Stuart Card and Peter Pirolli from PARC introduced this concept in their talk on information foraging at the 2003 usability conference.

George Miller conducted studies that suggested that the short-term memory used for manipulating concepts in the human mind could only handle so many concepts at a time. The average was seven with a margin of error of two, hence 7±2 concepts is the maximum that can be handled at a time.

This is an interesting concept, which may help to explain the trends of human conceptualisation: namely that we seem to encapsulate some concepts in another and repeat and repeat.

To borrow another concept from Stuart and Peter let us ask why this has evolved? Why might it be necessary for a collection of concepts to be represented by another concept? This is necessary if there is a finite number of concepts that can be held and manipulated within the human mind.

These concepts can form a networked hierarchy: each concept encompassing more concepts than those that it encompasses do. The addition of 'higher' concepts (i.e. those that encompass more concepts) will therefore allow the conscious mind to manipulate effectively more concepts than the limitations placed on it by design. Thus learning and forming connections into new concepts can effectively allow you to transcend the 7±2 concepts limitation.



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