Human working memory (aka the magic number 7, plus or minus 4 depending on type) is very chunking-aggressive. Everyone can remember a phone number because it’s three numbers, where they might have problems remembering ten separate digits, and similarly very complex sentences can be burned down to three or four fragments that each are only one object in memory.
But chunking doesn’t work well when there is ambiguity or where the parts can not yet be brought into a single piece. You can take “the car”, then “the car” and “in” and “the driveway”, then “the car in the driveway” and “of the house”, and so on, until the structure of the first memory object becomes too long to recite internally.
With the second phrase, you have “the mouse” and “the cat” and “the dog” and you’re adding a fourth object and it’s yet another noun so the English language doesn’t let /any/ of these things clearly chunk together. There are some center-embedded sentences that chunk more readily, and some languages that allow more same-part-of-speech chunking, but there’s an upper limit to what you can do with human neurology.
((This is somewhat related to the preference for front-loaded active voice in writing and speaking technique.))
Everyone can remember a phone number because it’s three numbers, where they might have problems remembering ten separate digits
This is slightly irrelevant, but for some reason I can’t figure out at all, pretty much all phone numbers I learned (and, incidentally, the first thirty or so decimals of π) I learned digit-by-digit rather than in groups. The only exception was when I moved to France, I learned my french number by-separate-digits (i.e., five-eight instead of fifty-eight) in my native language but grouped in tens (i.e., by pairs) in French. This isn’t a characteristic of my native language, either, nobody even in my family does this.
I once had memorized the periodic table to 54 places (Xenon) by name, as a sequence with a few numeral fixed points. This helped me in High-school chemistry. Lost some chunks of the higher parts, but I have intuits about most anything in the periodic table. Some of this is visual memory.
I memorized that as a verbal thing initially, kinda like the alphabet song (which I know a large number of people still sing internally when they need to sort stuff lexicographically). But even the alphabet I have with sucess moved partially to visual memory.
IMO, visual memory is an underused resource to audiotorial thinkers (like myself) and probably vice versa.
Human working memory (aka the magic number 7, plus or minus 4 depending on type) is very chunking-aggressive. Everyone can remember a phone number because it’s three numbers, where they might have problems remembering ten separate digits, and similarly very complex sentences can be burned down to three or four fragments that each are only one object in memory.
But chunking doesn’t work well when there is ambiguity or where the parts can not yet be brought into a single piece. You can take “the car”, then “the car” and “in” and “the driveway”, then “the car in the driveway” and “of the house”, and so on, until the structure of the first memory object becomes too long to recite internally.
With the second phrase, you have “the mouse” and “the cat” and “the dog” and you’re adding a fourth object and it’s yet another noun so the English language doesn’t let /any/ of these things clearly chunk together. There are some center-embedded sentences that chunk more readily, and some languages that allow more same-part-of-speech chunking, but there’s an upper limit to what you can do with human neurology.
((This is somewhat related to the preference for front-loaded active voice in writing and speaking technique.))
This is slightly irrelevant, but for some reason I can’t figure out at all, pretty much all phone numbers I learned (and, incidentally, the first thirty or so decimals of π) I learned digit-by-digit rather than in groups. The only exception was when I moved to France, I learned my french number by-separate-digits (i.e., five-eight instead of fifty-eight) in my native language but grouped in tens (i.e., by pairs) in French. This isn’t a characteristic of my native language, either, nobody even in my family does this.
I once had memorized the periodic table to 54 places (Xenon) by name, as a sequence with a few numeral fixed points. This helped me in High-school chemistry. Lost some chunks of the higher parts, but I have intuits about most anything in the periodic table. Some of this is visual memory.
I memorized that as a verbal thing initially, kinda like the alphabet song (which I know a large number of people still sing internally when they need to sort stuff lexicographically). But even the alphabet I have with sucess moved partially to visual memory.
IMO, visual memory is an underused resource to audiotorial thinkers (like myself) and probably vice versa.