The Science of Chunking: A Cheat Code for Learning Faster [#67]

“Hey, what’s your phone number?”, I asked. 

The girl across the table replied: “it’s 0123 456 78 90”. 

She, like all of us, had her phone number memorized. But when you look closely, she didn’t memorize a string of 11 digits – that’s hard to do for humans. She memorized four chunks of numbers. 

Everyday, whether it’s with phone numbers, IBANs, credit cards, etc., we use a memorization technique called chunking: breaking down elements into chunks to remember them more easily. 

In 1978, Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot ran an experiment where he presented chess grandmasters and novices with different chessboard positions. Grandmasters were, perhaps unsurprisingly, able to recall positions much better than novices. This was the foundation. 

In a follow-on study from Carnegie Mellon University, researchers replicated the experiment with similar results (grandmasters recalled 92% of positions; high-level players 32.2%). But then, they threw a wrench into it – and presented the subject with randomized positions that cannot possibly occur in a game. 

Their recall plummeted: grandmaster were able to recall only 19% of positions. Still slightly better than the high-level players at 12.4%, but impressively low. 

Why did this happen? 

Chess grandmasters had seen a ton of positions throughout their career. They had developed chunks of positions they could group together: instead of remembering 32 chess pieces, they memorized 4-6 chunks of the board (just like the girl memorized her phone number). 

The less experience subjects had, the less chunks they could create – and therefore, had to memorize more items, leading to worse performance. 

Once the random positions were introduced, neither the grandmasters nor the high-level players were able to use their pre-defined chunks anymore. Leading to an abysmal ability to recall.

The researchers explain the slight deviation between grandmasters and high-level players with the fact that despite the random positions, they were still able to use some chunks, but way fewer than before. 

It’s not that chess grandmasters have a better ability to memorize; it’s that they’ve created larger and larger chunks of positions in their minds. 

How can we use this in our everyday life? 

Everything we do repeatedly can be broken down to chunks. 

Take a typical sales call: 

1. A bit of smalltalk
2. Walk customer through the structure of the call
3. Ask a lot of questions to identify the problems your customer is facing 
4. Present how your solution might be able to resolve that problem
5. Handle objections
6. Go for the close 

All of these are chunks you can practice in isolation. So instead of practicing entire sales calls, practice one particular chunk of the call first. Then, the next one. Until eventually, you can put it all together. This will also allow you to isolate issues in your calls. 

By encoding these chunks one-by-one, you free up mental processing power. Instead of thinking about how to handle your customer’s objection, you can focus on listening. What is he actually saying? Is there a nuance to this objection? How is he saying it? 

Chunking also helps in situations where there’s a lot going on at the same time. Take the sport of Lacrosse. 

As an off-ball defender in Lacrosse, I always need to understand three things: 

1. Where the ball is
2. Where the player I’m covering is
3. Where the goal is 

And then position myself accordingly. 

But if I position myself reactively, chances are I might be too late – the feet are never faster than the ball. 

So by studying different types of alignments and plays, I can anticipate where the ball is going before it gets there. This allows me to pay attention to smaller details: where are the hips of my opponent pointing? Is there something going on behind me? Are my teammates also in the correct position? 

That’s why a big part of practice, especially for defenders, should be film study: the creation of chunks of offensive alignments. So that when chaos hits, your brain can process infinitely faster. 

Anything that you do repeatedly can be broken down into chunks. 

By practicing the ones that occur most often first, you can free up mental power to conquer the chaos and pay attention to details you otherwise wouldn’t. 

Let’s put this into practice ⬇️

Question for you: 

Which things do you do repeatedly? Can you break them down into chunks and practice them in an isolated manner? 

Try it out this week – and let me know how it goes. 

LFG. 🔥

And the girl from the introduction?

I couldn’t reach her afterwards. You guys think she gave me a fake number??

PS: My dear friend Paul recently commented: “the one thing I’ve learned from you on LinkedIn is that few people use more paragraphs than you do.”

→ An accurate observation. More paragraphs in a text lead to – you guessed it – chunks that are more easily digestible. Just like you break up a phone number into chunks. 

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