A Psycholinguistic Model of How the Human Brain Processes Language

by Dr. Ed Vavra

In a famous study, George Miller demonstrated that, on average, STM can handle seven bits of information at a time. (Scroll down for details.)
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Miller's primary experiment was based on giving a human subject a sequence of series of random numbers and asking the subject to repeat each series:

1 5 8 3 4 9 2

2 4 7 5 8 1 9 4 6 3 8

8 4 1 8 3 0 4 8 3 5 7 6

3 5 8 9 5

6 4 8 2 0 3 7 4 8 1 6

What he found was that most people can remember sequences of seven digits. Some people have trouble with sequences longer than five; most people have problems with sequences longer than nine. Miller's theory has been supported by numerous others, including a small one by a class of my own students. See Miller, George A. "The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information." Psychological Review 63 (1956) 81-97.