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Miller's law 0:34
A 34-second explainer of Miller's law, narrated over the same demo you can try yourself.
Try the interactive Miller's law demo
What this video covers
Working memory can hold roughly seven items, plus or minus two, at once. Exceed that limit and things start to fall out. The constraint isn't about intelligence; it's about the size of the mental workspace everyone is working with.
That's your working memory limit in action. The number wasn't made up: George Miller measured it in 1956 and found the same result across people, senses, and kinds of information.