magical number 7 - cognitive limitation of working memory (for bigger brains)

It is well known that our working memory (in our brains) is limited to about 7 items, the magical number 7, + or - 2. This is the Miller's law.

^{(our working memory is not at all like the RAM of a computer; it is profoundly associative)}

Do we have reasons to believe that aliens (or our descendants, in several hundred thousands years) with a brain no more than twice as big as ours would have a larger limit?

^{(my intuition would be that this limit is logarithmic in the size of the brain, but I cannot explain why; in that case the limit won't change much for a brain twice as big, and certainly won't jump to 15)}

Of course, plugging a computer inside our brain does not count as a way to increase its working memory.

posted almost 9 years ago

Basile Starynkevitch‭

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