Stories, by Steven Pinker
I am fascinated by Steven Pinker’s example of how humans remember things1.
Our brain can hold only about six bits of information in our working memory at once.
M D P H D R S V P C E O I H O PHow many of those letters can you remember immediately after reading them?
If we compress the random letters above into familiar groups, we’re able to remember them all easily:
MD PHD RSVP CEO IHOPIt’s easier to remember them all when they’re condensed into five chunks. But we can do even better:
The MD and the PhD RSVP'd to the CEO of IHOP.One chunk.
Stories are our competitive advantage as a species. The great storytellers among us can wield outsize power2.
From Sense of Style by Steven Pinker, page 68.↩