Also "working memory" is short-term storage, like registers, the details of what you're thinking about right now. Not memory of past events, like your wedding day.
Yeah I have no idea what definition the OP had in mind. Nonexistent working memory must be devastating:
Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily.
It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior.
Interesting. I’m bipolar and I can absolutely say core training does not work for me. My working memory has a hard limit on the number of tokens it can store.
What does work is encoding complex ideas into longer term memory so they become one token instead of many. I typically shove them into visual memory.
The best way I can explain it is a terrain map. The map has trees which are flow charts, lakes which are distillations of many ideas into a small pools of concepts. Valleys of questions. Eventually everything is in my “mind’s eye” and I can figuratively fly over the data.
Now take that image and remove the visuals. My brain “sees” the map without needing to describe it. It exists as pure, untranslated thought. Intermediate steps, like language, would only get in the way.
Not a fan of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. For myself my brain clearly functions at a lower level of abstraction. Language is an imperfect translation of my actual ideas.
If the hypothesis has any truth at all, it cannot be universal. It doesn’t apply to me.
If someone has thoughts they cannot express in words, are they truly limited by the language they speak?
As another person with low working memory (but decent long term memory) I can posit things aren’t that simple. Working memory has to be wired for recall, and my guess is that wiring may be different from what connects to longer term persistence. Someday soon perhaps we’ll understand just how complex it all really is…