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The word ‘’chunking’’ comes from a famous 1956 paper by George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. At a time when information theory was beginning to be applied in psychology, Miller observed that some human cognitive tasks fit the model of a "channel capacity," characterized by a roughly constant capacity in bits, but short-term memory did not. A variety of studies could be summarized by saying that short-term memory had a capacity of about "seven plus-or-minus two" chunks. Miller wrote that "With binary items the span is about nine and, although it drops to about five with monosyllabic English words, the difference is far less than the hypothesis of constant information would require (see also, memory span ). The span of immediate memory seems to be almost independent of the number of bits per chunk, at least over the range that has been examined to date." Miller acknowledged that "we are not very definite about what constitutes a chunk of information." Miller noted that according to this theory, it should be possible to effectively increase short-term memory for low-information-content items by mentally recoding them into a smaller number of high-information-content items. "A man just beginning to learn radio-telegraphic code hears each dit and dah as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves as words, which are still larger chunks, and he begins to hear whole phrases." Thus, a telegrapher can effectively "remember" several dozen dits and dahs as a single phrase. Naive subjects can only remember about nine binary items, but Miller reports a 1954 experiment in which people were trained to listen to a string of binary digits and (in one case) mentally group them into groups of five, recode each group into a name (e.g. "twenty-one" for 10101), and remember the names. With sufficient drill, people found it possible to remember as many as forty binary digits.

Miller wrote:

"It is a little dramatic to watch a person get 40 binary digits in a row and then repeat them back without error. However, if you think of this merely as a mnemonic trick for extending the memory span, you will miss the more important point that is implicit in nearly all such mnemonic devices. The point is that recoding is an extremely powerful weapon for increasing the amount of information that we can deal with."

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Memory training systems

The phenomenon of chunking as a memory mechanism can be observed in the way we group numbers and information in our day-to-day life. For example, when recalling a number such as 14101946, if we group the numbers as 14, 10 and 1946, we are creating a mnemonic for this number as a day, month and year. An illustration of the limited capacity of working memory as suggested by George Miller can be seen from the following example: While recalling a mobile phone number such as 9849523450, we might break this into 98 495 234 50. Thus, instead of remembering 10 separate digits that is beyond the "seven plus-or-minus two", we are remembering four groups of numbers. Various kinds of memory training systems and mnemonics include training and drill in specially-designed recoding or chunking schemes. Such systems existed before Miller's paper, but there was no convenient term to describe the general strategy, nor was there substantive and reliable research. The term "chunking" is now often used in reference to these systems. When people are aging, the possibility developing Alzheimer’s disease will increase. Patient with this disease will typically experience working memory deficits. Chunking is an effective method to improve patient’s verbal working memory performance.

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When seeing a series of information for a short time, people always show divergent level of ability of memory. Except some superman of memory, why ordinary people have so large difference of ability of memorizing? How can some people manage to memorize larger amounts of information than others for just brief period of time? The answer is grouping and chunking.

Firstly, grouping is to divide information into groups and remember all the groups in ordinal position. If one wants to remember a series of numbers maybe more than 12 in a short time, it's hardly to memorize all numbers one by one because the span of short-term memory, according to George Miller, is seven plus or minus two pieces of information. But if we divide the 12 numbers by 4 and get 3 groups of numbers, it much easier for us to remember all of them in short time.

Secondly, chunking is another way to extend our span of short-term memory. Chunking is to make meaningful groupings from material. For example, look at the following words for a little time and recite them: tone, stuck, tuning, pure, retain, period, pitch. It's not easy to memorize all of them quickly. But if we organize these words to make a sentence, "When it is struck, a tuning fork produces an almost pure tone, retaining its pitch over a long period of time", it seems easier to remember these words when we memorize the sentence. Because the sentence is meaningful, we could remember that more quickly than a set of single words. -- http://blog.lib.umn.edu/

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