George A. Miller
The mind holds about seven things
An American psychologist who measured the limits of the human mind and helped found cognitive science.
techniques
We escape memory's limits by grouping the world into meaningful chunks.
Who they were
George Miller noticed that across very different tasks people could juggle only about seven items at once, a regularity he captured in his famous paper on the "magical number seven." He showed how we slip past that bottleneck by chunking — grouping small pieces into larger, meaningful units. With colleagues he reimagined behavior as guided by plans and feedback loops rather than simple reflexes. His writing helped turn the study of mind into the new field of cognitive science.
Famous books
What they left on the shelf
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Their big idea
Information Processing Theory
George A. Miller treated the mind as a system that takes in, stores, and works on information much like a computer. His famous observation was that short-term memory holds only about seven items at once, give or take a couple.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Miller — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.