Hacking the Magical Number Seven With Storytelling | Hacker News Reader

Hacking the Magical Number Seven With Storytelling

gigaom.com

16 pointsmspeiser12 comments

Maybe putting the gist of what you want to communicate into a story context is a hack for making what you want to communicate more memorable. Because most stories, as Ira Glass says, are action, action, action, then how you felt about something you did. However, personal stories are much more effective because you are sharing part of you - anyone can tell stories of people like Ray Kroc or Sir Richard Branson but I believe when you tell a 3rd party story - you're not putting yourself out there. And you can argue that the value of Y-Combinator is the private founder's dinners.

I'm not the best at remembering names but I remember many people's personal stories. I love personal stories. And some of the best are told by the storytellers of The Moth.

"The stories range in length from approximately 5 to 17 minutes. Sometimes funny, occasionally sad, often poignant, we hope you will find the stories memorable and representative of many aspects of human experience."

http://www.themoth.org/podcast

Very fascinating! I read about this "rule of seven" in "The Tipping Point". Apparently the concept that most people can only remember a max of seven items is the principal behind using seven digits in a telephone number.

Rule of thumb is that short term memory can hold 7 +/-2 items. ("Items" is variously defined.)

Edit: if you can explain why you downvote something like this, I'm very open to hearing it.

This is actually how mnemonic devices work (or so I hear): by encouraging your brain to "chunk" things such that each chunk has more information.

That's actually a very concise yet accurate summary of the rule which is widely, almost universally, misquoted and misapplied.

As in this article, for example. Short term memory lasts for seconds. The mnemonic tricks discussed in the video are not for short term memory.

Mnemonics are interesting stuff though. Memorizing the order of a pack of cards (once you know the techniques) is not hard and worth doing just to surprise yourself. Of course doing it really fast or doing 10 packs is another matter.

I don't really see the connection to story telling except in the most tenuous of ways, though I think that is also a powerful technique for delivering presentations.

Did you mean that my summary is concise and correct, or just a correct representation of an incorrect statement?

I see how that sentence is ambigious. I meant that you have it correct. The two key elements being "short term memory" and "items (variously defined)".

This article thinks it applies to long term memory, and most people don't realise you can 'hack' this by chunking 'items' into bigger 'items' (e.g 7 two digit numbers have 14 digits total).

"it’s the reason that U.S. phone numbers have seven digits"

I used to believe these sorts of things until living in China and noticing cell numbers are 11 in length and Chinese don't have a problem remembering loads of them. I saw an article not long ago pointing out that CJK languages have only one syllable per number word, which may enable them to deal with longer strings of them more easily.

Yeah, I'm not sure the telephone thing holds much water. Sequences are much easier to remember. No one has trouble remembering the tune or lyrics of a song they like, far more than 7 notes / words.

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

"For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five parts, take three.'"

You could also say that three-fifths is literally "out of five parts take three" too, just more tersely. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that in Chinese languages the meaning has not atrophied to the same degree or is more verbosely specified (which kind of counters the brevity argument they use for integer digits).

Perhaps a bilingual Chinese person could weigh in on this. For this exercise, we are concerned with the language in their head, not what they say when they talk to another. I'm guessing they think in terms of math notation with word-numbers, so "3/5" in their head would be "one-syllable-number" "slash" "one-syllable-number".

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