PERSON
George Armitage Miller
The cognitive psychologist whose 1956 discovery of the seven-item working memory limit revealed the bottleneck through which every cathedral, every symphony, every civilization has been forced to pass—and whose framework for chunking and recoding is the most precise available instrument for measuring what AI actually changes about human cognition.
George Armitage Miller is the psychologist who discovered the wall inside the human mind. Born in 1920, he spent his career at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton pursuing what seemed like a narrow experimental question—how much information can the human mind hold in active attention at once?—and found an answer that reframed the entire history of human tool use. His 1956 paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” the most cited article in the history of psychological science, established that human
working memory holds approximately seven items, the same number for Einstein as for the postal clerk, the same for the chess grandmaster as for the novice. The constraint does not yield to intelligence, ambition, or training. It is a physical law of the thinking mind. What
does yield—and this is where Miller’s framework becomes a theory of civilization—is the amount of meaning each item can