Credit: L: Salk Institute; R: Courtesy of Robert Kim LA JOLLA--(December 17, 2020) If you've ever forgotten something mere seconds after it was at the forefront of your mind--the name of a dish you were about to order at a restaurant, for instance--then you know how important working memory is. This type of short-term recall is how people retain information for a matter of seconds or minutes to solve a problem or carry out a task, like the next step in a series of instructions. But, although it's critical in our day-to-day lives, exactly how the brain manages working memory has been a mystery.