At an MIT conference on 11 September 1956, remembered for a series of brilliant lectures that some refer to now as the ‘cognitive revolution’, psychologist George A. Miller, then of Bell Laboratories, later of Princeton, presented a paper entitled ‘The Magical Number 7 +/− 2’. Miller’s research concluded that, without practice, people can remember up to nine, usually more like five, items at a time for roughly a minute.
