Cognitive Grouping: The Mathematical Limits of Working Memory

Why can you effortlessly remember a ten-digit phone number when it is broken into three sections, but completely fail if the numbers are read to you sequentially? In 1956, cognitive psychologist George A. Miller discovered a fundamental, unbreakable law of human hardware: the average brain can only hold seven (plus or minus two) distinct pieces of information at once. This rigid bottleneck in ou...