"the task of JOIN is to modify the circuit so that at subsequent times there is the representation of a new item C that will fire if and only if the representat

"the task of JOIN is to modify the circuit so that at subsequent times there is the representation of a new item C that will fire if and only if the representations of both A and B are firing." What that describes sounds like what in linguistic (syntactic) terms one would call conjunction. I don't recall whether Chomsky's recent theories (which come under the rubrik of "minimalism") count conjunction as a type of Merge, but what he's more concerned with is subordination, which is quite a different thing from conjunction, given that subordination--but not conjunction--results in hierarchical structures. And for the record, I don't think Merge in the linguistic sense has anything to do with "chunking", much less the "magical number seven." But then I don't know much about chunking.