If the rule gives rise to action, that's enough. You don't need a supernatural reason for adopting a personal rule to contact seven of your friends each week, or tick seven items off your to-do list each day. But arbitrary rules, providing they're recognised for what they are, can be some of the best.
#MAGIC NUMBER 7 FULL#
Her various lists of seven – ways to live simply, ways to eat healthily and so on, which are full of good ideas – could just as easily be nine or 15 items long, but then you wouldn't remember them.Īs self-help prescriptions go, using seven to govern your life seems comically arbitrary.
Leo calls it "a natural brain filter", particularly crucial in an era of information onslaught.
Seven does, in a sense, structure the way we encounter the world. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals." One of his conclusions is that seven – or rather seven-ish, as his title suggests – is the largest number of items, such as numbers or words, that the average person can retain in short-term memory. But from this extensive testing that could well be a fallacy. We’re told that putting a 7 at the end of our prices will magically increase our response, conversion and profits. "My problem," Miller wrote, "is that I have been persecuted by an integer. From all the marketing books I’ve read over the last 5 years and I read a lot, between 1 and 3 books a week, we’re all led to believe in the magic number ‘7’.
#MAGIC NUMBER 7 PLUS#
And she marshals a sliver of bona fide psychological research to bolster her case: George Miller's classic 1956 paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity For Processing Information. Even imaginary significance exerts an influence if enough people believe it, and Leo shows that cultures and religions from Mesopotamia to Hinduism to Christianity have all found the number deeply meaningful. While reading her book, I happened to glance at my watch, and – oh my God, this is so spooky – there was a number seven on it, right between the six and the eight!īut I'm being unfair.
#MAGIC NUMBER 7 MOVIE#
Leo even chucks in 7Up, the movie Seven, and the seven members of a water polo team. If the single digit comes out to be 1,then the number is a magic number. Start looking, and you'll find it everywhere: seven seas, seven days of the week, seven deadly sins, seven dwarves, Shakespeare's seven ages of man, the seven natural notes in an octave. A number is said to be a magic number, if the sum of its digits are calculated till a single digit recursively by adding the sum of the digits after every addition. 3, by contrast, is used to indicate a progression within similar things. The same is the case for the magnificent 7. The numerological fixation with seven, of course, is largely a matter of confirmation bias. 7 is used to indicate individuality within a larger group, so the seven dwarves, as you indicate above, all have unique qualities that make each one special.
0 kommentar(er)
