Raw information is hard to hold. Grouped information is not. Chunking is the process of organising individual pieces of data into meaningful clusters so the brain can treat a group as a single unit rather than multiple separate items. George Miller's landmark 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" established that short-term memory handles roughly seven items, but those items can each be chunks containing multiple pieces of information. The trick is that the grouping must be meaningful, arbitrary clusters do not help.
Chunking
How grouping information makes it easier to process and remember
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Designers Academy
5 February 2025 · 4 min read
DesignPrinciples
In brief
Chunking is the process of organizing individual data pieces into meaningful clusters, allowing the brain to process and remember information more efficiently as single units rather than many separate items.
