On Saturday, 3 March 2018 at 16:59:56 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Sat, 2018-03-03 at 16:06 +0000, Dmitry Olshansky via
DuckDuckGo search.
It's a 1956 paper by Miller that claims 7 is the magic number for short term memory, the number of chunks of stuff you can keep for a certain period. A chunk is not a defined thing such as characters or words, but they are examples. I am not sure what the experimental status is of this "theory", but I suspect no-one has disproved it as yet.
I know people who indirectly proved that theory to be correct in many unexpected ways. In particular when people are asked to define “distant” or “hot” as a set of classes they usually settle for around 7 states and cannot distinguish finer ones. Same problem with colors, as in defining shades of the same color.
All that said, the trick is that ~7 applies to any “thing” and thusly your capacity increases if you can “merge” things to a single entity or otherwise establish relations or laws, doing reduction on a number of entities. Likely composition is a sideeffect of this tendency and 7 is not exact number in any wat.
