The magical number seven started life as a talk on military voice communication
George Miller spent the Second World War researching army voice communication, and his doctoral thesis on jamming signals was classified top secret. That work on what makes speech intelligible led to a 1955 talk, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, still one of psychology's most cited ideas about memory.
Miller was born on 3 February 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia. His parents divorced soon after, and he grew up with his mother through the Depression in a Christian Science household that relied on prayer rather than medicine. Following his stepfather's job moves, he ended up at the University of Alabama, where the drama club drew him into speech courses and a professor, Donald Ramsdell, introduced him to psychology. He took degrees in history and speech there before heading to Harvard.
At Harvard's Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory under S. S. Stevens, he researched voice communication for the Army Signal Corps, and his 1946 doctorate on the optimal design of jamming signals was locked away as top secret. At MIT's Lincoln Lab in the early 1950s he pinned down the minimal features that keep speech intelligible, and a 1955 invitation to speak about it produced his famous paper: pooling many experiments, he argued that human short-term memory holds on average about seven items.
Miller came of age when behaviourism ruled and treated the mind as off limits. He rejected that, devising experiments and mathematical tools to study mental processes, especially language, and aligning psychology with information theory, computation and linguistics. With Jerome Bruner he founded Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960, a deliberate break with behaviourism that drew visitors such as Jean Piaget, Alexander Luria and Noam Chomsky, with whose family Miller once shared a summer house at Stanford.
He is counted among the founders of cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and, around 1978, cognitive science. A sabbatical at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study brought squash games with J. Robert Oppenheimer, and he helped recruit Timothy Leary to Harvard. Later he directed WordNet, a database of word links usable by computers. He received the National Medal of Science, ranked 20th among the most cited psychologists of the 20th century in a 2002 survey, and died on 22 July 2012.
Source: George Armitage Miller
