Miller's Magical Number Theory

 An article by Sue, compiled from info on several Internet sites

In Nick's review of Unreal II he remarked on the fact that there
were seven artifacts to collect and mentioned Miller's Magical
Number Theory. I would have liked to have been able to nod sagely
when I read this and mutter to myself, quite right, Nick.  As I
was I thought ... eh? What? Then went onto Google to look it up.

When you think about it, seven does seem to have some sort of
mystical significance when you think of lists of Important Things.
Queen sang about the Seven Seas of Rye but there are also the
Seven Wonders of the World, colours of the rainbow, levels of
hell, ages of man, days of the week and notes in the musical
scale. In spiritual terms as well, it is all-important. In the
book of Revelations, the number seven appears frequently, in 31 of
the verses. Elsewhere we're told that God rested on the seventh
day and the walls of Jericho fell after seven days and in other
religions it also plays a big part.  The Hindus have seven Devas,
the Persians seven Amschaspands. So the number seven is used to
represent a spiritual or mysterious God force, whatever religion
you look at.

Seven too is the only single figure that can't be divided evenly
into a circle - 360/7 = 51.428. Every other number divides neatly.
In architechture, seven is also prominent. The pagoda at
Churingham is surrounded by seven square walls, painted in seven
different colours and in the middle of each wall is a seven
storey pyramid.

You can make of all this what you will. This may depend on your
religious and/or superstitious leanings. I don't think we could
make a similar argument for any other number - the five senses,
the five towns in Arnold Bennett's novels and Chanel No. 5
(intoduced by Coco Chanel on the fifth day of the fifth month in
1927 because five was her lucky number) don't have quite the same
ring.

And where does Miller come into all this?

Memory is divided into three storage areas - sensory, short term
and long term. Information comes into the Sensory memory from the
environment. From there it is transferred into short term memory
of forgotten. A similar process happens in short term memory; the
information can again be forgotten, rehearsed and continually
recycled into short term memory. Or it can be passed to long term
memory from which it can be retrieved into short term memory in
the future when needed.

Sensory memory lasts only a few seconds, maybe only as little as
300 milleseconds, but it has unlimited capacity. Long term memory,
at the other end of the scale, is relatively permanent storage.
Short term memory is a bit like a PC's RAM - a working space. And
it has a limited capacity in that it can only hold 7 bits of
information so we can only remember 7 items at any time. Miller's
classic study in 1956 found that the figure was actually between 5
and 9 (7 plus or minus 2) depending on the information. So the
number 7 became known as Miller's Magic Number, the number of
items that can be held in short term memory at any one time. As
one page on the Internet put it, maybe this is why phone numbers,
for example, are broken into chunks of digits divided by spaces.
It makes it possible to remember them.
















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