Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #11. Consume Your Information in Chunks

Improve your short-term memory, your information processing, and your long-term memory by grouping the bits of data you come across into chunks.

Psychologist George A. Miller concluded in a classic 1956 experimental survey that human short-term memory can hold only seven items at a time, plus or minus two.¹Short-term memory bears the same relation to long-term memory in humans that RAM does to mass storage in a computer: short-term memory, which is temporary, is the gateway to human long-term memory, which is semi-permanent. Short-term memory is also where information that is currently being processed is stored (such as a phone number you're calling). Thus, it's important for not only short-term memory itself, but also long-term memory and information processing, to maximize the ability to use short-term memory.

Recent research suggests the magic number that short-term memory can hold might be somewhat lower than seven, at least for intellectually demanding tasks. Researchers at the University of Queensland found that 30 academics given a task of analyzing statistical interactions among variables—a task at which they were already expert—did not perform better than chance at analyzing interactions of five variables in timed tests. Also, they were not only worse at analyzing four-variable interactions than interactions involving three or two variables, but less confident of their answers as well.²

Whether the magic number is five or seven, ...