The Magic Number Seven Minus Two Analysis

Chapter three of Moonwalking with Einstein titled “The Expert Expert” and the main idea of this chapter is working memory, and specifically improving it. Foer also discusses K. Ericsson and his developed “Skilled Memory Theory,” which explains how and why our memory is improvable. Foer later goes on to explain a series of experiments done with fellow psychologist Bill Chase on a Carnegie Mellon undergrad in which they called SF. Ericsson and Chase found that working memory is expandable and crushed the old beliefs that our memory composites are limited. Ericsson found that it takes 10,000 hours of training to become an expert at one specific thing and be able to process huge amounts of information in sophisticated ways to get past “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (the short-term memory limit) in which was discovered from a Harvard psychologist named Gregory Miller.
The 10,000-hour rule is based on the idea that any individual can become an expert in any field, including athletics in 10,000-hours. Malcolm Gladwell, who coined the rule, popularized the idea in 2008. He estimated

In 1993 Anders Ericsson published the results of a study on a group of violin players in the West Berlin Music Academy and found that the most accomplished student spent on average 10,000 hours by the time they were twenty years old. From Ericsson’s study, Gladwell coined the 10,000-hour rule. Liking into the study in greater detail, there are no actual measures of variance, which means there was no information taken on the range of time to reach expert status was given. Further, Gladwell chose the 10,000-hour number based on the participants reached twenty years of age simply because 10,000 hours was a nice sounding round number. Secondly, participants were asked to retrospectively estimate the time taken to reach expert status. Which brings to question all kinds of problems relating to participants memory and issues with responded