"Magical Number" On Stage with Leonard Lopate

Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein and the 2006 United States Memory Champion in the "speed cards" event, was interviewed by Leonard Leopate during his WNYC show. During the interview, Lopate asked Foer to explain "chunking," which is the theme of this blog. Foer immediately explained it as the 7 plus or minus two rule which comprises the Magical Number.
 
If there are lingering doubts as to the perceived importance of memory, consider that this book is already the third best-selling book on Amazon, was the subject of an opinion piece on NYT by Maureen Doud, book reviews by Michiko Kakutani and by Marie Arana of the Washington Post. That said, it should be remembered [sic] that the IBM Watson team faced greater challenges in natural language understanding than providing in sheer memory resources. The carefully curated content in Wikipedia, which uses logical connections carefully created by countless contributors, exploited by Watson's statistical reasoning resources, did the heavy lifting -- not fast hyperlink traversal of all those terabytes.