Psychologist reveals how distraction breaks memory

Psychologist reveals how distraction breaks memory

You're in the kitchen, baking a cake, and the recipe calls for two cups of sugar. By the time you choose between the brown and white sugar, you've forgotten how much you need, and you have to check the recipe again. That's a failure of working memory—the mental workspace that lets you hold and use information for the task at hand. Meanwhile, you're effortlessly singing the lyrics to a '90s ballad. How can you remember every word of an old song b…