If I ask you to memorize the following 14 digits (01093904071776) in five minutes, how would you do it?
Today I'm going to show you how to memorize numbers and thigs faster by using a strategy called chunking.
Chunking (t͡ʃˈʌŋkɪŋ). To group items together through meaning so that they can be stored as one single concept. Chunking is not only helpful to memorize things, but also to become good at any skill.
Have you ever wondered why some numbers (including phone numbers and credit card numbers) are split into two or more groups of numbers? Or why some codes have only four items? Well, the answer is related to the short-term-memory.
As you know, we all have two major memory systems: the short term memory and the long term memory. It's said that the short term memory can retain five or seven items of information, but now it's widely believed that it can hold only four pieces of information.
If I were to ask you to remember that 14 numbers, you'd probably take a long time doing so. You see, 14 digits are too many numbers for your working emmemory to hold, but what if there's a way to decrease the pieces of information and making them more memorable at the same time? That's called chunking. Chunking helps you to decrease the amount of pieces of information by increasing the size of each piece, which makes things easier to remember. For example, I can give you these five letters to you to remember: l, c, o, d, u.
Now look away and remember them. How easy it was?
Let's try chunking those five letters into one word: cloud. It became much more easy to remember and now those no-sense letters have a meaning. Furthermore, the word "cloud" uses one slot of your working memory and the rest of slots are free, which allows you to keep more information in your short-term-memory.
Back to the first 14 numbers, you can easily memorize them by chunking them. For instance, I can split them into two groups: 010939 and 04071776. But I can take one step further and chunk them even more: 01/09/39 and 04/07/1776. Are those dates familiar to you? If so, you'll find them to be more memorable. The first is the date of the beginning of the Second World War, and the second one is the Independence Day of the United States.
Interesting article. I think chunking plays a big role as we get better in a language, since we start chunking much more efficiently. At the start, every word is based on a new root and we struggle remembering 10 words a day, later, we chunk things by roots, prefixes, suffixes, and we can remember 50 words a day with the same amount of effort. PS: I remembered lcodu picturing "lu" with a cod (fish) in the middle.
Yes, chunking is pretty related to language learning. For instance, when someone learns how to read, he/she first learns the alphabet and then forms words by chunking letters. I think you're understanding well this topic. You chunked "lcodu" in your own way. That's great!