Chunking Expanded

     I know Addess posted a blog regarding chunking, but I wanted to expand on it and bring in some real life examples. George Miller proposed a hypothesis regarding the magic number 7. He concluded that humans tend to really only remember about 7 items at a time before they begin to forget anything added to a respective list. The idea of chunking deals with short term memory being limited as opposed to your long term memory. If you chunk the numbers together, or simply group them, you may be able to remember a lot more. Say for example I created an experiment where I told the class to memorize the following numbers: 81419952012. Most people wouldn't have a terrible time memorizing them, though many people would certainly forget a few. Now what if I told you to break up the numbers into segments. It is easier to remember 814, 1995, 2012 than memorizing it all as a whole. Another reason you may (or lets say me in this case) not have such difficult memorizing these numbers is because of the self-reference effect. 814 is associated with August 14, my birthday, and I was born in 1995. This year is 2012, making it easy to memorize that. When things begin to have connections to me personally, it becomes much easier to remember it.
     The Guinness World Records officially recognizes Lu Chao as the world record holder with 67,890 decimal places memorized in the number pi (as in 3.14159 etc.). How can memorize so many digits. While Lu Chao is clearly a genius that has a great memory, he probably also utilizes chunking and makes associations to group the numbers. This was probably very helpful in memorizing all of those digits. All in all, chunking is very helpful in memorizing data.