We have seven deadly sins, seven days of the week, seven seas, seven dwarfs. The recurrence of the number seven so impressed the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller that, in an oft-cited paper in 1956, he wrote, “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer.” Miller went on to describe several experiments where seven pieces of information — plus or minus two — appeared to be the limit of what our minds could retain in the short term. Since then, Miller’s theory — that our short-term memory can hold about seven items before we start to forget them — has been refined. It is now understood that the capacity of short-term memory depends on several factors, including age, attention and the type of information presented. For instance, long words like “onomatopoeia” and “reciprocate” take up more memory span than short words like “cat” and “ball.” Grouping smaller bits of information into a meaningful unit, like a word of many syllables or an abstract concept, is called “chunking,” and our ability to retain information decreases as the chunk becomes more complex. Psychologists now believe that we can recall about four chunks of information at a time, which works out to approximately six letters, five one-syllable words and seven digits. As for the ubiquity of the number seven, Miller came to suspect that that is just a coincidence.
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