🔢Miller's seven counted chunks, not items

George A. Miller's 1956 paper, 🔬 The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, is cited for the claim that people can hold seven things in mind. What he counted was chunks: units of meaning. A phone number can be ten digits or three groups.

He was also half joking about the number. The paper opens with a complaint about being followed around by an integer (my paraphrase), and it ends doubting that the various sevens have one cause. Later work puts the figure nearer four.

Why I kept it: the limit is real and the seven is not sacred. See 📖 Miller on the limits of working memory.

So what? For the exception list this means: do not argue about seven rows against nine. Group them. Five groups a dispatcher can name beat forty rows a dispatcher can scroll. The concept note is 🧩 Working memory limits.