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

Linhares, Alexandre; Chada, Daniel M; Aranha, Christian N · PLoS One · 2011

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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.

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