Cyborganize launched - the ultimate outliner productivity system

Posted by JBfromBrainStormWFO
Jul 27, 2011 at 11:13 PM

Alexander,

I understand that the topic of cognition is quite complex, and I am not making any claims about structuring lists, writing longtext documents or designing layouts.

I am saying that simultaneous comprehension of the interconnections between all child entries of an outline’s parent entry is limited to about 7 brief items, or less.

This is a general rule; obviously there are places where you would make exceptions.

The main fallacy of the misapplications you linked to is that most situations do not require simultaneous apprehension. It is perfectly acceptable to scan through a document serially, rather than attempting to comprehend its entirety at once. However, when rapidly structuring an outline, we need to immediately comprehend the entirety of the “small picture” at each layer, so that the “big picture” can automatically build itself with minimal mental exertion.

I find that 7 is the practical limit for this, and often I prefer 6 or 5.

The rule of 7 does refer to an experimentally verified limit of human mental capacity; it is just that cognition in practical situations has many ways of getting around this limitation, so trying to apply a rule of 7 naively as a general rule for designing everything is quite stupid.

As you can see, I am not just talking about short term memory, the capacity to store and recall, but also the capacity to comprehend as an interconnected whole. The visuo-spatial analogue would be thinking of how seven moving parts interact in an engineering design.

Furthermore, the last link you provided claims the number is even lower, 3 or 4. Perhaps this is true, but that is irrelevant since we do not have to remember by brute force when constructing an outline in BrainStormWFO; the text is remembered for us on the screen. We need only comprehend the interrelationships, i.e. ensure our categories are properly divided.

I think 3 or 4 is too simplistic for most people; 5 or 6 is where I’m most comfortable.