that we can train and boost our memory to a variety of simple things at any age. So it's not something

that is fixed or set simply because there's genetic association. But what are the factors that

might determine how effective our working memory is? Well, that depends on your age. So definitely

there's an age-related difference in working memory.

Working memory continues to develop right up into our 20s and even our 30s.

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