The magic of number seven

A: Am heading out.

B: On your way back, can you pls. get grapes, milk, tea, avocados, eggs, carrots, oranges, butter, apples and cream.

(3 hours later)

A: Grape, Milk, Tea, errr….

Would you remember?

Turns out, it is empirically proven that our short term memory can remember nine or less chunks of information, preferably only ~5.

When presented with information, the human mind spends a lot of energy to listen, look for similarities and wherever it sees one, it tries to group them together into logical categories (if the number of items is more than five) and finally sort the items based on significance.

Now?

Most people take shortcuts and do not force their mind to group and sort. Hence, they forget.

Source: ‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information’ by George A Miller in 1956.