Your Phonological Loop

2. Your Phonological Loop. Just as your visuospatial sketchpad
stores images briefly while you are working with them, your phonological
loop stores a small number of sounds for a brief period.21 Generally,
researchers have found that you can hold about as many
words as you can mentally pronounce to yourself in 1.5 seconds, so
you can remember more short words than long ones.22
A good example of how this works is when you are trying to
remember what you or someone else has just said. Without memory
training to put those words in long-term memory, you will normally
only be able to clearly remember back what has been said in the last
1.5 seconds, though you will remember the gist of what you or the
other person has said. Also, because of this 1.5-second limit, you will
be better able to remember more shorter names than longer ones,
such as when you are introduced to a number of people at a business
mixer or cocktail party. It’s simply much easier to remember names
like Brown and Cooper than longer and more unusual ones.
You’ll also find that just as working with different types of visual
imagery can cause interference, so can working with different types
of audio sounds. For example, if you are trying to remember a phone
number and someone says something to you, that can interfere with
your ability to remember that number. But if you are looking at
something while you are trying to remember the number, that won’t
interfere as long as you continue to pay attention to remembering
that number, since your visual observation is processed in your visuospatial
sketchpad.
Then, too, just as similar visual imagery can cause memory errors,
so can hearing similar sounding words or numbers, such as
when you find yourself meeting a Margaret, Maggie, and Mary at a
party. The names can blend together in your mind and you have
trouble remembering who is who. Or say you are trying to remember
a phone number you have gotten from a message so you can write it
down.Well, if you are given two phone numbers to remember—such
as this is my land line and this is my cell phone—the two numbers
can interfere with each other, so you might mix up numbers or just
not remember at all. Or if you are trying to recall and write down a
number that’s close to another phone number you already know,
that could interfere with your ability to remember the new one.
But the reason that visual images won’t interfere with trying to
remember words or other audio sounds, as long as you are attending
to both, is that the audio processing occurs in a different section of
your brain—in the left hemisphere of your brain, which is the side
of your brain that handles language. Plus the auditory information
is stored in the parietal lobe of your brain, though when you practice
working with this information, your frontal lobe section that processes
speech will become active too.