Theos-Talk Archives (December 2003 Message tt00164)

Dear Bart and everyone,

Psychologists generally agree that the capacity of short-term memory 
is 7 items (or chunks of information)-- with lots of caveats and 
exceptions but still, by and large seven. Here's a link to a recent 
discussion of it:
http://www.gpc.peachnet.edu/~bbrown/psyc1501/memory/stm.htm

and here's one to the well-known article that established this now 
widely accepted observation:
http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

This is why telephone numbers have seven digits-- people would have 
a much harder time remembering more. As for why all those manmade 
sevens, like days of the week, colors, and such, it seems to me to 
come from the same root. If normally seven is the number of things 
we can hold in short-term memory, and we want to explain complex 
phenomena with easily remembered schemata, we will have a bias in 
favor of septenary patterns.

Paul