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Subject:Re: 7 plus or minus 2 From:Miles Jack <miles -at- NOTES -dot- CTL -dot- COM -dot- CY> Date:Tue, 29 Jul 1997 13:53:44 +0300
At 13:12 29/07/1997 +0200, raoul -at- MINDSPRING -dot- COM wrote:
>
>I worked for a time in opertions research of Soviet cybernetics. (OK,
>wizards, apply *those* buzzwords.) We looked into military leadership
>problems and found this rich body of research on something called "control
>theory" that was ignored in the West because few people read Russian.
>
>The Rooshians tried for optimal relationships between entities, i.e., units
>on the battlefield or the usual drunks running machine tools in their
>quaint factories. Anyway, they felt that the optimal number of sub-elements
>that a person or entity could control was 6 or 7, and no more than nine.
>
>When I read the chunking stats, imagine how fascinated I was.
>
>Sorry for no citations, but it's a dim memory from my days in the
>amerikansky military-industrial complex.
>
In a previous incarnation, I used to work in the crisis management /
emergency response field. We used to work on the basis that a person could
only handle two important tasks/pieces of information at one time. It seems
that when the brain gets stressed, information retention is one of the
first things to go - which is why you get people doing inconsistent or
unsuitable things in the middle of an emergency.
Another aspect of stress is that if you *do* add another task to the list
of things to do, the brain does a juggling act and randomly drops one of
the other pieces of information (which might be the most important one).
We had to figure this into our procedures and checklists so that people
weren't overloaded at a critical time. Anybody writing instructions for
programming a VCR might like to consider the effect of stress on their
target audience. <grin>
Again sorry I can't give any references, it was a while a go and I don't
have anything to hand.
Anyway, depending upon what it is you are presenting, be it a checklist,
bulleted list, or whatever, as always, consider the target audience and how
the document is intended to be used.
======================================
Miles Jack - Card Tech Ltd
Tel: + 357 2 376671/ Fax: + 357 2 377412 mailto:miles -at- ctl -dot- com -dot- cy
======================================
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