In recent days, I have been obsessively staring at telephone numbers. That is partly because I have just moved house and am flicking through my contacts list to send out change-of-address notes. But there is a second reason too: I have just stumbled on a fascinating little paper written by a Princeton cognitive psychologist called George Miller on the topic of “chunking”. And while this piece of research is half a century old, it has a curious relevance today - particularly in relation to those telephone numbers which are now so unthinkingly woven into the fabric of our 21st-century lives.
最近幾天我在著了魔似的盯著電話號碼。這部分是因爲我剛剛搬家，正翻著通訊錄發出地址變更通知。不過還有另外一個原因：我偶然間看到了一篇引人入勝的小論文，這篇論文出自普林斯頓大學(Princeton University)認知心理學家喬治•穆勒(George Miller)，討論的是有關「組塊」(chunking)的話題。儘管這篇研究論文是半個世紀前發表的，但它在當今時代具有一種令人好奇的相關性——尤其是在與電話號碼有關的方面，這些電話號碼正悄無聲息地滲透到21世紀生活的方方面面。