On July 22, at the age of 92, George A. Miller, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, died. In Latin America, where psychoanalysis is the dominant current, this news went unnoticed and it seemed unfair to me that he was not paid tribute to one of the founders of cognitive psychology and pioneer of neuropsychological research. It is not my objective to publish an extensive biography of Dr. Miller, but rather to expose what his main discoveries were and thus contribute to the knowledge of psychologists who are ignorant of this branch of research.
Who was George A. Miller?
Dr. Miller was born on February 3, 1920 and, in the mid-1950s, he revolutionized the world of psychology by demonstrating through his studies that the human mind, although invisible, can be observed and demonstrated in the world. laboratory. His famous research: “The magical number seven, plus or minus two”, established a new conception of thinking and opened a new field of research, known as cognitive psychology.
The word “cognitive”, considered taboo by behaviorists, marked a break against the behaviorism establishment.
In 1955 the dominant current in the US was behaviorism. This current of psychology had rejected Freud’s theories about the mind as being very intangible, unprovable and vaguely mystical. Instead of studying the mind, behavioral researchers focused on studying behavior in laboratories, observing and testing subjects’ responses to various stimuli. Dr. Miller had been trained by behaviorism but was the first of many researchers to challenge scientific principles in the early 1950s. Together with his colleague Jerome S. Bruner, they named a new field of research when they established a psychology laboratory, called the Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960.
In 2006 Dr. Miller wrote
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For someone who was raised to respect reductionist science, ‘cognitive science’ made a definitive statement. This meant that he was interested in the mind.
The magical number seven, plus and minus two.
Dr.Miller took one of the test models from computer science to show that the short-term memory of human beings when faced with the unknown, can only memorize about five to nine new things, that is, seven.
When we ask people to repeat a random list of letters, numbers and words, people get stuck around the number seven, Miller said.
Some people can remember up to nine items from a list and some less than seven. Regardless of what was remembered: color-words, numbers with decimals, numbers without decimals, consonants and vowels) seven was the statistical average of short-term memory. While long-term memory is virtually unlimited.
Dr Miller was unable to explain why people can only remember about seven objects. But he speculated that he might have favored the survival of early humans who could only retain little information about many things rather than a lot of information about a small number of things.
The brain is an information processor, with a system that obeys mathematical rules that can be studied. It was his maximum conclusion and served as the foundation for cognitive science.
Like great scientists, Dr. Miller became interested in a phenomenon and then simply jumped in to try to illuminate the problem. He helped create the field of cognitive neuroscience in the late 1980s. “He was exceptionally generous,” said Michael Gazzaniga, a renowned cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of California.
Other contributions.
In addition to conducting research on memory, Dr. Miller was also interested in other areas of psychology. His first book, Language and Communication (1951), is widely considered the foundational work of psycholinguistics (the study of how people learn, use, and invent language). He also collaborated with the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky in various investigations on the mathematics of language and computational problems for the interpretation of syntax. He also conducted some of the first experiments on how people understand words and sentences, which became the basis of computerized speech recognition technology. In 1960 he published, together with Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribram, “Plan and Structure of Behavior,” which was the first attempt to synthesize artificial intelligence research with psychological research on how human beings initiate an action. . Some say the point of this book was about how to build a better robot. And in 1986 he oversaw the development of Wordnet, an electronic data center that attempted to help computers understand language.
“George Miller deserves more credit than anyone for the existence of modern science of mind and was undoubtedly one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century,” said renowned Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker.
George Miller’s research is an example of the novel contributions that psychology can offer and that we can break against the mainstream and develop useful and novel research. But to achieve this, we must encourage more and new research, instead of getting stuck repeating and repeating in an almost dogmatic way what some psychologists maintained in the past. Let us remember that psychology is a science and therefore we must investigate and revolutionize.
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