We often reference Miller’s rule “7 ± 2” in our articles when it comes to short-term memory or human attention. The seven plus or minus two rule was opened back in 1956, and has not lost its relevance to this day.
This pattern of “seven plus or minus two” was discovered by American psychologist scientist George Miller as a result of a series of experiments and shows that a person’s short-term memory can be remembered on average :
- nine binary numbers
- eight decimal numbers
- seven letters of the alphabet
- five monosyllabic words.
This psychological pattern was first set forth in his work, The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. From all this it follows that an ordinary person is able to simultaneously remember 7 ± 2 elements. It turns out that a person can keep in mind (remember and repeat) no more than 9 elements, and often no more than 5 .
Miller’s wallet is a short-term memory of a person into which you can “put” only seven “coins” at the same time. Moreover, it is important that memory does not try to analyze the meaning of information, only external, general characteristics are important. In other words, it doesn’t matter which “coins” are in the “wallet”, the main thing is that there are seven of them. And if the number of elements is more than seven (in extreme cases, nine), then the brain breaks down information on subgroups so that their number is from five to nine.
George Miller (1920-2012) is an American psychologist. In the forties of the last century, he received a bachelor's degree in art from Alabama University, and in 1946 he defended his doctoral dissertation in psychology at Harvard. After which he becomes a professor of psychology at Rockefeller University in New York, at Princeton University. In 1969 he was elected president of the American Psychological Association. George Miller was awarded the William James Book Award for his book The Science of Words, and also received the senior United States National Science Medal from President George W. Bush.
His most famous work, The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, was published in 1956 in the Psychological Review.
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