How to Improve Your Working Memory: Chunking, Visualization, and Realistic Expectations
Working memory — the ability to hold a handful of items in mind and manipulate them for a few seconds — is one of the more trainable-feeling cognitive skills, and also one of the most overstated. You genuinely can get better at tasks like the Chimp Test, Sequence Memory, and Number Memory with practice. What improves is mostly your strategy, not the raw hardware underneath it. Here's what actually works, and what doesn't.
Chunking: the single biggest lever
Chunking means grouping individual items into fewer, larger units so you have less to hold at once. It's the reason a phone number feels manageable at ten digits but ten random unrelated digits in a lab test feel brutal — you're not holding ten items, you're holding two or three chunks (area code, prefix, line number).
In Number Memory, this looks like grouping digits into pairs or triplets as they appear rather than trying to hold each digit separately. “4, 7, 2, 9, 1, 6” is six items; “47, 29, 16” is three. If a chunk happens to resemble something meaningful to you — a year, an address, a chunk that rhymes — it gets even easier to hold, because you're now storing one association instead of several raw symbols.
In Sequence Memory, chunking works spatially: instead of tracking eight isolated tile flashes, look for a path. If the sequence visits four corners then the center twice, that's a shape, not eight independent facts. People who plateau early in Sequence Memory are almost always still encoding tile-by-tile instead of noticing the emergent pattern in the route.
The Chimp Test resists chunking a little more, because the numbers vanish before you can group anything meaningful about their values — but you can still chunk spatially, which brings us to the next technique.
Visualization and spatial encoding
For any task with a spatial layout — the Chimp Test above all — the strongest technique is to stop thinking of the grid as numbers and start thinking of it as a scene. Instead of memorizing “3 is top-left, 7 is bottom-right,” try building a single mental sweep: a path your eye travels that visits 1, then 2, then 3 in order, the way you'd trace a route on a map. Once you have the path, you don't need to recall six separate coordinate facts — you need to recall one shape and walk it.
This is a smaller-scale cousin of the “memory palace” (method of loci) technique competitive memorizers use to recall long lists: instead of storing arbitrary items, you place them along a familiar spatial route and then mentally walk the route to retrieve them in order. You won't need anything that elaborate for a five-second Chimp Test round, but the underlying principle — spatial structure is easier to hold than an unstructured list — is the same, and it's worth deliberately practicing rather than assuming it'll happen automatically.
A related trick: say the pattern under your breath, even silently. Verbal rehearsal (the “phonological loop,” in the classic Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory) is a genuinely separate channel from visual-spatial memory, and using both at once — seeing the layout and narrating it to yourself — gives you two partially independent traces of the same information instead of one.
Short, consistent practice beats marathon sessions
It's tempting to grind twenty rounds in a row chasing a personal best, but working memory tasks are mentally fatiguing in a way that compounds quickly. After a handful of rounds, attention narrows, small slips creep in, and you start making the kind of avoidable mistake that has nothing to do with your actual memory capacity — a mis-click, a moment of losing focus mid-sequence. Grinding through fatigue mostly practices frustration, not memory.
A better pattern is a handful of focused rounds, on most days, rather than one long session occasionally. This mirrors what's well established about skill learning generally: spaced practice consistently outperforms massed practice (cramming) for retention, even when total practice time is identical. Five minutes a day for two weeks will very likely leave you with better technique — better chunking habits, calmer pattern recognition — than one 90-minute session, even though the clock-time invested is similar.
It also helps to actually notice what went wrong on a failed round rather than immediately mashing “play again.” Did you lose the sequence at a specific point? Did you fail to chunk before the numbers vanished? A few seconds of honest review turns a failed round into information instead of just a lower number.
What's realistically trainable versus what isn't
Here's the part that's easy to oversell: there's reasonably good evidence that working-memory strategy — chunking, rehearsal, spatial encoding — improves substantially with practice, and that improvement transfers well to tasks similar to what you practiced. What's much shakier is the idea that practicing a memory game raises your underlying, general-purpose working memory capacity in a way that transfers broadly to unrelated tasks (studying for exams, remembering names, driving performance). Several large, well-controlled studies of commercial “brain training” programs found real, sometimes dramatic improvement on the trained task itself, and little to no measurable improvement on different tasks that weren't directly practiced.
The honest framing, then: you can absolutely get meaningfully better at the Chimp Test, Sequence Memory, and Number Memory specifically, through the techniques above. Treat that improvement as real skill in a specific game, similar to getting better at a specific video game or a specific card trick — genuinely earned, genuinely satisfying, but not evidence that your brain's raw processing capacity has been rewired. If you want to know roughly where your current scores sit relative to others, see our guide to realistic benchmarks for each mode. And if you're curious about the deeper research history that these particular games draw on, our history of the Chimp Memory Test is a good next stop.
Ready to put any of this into practice? Head back to the test and try a focused, unhurried round.