Miller's Law

From the days of William James, psychologists had the idea memory consisted of short-term and long-term memory. While short-term memory was expected to be limited, its exact limits were not known. In 1956, George A. Miller would quantify its capacity limit in the paper "The magical number seven, plus or minus two".

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. It was published in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University's Department of Psychology in Psychological Review. It is often interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller's Law.

Miller's law, part of his theory of communication, was formulated by George Miller, Princeton Professor and psychologist. It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

How would you define consciousness?

·         the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc. the thoughts and feelings, collectively, of an individual or of an aggregate of people:

·         the moral consciousness of a nation.

·         full activity of the mind and senses, as in waking life:

April 29, 2008. The Limits of Memory: We Can Only Remember Four Things at a Time. New research in to our minds capabilities to retain knowledge has shed light on a question that has been discussed for many years; how much, can our mind remember, at a time?

George Armitage Miller was one of the founders of the cognitive psychology field. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he insightfully observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited in both psychology and the wider culture. He also won awards, such as the National Medal of Science.

Miller is considered one of the founders of psycholinguistics, which links language and cognition in psychology, to analyze how people use and create language.

He published papers along with Noam Chomsky on the mathematics and computational aspects of language and its syntax, two new areas of study.

Miller also researched how people understood words and sentences, the same problem faced by artificial speech-recognition technology.