The emergence of miller's magic number on a sparse distributed memory

Abstract

Human memory is limited in the number of items held in one's mind-a limit known as 'Miller's magic number'. We study the emergence of such limits as a result of the statistics of large bitvectors used to represent items in memory, given two postulates: i) the Sparse Distributed Memory; and ii) chunking through averaging. Potential implications for theoretical neuroscience are discussed.