Executive control involves the planning and the anticipation of the consequences of behavior. Neither Phineas Gage nor David could maintain their performance and therefore adhered to unsuccessful approaches. Most important from our point of view is the lack of an intact working memory. David could not maintain more than one object in mind at a time. Contrast David with that of a successfully functioning executive.The executive of a corporation is responsible for productivity, stock holder satisfaction, and worker compensation along with making various micro-decisions every day. All of these elements have to be carefully kept in mind and balanced. In order to remain balanced they have to be kept in working memory. When you strengthen your working memory, you enhance your life skills by keeping in mind past performances, your present situation, and your future desires. Sadly, my patient David, like Phineas Gage a century and a half before him, had lost this ability, all of these secondary to the damage to his frontal lobes.Let’s take a closer look at executive function and how it helps organize our memory and our life. Think back to a typical day in college. Just imagine you were scheduled to take a French class at 10:00 a.m., a chemistry class at 3:00 p.m., and a public speaking class at 4:00 p.m. You also needed to do laundry, pick up tickets for a Lady Gaga show that evening, withdraw some cash from your bank account, and, finally, be primped and ready for a dinner date at 6:00 p.m.In order to accomplish these goals, you have to keep them all in mind and organize them. Some can be done anytime and do not impose a specific time constraint, (doing the laundry, picking up tickets for the Lady Gaga show, withdrawing spare cash from the bank). But everything has to be done by no later than 5:30 p.m. (after all, you need some time to prepare for the date).To accomplish all this you have to mentally envision the proximity of your classes to the laundry, the concert ticket pickup spot, and the bank. And since each of your classes are held in different buildings across campus, efficient planning is required, lest you run late and turn into a no-show for the 6:00 p.m. date.In carrying out this exercise in temporal and spatial planning, you depended on the central executive and working memory to organize and achieve all of these goals in the most efficient manner. You have to remain consciously aware and review them in your mind via inner-talk (“Isn’t the laundry a half a block from the French class? So I’ll do these together”) and mental pictures (“Yes, it is. I can see them both in my mind’s eye”). The central executive and working memory are cooperating in tandem. Indeed, without the cooperation of working memory and central executive, you wouldn’t be able to carry out the required mental juggling.Go over in your mind the US presidents backward from Joseph Biden to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Write them out, or speak them in order using your voice recorder or cell phone. Now name them or review them in your mind from Roosevelt to Biden. Next, name only the Democratic presidents, skipping the Republican presidents; then name from memory the Republican presidents while skipping the Democratic office holders. Now name them in alphabetical order regardless of party. Notice that in the later two operations (ordering by party or alphabetical order) you have to work harder—you are engaged in a very challenging working memory exercise.Next, list in your mind the members of your favorite sports team. Name them along with the positions that they play. Now without writing anything down, list the players in alphabetical order. Finally, name them in reverse alphabetical order.If you are not a sports fan, write down (writing is ok here because you have to make up the list before carrying out any manipulations with it) your ten favorite authors. Memorize that list (immediate memory), which shouldn’t be difficult since they are your favorites. Now mentally list them in alphabetical order. If you forget one, you are allowed to take a one-time brief glance at the list. Finally, list them in chronological order according to the years during which they were written. In the case of overlap (Hemingway and Faulkner, for instance) list their names in alphabetical order (Faulkner, Hemingway).While doing any of these exercises, you have to maintain information and move it around in your mind, according to superimposed criteria—the essence of working memory.Reading novels, incidentally, provides an especially helpful exercise in working memory. Why is fiction preferred over non-fiction? Because non-fiction works are often organized in ways that allow the reader to skip around a bit according to personal interests and previous familiarity with the subject (you are now reading such a book). Fiction, on the other hand, requires the reader to proceed from beginning to end while retaining in working memory the various characters and plot developments.The fiction reader must remember when a character was first encountered along with all of the backstory from the character’s past. Each time that character reappears, the reader, by means of working memory, has to recall the character’s past actions along with whatever insight into the character’s motivations the author may provide.Incidentally, I have noticed over my years as a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist that people with early dementia, as one of the first signs of the encroaching illness, often stop reading fiction. They can no longer keep the characters or plot development “in mind” (in their working memory). A second early sign of incipient dementia (while we are on the subject) relates to cooking. Unable to retain and employ working memory, the sufferer can no longer follow a recipe. Especially hard are measuring the ingredients and timing their entry into the meal being prepared. Bottom line: keep reading and cooking as spurs to maintaining your working memory.Games offer another avenue for strengthening working memory. Bridge and chess are stand-out examples of keeping past, present, and future memories (based on evaluations of past games and the future consequences of the decisions made during those past games). My favorite working memory game is Twenty Questions.In the traditional game of Twenty Questions, one person, known as the questioner, leaves the room and the remaining players select a person, place, or thing. When the questioner returns to the room, he or she tries to guess what the group has decided by asking a total of no more than twenty questions.According to the rules, the questioner can operate on the assumption that his questions will be answered truthfully and that the unknown person, place, or thing that he is trying to guess does not change. The skill demanded of all the participants is to keep in their working memory all of the previous questions and answers. For instance, if the object is a “camel” and the questioner asks, “Is it an animal that lives in the ocean?” the “No” response must be kept in working memory by all of the other questioners when presenting their questions.