# Chunking The most common way that people organize information is to group related concepts into topics. By grouping related information, you reduce the [[Cognitive load]] required to keep track of individual items. The psychological term for this is called chunking and it is something that the brain is naturally good at. Even unconsciously, we will create associations between things. This process is so powerful that we now have [[Unconscious bias training]] to **train ourselves not to do this** when it results in discriminatory behavior. The problem with chunking is that it cannot keep up with the sheer amount of information we deal with today If you try to group all the information into chunks, one of two things will happen You have too many chunks and keeping track of chunks becomes overwhelming You have a few chunks with too many things in them which causes you to lose the benefits of chunking in the first place The solution to too many chunks is indirection When the complexity of information becomes too much at one level, we simplify it with a layer of indirection that pushes the bulk of the complexity to a new level For information, this means creating hierarchies to group related chunks. We can keep doing this until the number of chunks at any given level of the hierarchy becomes manageable. At this point, our data starts to take the shape of a tree. [[All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection]] ## References - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)