You Can Effectively Turn Long-Term Memory Into An Extension of Working Memory

By developing automaticity on your lower-level skills, you can effectively turn your long-term memory into an extension of your working memory.

Reber & Kotovsky (1997) actually did some experiments on this and found that indeed, the impact of working memory capacity on task performance was diminished after the task was learned to a sufficient level of performance:

In addition to behavioral studies, this phenomenon can be physically observed in neuroimaging. Developing automaticity on skills empowers you to perform them without disrupting background thought processes (so you can keep the “big picture” in mind as you carry out lower-level technical details).

At a physical level in the brain, automaticity involves developing strategic neural connections that reduce the amount of effort that the brain has to expend to activate patterns of neurons.

Researchers have observed this in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans of participants performing tasks with and without automaticity (Shamloo & Helie, 2016). When a participant is at wakeful rest, not focusing on a task that demands their attention, there is a baseline level of activity in a network of connected regions known as the default mode network (DMN). The DMN represents background thinking processes, and people who have developed automaticity can perform tasks without disrupting those processes:

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