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> In 1956, the renowned cognitive psychologist George Miller published one of the field’s most widely cited papers, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
by mromanuk 8y ago
> In 1956, the renowned cognitive psychologist George Miller published one of the field’s most widely cited papers, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” In it, he argued that although the brain can store a whole lifetime of knowledge in its trillions of connections, the number of items that humans can actively hold in their conscious awareness at once is limited, on average, to seven.
So, your mind can hold 4-5, not 7 things at the same time or it goes "out of sync"
edit: added quote.
- bovermyer 8y agoThis seems to agree with my own experiences. I've never been able to hold seven things in my head at once, it's definitely closer to the four number.
- DiffEq 8y ago...and you may not be able to do a handstand. But if you learn the technique you can easily within a few weeks or less. Memory is no different. Learn the techniques recall and you will be able to remember more.
- graeme 8y agoDo you have any evidences that this applies to short term working memory? That's what the article is about. The limit seems to be 3-7, and it's not clear that's malleable.
- lhuser123 8y agoYeah. The number 7 has always seems to me like an oversimplification. Applicable to specific cases.
- perfmode 8y agohow does one begin to even delineate a “thing”?
- azhenley 8y agoA great place to start reading about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)
- pmalynin 8y agoOh man. You should read Heidegger's The Thing. [0] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/nmwg/the.thing-heidegger.pdf http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/nmwg/the.thing-...
- dredmorbius 8y agoThanks, iteeresting, in a thingness sort of a way. Found the scan annoying, transcribed to pandoc Markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/3HYkwASH https://pastebin.com/raw/3HYkwASH
- wm_throwaway 8y agoWelsh.