Your working memory has about 3 different, distinct processing methods:

- the phonological loop
- a visuo-spatial sketchpad
- an episodic buffer for transmission to short term and long term memory
- a literal kernel that allocates/chooses resources to use

Your phonological loop is about 2 seconds, or 10 syllables, of information that rapidly decays if not triggered to refresh.

Your visuo-spatial sketchpad holds mental imagery. It has a similar refresh loop, allowing for rehearsing details, priming for pattern matching, etc

Your episodic buffer is, basically, the working memory you are consciously aware of.

You can't inspect the interior components, the nitty gritty subprocesses that your central executive's chosen. You're aware only of the top layer, the interface to everything else.

At any given time, you're not aware of the chunking going on, *how* you're encoding storing working memory.

Your central executive's figured out how to chunk things, encode things, so you can handle them.

You perceive only the result.

Basically: your working memory is mostly a black box, with several subprocesses working in parallel and tasks being juggled invisibly across them.

In normal operation, this encoding process works invisibly, optimizing for speed and usefulness.

As you learn a task, you chunk relevant details better, faster.

More of the processing involved gets hidden inside the black box.

A master piano player, or a fluent language speaker, requires less conscious awareness to perform. More of the processing is done well before it hits conscious awareness.

Cognitive strain is minimized, compared to a novice.

Each of the subprocesses can be damaged, work abnormally.

The phonological loop can nipple be disrupted pretty easily. The sketchpad can be overwhelmed by information it hasn't learned to chunk yet.

In normal use, it all adds up to the magic number of 7+-2.

Under abnormal conditions, it can break down in interesting ways.

An interesting thing about this, is how little is actually visible to you, directly accessible.

Almost none of it, in normal use. You couldn't function otherwise.

In other words: the multiple indirection, the parallel processing, the redundancy, the uncoupling, it's all necessary.

You *could* not function differently because there's no other way of doing it. Not enough processing power.

Think of it like one of those computational novelties where someone figures out how to run Linux at glacial speeds on a 2 bit processor.

Or a portia spider.

It's interesting to think that human working memory is operating under such tight constraints, optimized as much as possible for its task, with almost no room for drastic alteration of function.

If your brain were doing something substantially different, it'd be operating in a completely different way.

If you *could* access your phonological loop, odds are you wouldn't be able to identify shapes.

If you *could* chunk more than 3 bits of information, odds are you'd be unable to speak.