This week in lecture we learned that 7 plus or minus 2 chunks is the "magic" number our short term memory would be able to store. Although what we consider chunks changes from person to person because of how people remember things. Some may remember certain strings of numbers as possible dates while others only remember the individual numbers themselves making their chunks considerably less than the other persons. How we initially end up making our chunks is unique to the person themselves because how we group or remember things is often really personal because of life experiences and upbringing. Chunking only increases the amount of time you are able to remember in the short term but anything longer than that and it won't help. An example of this from the reading is a string of 15 letters and trying to remember as many as possible.
CIAUSFBINBCJFK
The average amount of letters people would get would be from 5-9 but by using chunks most Americans could remember easily because the first three are FBI which is an agency, the next chunk would be US which is United States, the third chunk could be CIA because its another agency, the fourth chunk is NBC a popular news channel and finally JFK one of our presidents. This is an easy example of memory chunks but again each person is of their own personal style.
Nick Berg
