The Magical Number Seven

An article titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," came to my attention when someone told me it contains the first occurrence of the word "chunk" being applied to the way people organize information. I found the full text online, which is great because the article was published in 1956 in Psychological Review.

The author, George A. Miller, distinguishes between bits of information and chunks of information. After reviewing several studies by other researchers, he concludes that humans can easily process or remember about seven chunks regardless of the size of the chunks (he measures size in bits). A very cool part of his theory is that when we recode information, we combine multiple chunks -- and this allows us to remember (or understand) more stuff.

Miller is careful to distinguish between memory and processing. In humans as in computers, storage and processing are two separate functions. The memory parts of his article made me think of Frances Yates's wonderful book, The Art of Memory (1966).