Re: Outlining and Fuzzy Thinking

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 873

Posted by jsmith
2000-12-12 15:48:31

You might want to read the 1956 article by psychologist George A. Miller entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”. It formed the basis of my “chunking” my lectures into short lists of about 5 topics each. For those who like to use PowerPoint in their lectures, it just so happens that PowerPoint works comfortably with about 5 bulleted items. In a nutshell, if you try to make a person juggle more than about 7 items in short term memory, you are likely to lose them via transient information overload.

Try http://www.ask.com to find the article. Try a question like “Who is George Miller?”, and I’ll bet you find the article in about 15 seconds.

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