Your Central Executive

4. Your Central Executive. Finally, your central executive pulls together
and integrates the information from these three other systems—
the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, and the
episodic buffer. In addition, this executive function helps to determine
where you are going to place your attention and suppresses
irrelevant or unimportant information, so you can stay focused on
what’s important and not be distracted by what isn’t. It also helps
you plan strategies and coordinate behavior, so you decide what to
do next and what not to do. Then you don’t get pulled away from
what you most want to do.26
Think of this as the top executive or senior manager in charge of
all of these other systems, which doesn’t store information itself.
Rather, like the executive of a company, it sets the priorities for what
these other sections of your memory should be doing. Or as Matlin
puts it: ‘‘like an executive supervisor in an organization . . . the [central]
executive decides which issues deserve attention and which
should be ignored. The executive also selects strategies, figuring out
how to tackle a problem.’’27
For example, when you decide what task you are going to work
on at work and seek to remember what your boss has instructed you
to do, along with what else you know about how to best perform
the task, that’s your central executive pulling together what is most
relevant from the other sections of your working and long-term
memory, so you can better perform the task.
* * *
So there you have it—the basic structure of how your memory
works, according to the latest research from cognitive psychologists.
In subsequent chapters, I’ll be drawing on this model as I describe
different techniques for optimizing your memory. Accordingly, you’ll
find techniques for strengthening your ability to work with images
(your visuospatial sketchpad), with verbal and audio input (your
phonological loop), with your ability to temporarily coordinate the
input from the other components of your memory (your episodic
buffer), and with your ability to use all of this information in a mindful,
coordinated, and strategic way (your central executive). 26