Description
In 1956, George A. Miller, published in the paper “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information” (http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/
Explanation & Answer
Main points following paper (http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/
- The span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember.
The process of recoding is a very important one in human psychology and deserves much more explicit attention than it has received.
The concepts and measures provided by the theory of information provide a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions.
what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory? For the present I propose to withhold judgment. Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.
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