The Fantastic Trio – Our STM isn't a single, unbreakable entity; it's more like a superhero team of three separate parts: the Central Executive (the boss), the Phonological Loop (the sound guy), and the Visuospatial Sketchpad (the artist).

Studies have shown that these subcomponents can work independently using a method called the dual-task technique. Let's say you're trying to listen to your favorite track while solving a math problem - if both tasks are from the same 'modality' (e.g., both visual or both auditory), they'll likely interfere with each other, making you less effective. However, if you're doing two tasks from different modalities (e.g., listening to music while drawing), you can still rock it without significant interruption.

Think of the Phonological Loop like your mind's personal voice recorder, storing information based on how it sounds. An experiment conducted by Conrad and Hull (1964) revealed that lists of letters that sound similar, such as B, D, and G, are harder to remember than non-rhyming ones like F, H, and R. Why? Because our mental voice recorder can mix up similar sounding letters, supporting the idea that the Phonological Loop is a sound-based storage system.