hierarchical thought

working memory limits us to the number of concrete details we can hold in our minds at any one time. depending on the type of detail, the consensus is somewhere between 4 and 10, usually quoted at 7. given first hand experience, I believe this idea has some legitimacy. but there’s a hidden detail that changes the implications of this limited work space hypothesis.

a detail in this context is answer to a question: the number of dollars in your bank account, the name of someone you want to communicate with, or the second digit of a novel phone number. that last one is the odd one. the number of dollars in your bank account is a single detail, you don’t recall the digits individually, nor do you recall the nth letter of someone’s name, but the name as a whole. so why divide up the phone number in this way? because we remember things based on connections to other concepts we’ve already established. names are recognizable as names, and we’ve heard most of the names we’re likely to encounter. in the case where we’ve not encountered the name, or anything like it before, they are indeed harder to remember, though we probably fall back on the larger chunks of syllables rather than the letters that make up the name. but how did we establish those other concepts if they are also expressed in terms of connections to other concepts we’ve previously learned?