The “Magic Number 7” is a paper written by a cognitive psychologist George Miller. It argues that the number of objects an average human can consciously process at any one time is 7 ± 2.
We can hold 7 plus or minus 2 separate bits of information consciously at any one time. There are approximately 2 million bits of information entering our brains per second, we delete, distort and generalise through our filters until we reach the number seven plus or minus two. This means that we are programmed by our filters in how we experience events and react to them. We can adapt the way that we take in the information by chunking (grouping information into chunks) in order to expand our capacity.
In fact our brain uses a method of chunking and grouping of bit of information together so that it can handle far more than the 7 bits but still, life is complicated and so we can get overwhelmed and confused. It is therefore worth taking a rest, a break or manually and consciously evaluating information so that it assists the brain in coping.
See a full animated explanation of the Magic number 7 in our NLP e-Learning training programme.