Chunking: Less Is More

Your working memory holds only about four to seven items at once. Chunking groups individual pieces into meaningful clusters, letting you remember far more. The phone number 8005551234 is ten separate digits, but chunked as 800-555-1234 it becomes just three groups, well within those limits.

This is also how experts seem to have superhuman memory. A chess grandmaster does not memorize individual pieces; they recognize familiar chunks of pieces from thousands of past games. The grandmaster sees three or four chunks where a beginner sees twenty separate pieces.