In the film Memento (2000), the protagonist Leonard (Guy Pearce) is a former insurance investigator who suffers from a form of amnesia that causes him to forget new events every ten minutes, while retaining memories of the past. Due to the traumatic incident of his wife being raped and murdered, Leonard cannot sustain new memories for more than ten minutes. The last things he remembers are his name, Leonard Shelby, that his wife was raped and murdered, and that the perpetrator is named John G. Any new information he acquires disappears shortly thereafter. To overcome his short-term memory loss, Leonard writes down what he needs to do and even tattoos important information on his body. He takes Polaroid photos of the people he meets and records the details of their encounters to remember them.
Leonard’s inability to retain new memories is due to a problem with his hippocampus. Damage to the hippocampus in our brain can lead to amnesia. There are two main types of amnesia: retrograde amnesia, where past memories are lost, and anterograde amnesia, where new information is not retained for more than ten minutes. Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia.
Our long-term memory capacity is vast, capable of storing information equivalent to 20 million books. However, our short-term memory capacity is severely limited. In fact, many problems stem from the limitations of human short-term memory. Computers have RAM (Random Access Memory) to temporarily store necessary information for processing tasks. To perform tasks, computers need information available in RAM. No matter how advanced the computer, it can only work with the data present in RAM. If there are many tasks to perform, they must be divided into smaller parts. Although computers have large hard disks for long-term storage, the actual working data is only what is loaded into RAM. Our human short-term memory functions similarly to a computer’s RAM.
We constantly process information from our sensory organs—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin. Even a brief glance around our surroundings reveals an overwhelming amount of visual and auditory information. If we had to process all sensory information, our brains would be overwhelmed. We selectively focus on meaningful information and store only what we deem necessary in long-term memory. This selective process is managed by the hippocampus. When we need to think about something, we retrieve relevant information from long-term memory into short-term memory. At any given moment, our current thoughts are held in short-term memory. Unfortunately, human short-term memory is notoriously poor. Generally, people can handle 7 ± 2 chunks of information at a time.
Our computer’s CPU contains registers, small storage areas where information from RAM is temporarily held for processing. The short-term memory capacity of a human is equivalent to about 7 chunks of 16-bit registers, roughly 14 bytes. Considering computers’ RAM capacity of 512 megabytes, human short-term memory capacity is quite limited.
We struggle to remember more than seven chunks of information at once. While we can easily remember a seven-digit phone number, longer numbers are difficult to retain. However, we can expand our short-term memory capacity through a technique called “chunking.” Chunking involves grouping information into meaningful units. For example, the digits 1, 3, 9, 2 can be chunked as the year 1392, when the Joseon Dynasty was founded. Similarly, the names of the 27 kings of the Joseon Dynasty can be remembered using mnemonic phrases.
In English, letters can be grouped into words, words into sentences, and sentences into stories. Creating sentences from words makes memorization easier, as the memory unit expands from individual words to sentences. For example, to remember the names Linnaeus, Haeckel, Chatton, and Whittaker, associating them with their countries and noting they are biologists from different periods makes the task easier, even though it involves more information.
Stories can encapsulate complex information into single chunks. For instance, the word “Eureka” recalls the story of Archimedes discovering how to measure the purity of gold in a crown, demonstrating how narratives aid memory retention. Similarly, we retain knowledge better when it is part of a story.
Psychologists refer to knowledge learned through language or text as “declarative memory.” However, experiential knowledge, or “procedural memory,” learned through life experiences, is equally important. Skills like riding a bike are typically learned through practice rather than books. Unlike declarative memory, procedural memory is less likely to be forgotten. Nevertheless, declarative and procedural memories are interconnected and can enhance each other.
By explaining the knowledge you have gained to your friends, your declarative memory can become a kind of procedural memory. Declarative and procedural memories complement each other, expanding the breadth and depth of your overall memory. This, combined with the knowledge gained from previous experiences and learning, enables us to better organize and recall given information. In fact, a skilled Go player can perfectly recall the progression of moves after a game. For beginners, each stone on the board is a single memory unit, but experts remember the game’s progression in several ‘chunks.’
The number 7 in short-term memory is referred to as Miller’s Magic Number. This term comes from a 1956 paper titled “The Magical Number Seven” by American communication theorist George A. Miller, based on his experiments. The number 7 might indeed hold magical significance. The basic colors we recognize are composed of the seven colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Similarly, music is fundamentally created by the seven notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. Whether these limits are due to the constraints of human perception or a design by a creator is unknown. However, it is clear that we can generate vast amounts of information from seven units. This is also a law of nature. Acting in accordance with natural laws is likely the most efficient way.
The book 3.0 CEO categorizes the knowledge needed for economic activities into thoughts, people, markets, and support, with each category further divided into 4 to 5 chapters. Each chapter is equivalent to a college course. Moreover, each subject’s key ideas are summarized into seven items. Condensing a semester’s worth of knowledge into a few pages is challenging, but it is an effort towards practicality. Beyond this limit, it becomes difficult to remember and retrieve information when needed. For example, the seven principles of negotiation, the seven rules of marketing, and the seven characteristics of consumers. Academics should focus on their specialties, but the everyday lives of the rest of us are different. All the knowledge we need is not independent as it is during exams. Everyone needs to organize the knowledge required to live in the world this way. If we can condense even the most complex knowledge into approximately seven stories, it becomes highly useful. You might find that your chunks of information are gradually increasing in size through this process.
Experts can process more information for decision-making because their chunks of information are larger. As we acquire more knowledge, we can think about and create more new things at once. This is why we must continuously strive to acquire knowledge. Additionally, we have at least two tasks left. One is to learn the skills necessary for chunking. Techniques such as breaking down, imagining, integrating, following, and storytelling, which we will discuss, are such skills. The second task is to overcome Miller’s Magic Number 7 through training. This is possible because we possess an unconscious, latent capability.
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