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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
Miller's 1956 research showed that our immediate memory for unrelated items is limited - famously 'seven, plus or minus two'. Miller himself cautioned against treating this as a fixed limit, and later studies suggest the number of chunks is often lower, around three to five under controlled conditions. The key insight isn't a magic number: working memory is limited, so grouping information into meaningful chunks helps people retain it.
That's the pull of working-memory limits: grouped items are far easier to hold than a loose string of them. Miller pointed this out in 1956 - though he saw the "seven" as a rough observation, not a fixed cap, and later estimates land lower.
