Initially, he was able to remember roughly seven numbers in the sequence -- an average improvement over the four-item limit that most people arrive at with a few simple and intuitive rehearsal strategies. But the young man was so bored with the experiment he decided to make it interesting for himself by doing his best to greatly improve his limit -- which he did. By the end, some 20 months later, he was able to say back a sequence that was 80 digits long -- or, as Bor puts it, "if seven friends in turn rapidly told him their phone numbers, he could calmly wait until the last digit was spoken and then, from memory, key all seven friends' numbers into his phone's contact list without error," an achievement that would make Joshua Foer proud.

But how, exactly, was an average person capable of such a superhuman feat? Bor sheds light:

This volunteer happened to be a keen track runner, and so his first thought was to see certain number groups as running times, for instance, 3492 would be transformed into 3 minutes and 49.2 seconds, around the world-record time for running the mile. In other words, he was using his memory for well-known number sequences in athletics to prop up his working memory. This strategy worked very well, and he rapidly more than doubled his working memory capacity to nearly 20 digits. The next breakthrough some months later occurred when he realized he could combine each running time into a superstructure of 3 or 4 running times -- and then group these superstructures together again. Interestingly, the number of holders he used never went above his initial capacity of just a handful of items. He just learned to cram more and more into each item in a pyramidal way, with digits linked together in 3s or 4s, and then those triplets or quadruplets of digits linked together as well in groups of 3, and so on. One item-space, one objet in working memory, started holding a single digit, but after 20 months of practice, could contain as much as 24 digits.

This young man had, essentially, mastered exponential chunking. But, Bor points out, chunking isn't useful only in helping us excel at seemingly meaningless tasks -- it is integral to what makes us human:

Although [chunking] can vastly increase the practical limits of working memory, it is not merely a faithful servant of working memory -- instead it is the secret master of this online store, and the main purpose of consciousness. [...] There are three straightforward sides to the chunking process -- the search for chunks, the noticing and memorizing of those chunks, and the use of the chunks we've already built up. The main purpose of consciousness is to search for and discover these structured chunks of information within working memory, so that they can then be used efficiently and automatically, with minimal further input from consciousness.

Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world. We cannot help actively searching for patterns -- any hook in the data that will aid our performance and understanding. We constantly look for regularities in every facet of our lives, and there are few limits to what we can learn and improve on as we make these discoveries. We also develop strategies to further help us -- strategies that themselves are forms of patterns that assist us in spotting other patterns, with one example being that amateur track runner developing tactics to link digits with running times in various races.

But, echoing Richard Feynman's eloquent lament on the subject, Bor points to a dark side of this hunger for patterns:

One problematic corollary of this passion for patterns is that we are the most advanced species in how elaborately and extensively we can get things wrong. We often jump to conclusions -- for instance, with astrology or religion. We are so keen to search for patterns, and so satisfied when we've found them, that we do not typically perform sufficient checks on our apparent insights.

Still, our capacity for pattern-recognition, Bor argues, is the very source of human creativity. In fact, chunking and pattern-recognition offer evidence for the combinatorial nature of creativity, affirm Steve Jobs's famous words that "creativity is just connecting things", Mark Twain's contention that "all ideas are second-hand", and Nina Paley's clever demonstration of how everything builds on what came before.

The arts, too, generate their richness and some of their aesthetic appeal from patterns. Music is the most obvious sphere where structures are appealing -- little phrases that are repeated, raised a key, or reversed can sound utterly beguiling. This musical beauty directly relates to the mathematical relation between notes and the overall logical regularities formed. Some composers, such as Bach, made this connection relatively explicit, at least in certain pieces, which are just as much mathematical and logical puzzles as beautiful musical works. But certainly patterns are just as important in the visual arts as in music. Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so fascinating to create and to view, precisely because we are forced to contemplate a new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.

What is true of creative skill, Bor argues, is also true of our highest intellectual contribution:

Some of our greatest insights can be gleaned from moving up another level and noticing that certain patterns relate to others, which on first blush may appear entirely unconnected -- spotting patterns of patterns, say (which is what analogies essentially are).

Best of all, this system expands exponentially as it feeds on itself, like a muscle that grows stronger with each use:

Consciousness and chunking allow us to turn the dull sludge of independent episodes in our lives into a shimmering, dense web, interlinked by all the myriad patterns we spot. It becomes a positive feedback loop, making the detection of new connections even easier, and creates a domain ripe for understanding how things actually work, of reaching that supremely powerful realm of discerning the mechanism of things. At the same time, our memory system becomes far more efficient, effective -- and intelligent -- than it could ever be without such refined methods to extract useful structure from raw data.

Though some parts of The Ravenous Brain fringe on reductionism, Bor offers a stimulating lens on that always fascinating, often uncomfortable, inevitably alluring intersection of science and philosophy where our understanding of who we are resides.

This post also appears on Brain Pickings, an Atlantic partner site.

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