The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory to long-term memory and weave it into conceptual schemas. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms the major bottleneck in our brain. Unlike long-term memory, which has a vast capacity, working memory is able to hold only a very small amount of information. In a renowned 1956 paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” Princeton psychologist George Miller observed that working memory could typically hold just seven pieces, or “elements,” of information. Even that
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