{"id":541038,"date":"2025-10-31T22:42:48","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T05:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clickup.com\/blog\/?p=541038"},"modified":"2025-12-13T06:26:23","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T14:26:23","slug":"chunking-method-in-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clickup.com\/blog\/chunking-method-in-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chunking Method: How to Remember and Recall More"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How does a pigeon remember<\/a> to return to your balcony each time? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does a rat know<\/a> which lever to pull to get out of the cage? Or how does a Chess Master memorize<\/a> over 50,000 patterns of pieces on the board?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simple answer (rooted in psychology research): Chunking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

70 years ago, American psychologist George A. Miller popularized the concept of chunking as a way to understand and expand short-term memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s fast forward to today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your sensory systems, sight, sound, taste, touch, etc., are gathering around 1 billion bits of data per second<\/a> right now. So Chunking might just be what we need to clear the thought clutter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is The Chunking Method?<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Chunking is the process of grouping individual bits of information into a sequence or a pattern that makes it easier to capture in our working memory and store in the long-term memory for later recall.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Even if you haven\u2019t heard of chunking before, you\u2019ve certainly done it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think of the way your Social Security number is represented: XXX-XX-XXXX, with chunks of three, two, and four digits. To remember the names of my seven cats, I chunk them into litter mates: three duos and a single child, easier to remember. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It happens in the professional sphere, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A librarian arranges books in alphabetical chunks. Infants use chunking to remember their dolls! Project management, time blocking<\/a>, and the Pomodoro technique are all ways of chunking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across various facets of everyday life, chunking is immensely popular, which begs the question of why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What problem does the Chunking Method solve?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Human working memory is limited. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can only store a few pieces of information, about seven pieces, and recall them accurately later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, human ambition is immense. Chunking bridges this gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transport for London, for instance, has the ambition of ensuring all its \u201ctaxi drivers know the quickest routes through London\u2019s complicated road network.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The test for this, known as The Knowledge, evaluates drivers on their memory of a six-mile radius from Charing Cross, which includes 25,000 streets, their directions, one-way streets, dead-ends, restaurants, pubs, shops, and landmarks.<\/p>\n\n\n

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What a London cabbie needs to be aware of, demonstrated via Google Maps<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Knowledge boys, a colloquial term for taxi driver candidates, use several memory techniques, one of which is a system they call satelliting, where they chunk locations in a quarter-mile radius around a run\u2019s starting and finishing points, to commit them to memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of these chunks adds up to larger chunks, forming a hierarchy of memory of the London landscape. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, studied London cabbies<\/a>, she found that their posterior hippocampus, part of the brain important for memory, is bigger than average. She also proved that parts of the brain that control memory are malleable and can change even in adulthood. \ud83d\udc40<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In essence, chunking, and the method of Loci, also known as a memory palace, helps individuals overcome memory limitations, indeed. With continuous practice over the long term, it also reshapes the physical brain to expand human capability closer to its ambition. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Concept of memory palace illustrated via ClickUp Brain<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
Try ClickUp Brain for free<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Though chunking is incredibly powerful, you don\u2019t need to be climbing the mental Mt. Everest to use it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use it to chunk the 14-step Korean skin care routine into manageable phases. At work, many of us schedule deep work in the morning and chunk meetings into the afternoons for simpler time management. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, I\u2019ve chunked this article into sections, sub-sections, paragraphs, and sentences. Something writers do all the time!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History and Origins of Chunking<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

While there have been studies around memory, recall, and groups of information earlier, George A. Miller\u2019s 1956 paper titled \u2018The Magical Number Seven \u00b1 Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity For Processing Information<\/a>\u2019 marks a seminal point in the study of chunking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to presenting the idea of chunking as a way to overcome the working memory bottleneck, he also posits that seven (\u00b1 2) is the number of chunks one can memorize comfortably. He writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>

George A. Miller<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Since then, chunking has been studied and has evolved a great deal across spheres. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psychiatrists use chunking<\/a> to help verbal working memory in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease. Teachers and educators find chunking useful for school and college students, especially for language learning<\/a>. Medical students use chunking, and other mnemonics, to remember names of hundreds of drugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Expert pilots, like London cabbies, use it for spatial memory to keep track of the various moving parts of an aircraft. Musicians, singers, guitarists, drummers, and so on, use chunking as a way to learn notes, songs, or even read sheet music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Music Practice: The Musician’s Guide To Practicing And Mastering Your Instrument Like A Professional<\/em>, David Dumais writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chunk your music to simplify it. Break it down by phrases and sub-phrases. Do whatever you need to do to keep it simple!<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>\n\n\n

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\ud83e\udd14 Check This Out: <\/strong>If cavemen had a to-do list all the way back then, what would be in it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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