The number of chunks of information we can hold in mind at any one time.
People can hold around 4 things in mind at any one time.
While there may be no limit to long-term memory, short-term memory is not so capacious.
Four chunks of information — whether words, numbers or whatever — is the human limit.
Even then, short-term memory only lasts around 15 to 30 seconds.
Professor Gordon Parker, author of the paper, said:
“So to remember a seven numeral phone number, say 6458937, we need to break it into four chunks: 64. 58. 93. 7.
Basically four is the limit to our perception.
That’s a big difference for a paper that is one of the most highly referenced psychology articles ever – nearly a 100 percent discrepancy.”
The ‘magic number’
Professor Parker is referring to a famous research paper by American psychologist George Miller.
Miller argued that the ‘magic number’ for the chunks we can hold in memory is 7 (plus or minus two).
Decades of memory research, though, has revealed that this figure is a little optimistic.
Some people can only hold around three things in mind at once, others can manage five, but for most of us four is the ‘magic number’.
Unless, of course, you are a baby, then you can only hold one thing in mind at a time.
Professor Parker said:
“There may be no limit in storage capacity per se but only a limit to the duration in which items can remain active in short-term memory.
Regardless, the consensus now is that humans can best store only four chunks in short-term memory tasks.”
Miller’s genius was really in marketing his idea, despite the scientific facts not backing it up, Professor Parker argues.
Seven is a number that has a sort of magical hold on us, which is perhaps why Miller chose it.
So, Professor Parker mounts his tongue-in-cheek defence of four:
“There are more four-lettered swear words than any other number.
Numerous sports have teams operating as foursomes.
Even golfers play in fours (and plus fours), and the last word a golfer is most likely to hear is four than seven.
Cricketers hit fours to applause and major sporting events (e.g. Olympic Games, World Cup Rugby, World Cup soccer) are held every four years.
The most popular board games (e.g. Scrabble, Monopoly) are designed for four players – as for card games – while card packs have four suits.
Swingers most commonly swing in foursomes, luck requires a four-leaved clover, and the Americans wisely waited until the fourth of July to declare their independence.
This article was prepared on A4.
So, for every deep and profound, even metaphysical, argument for seven, I suspect we can find four times as many for four.”
The study was published in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (Parker, 2012).
