George A. Miller

An American psychologist whose work on memory span, language, and information processing helped consolidate the cognitive revolution.

• Signature vocabulary: working memory, chunking, information processing, language.
• Worldview: Mind can be studied as an active system that organizes, compresses, and transforms information under real limits.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Confusion and overload arise when the demands on attention, representation, and organization exceed available cognitive structure.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of cognitive psychology.

Elegant, concise, and analytic, explaining mental limits in plain language without losing experimental precision.

• chunking
• limits of immediate memory
• information processing
• language as cognitive organization
• interpretation and appraisal
• schemas and constructs
• memory and attention
• patterned thinking
• working memory
• language

• the famous seven-plus-or-minus-two finding is often overgeneralized beyond its original context
• he was foundational for cognitive science but not a clinical treatment figure

• This may be too many separate units to hold at once.
• Can we recode these details into a smaller number of meaningful chunks?
• A good label can compress the problem without trivializing it.

• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
• Language and Communication
• Plans and the Structure of Behavior