Simon Says and the Limits of Working Memory

Play Simon Says ten times in a row and you will notice something odd. Almost every game ends somewhere between round 8 and round 11. Not because the sequences get faster, not because you panic, but because the human brain runs into a hard limit that psychologists have been studying since the 1950s.

Miller's magic number

In 1956, Princeton psychologist George Miller published what became one of the most-cited papers in psychology, titled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller argued that human working memory — the temporary mental scratchpad we use to hold information during active thought — tops out at about seven independent items, give or take two. That is roughly the length of a local phone number.

Later research refined the number downward. Nelson Cowan's influential 2001 paper argued that without any memory tricks, the real limit is closer to four items for most adults. Seven is achievable only when people unconsciously chunk items into groups. Four is the raw capacity.

Why round 9 is the natural ceiling

In Simon, each round's sequence is one item longer than the last. By round 4 you are holding four colors in mind. By round 8 you are holding eight. That is right at Miller's upper boundary. By round 10 or 11 you are past it, and the sequences start to blur into one indistinct blob unless you do something clever.

Raw working memory maxes out around four items. The extra capacity we think we have, up to seven or eight, comes entirely from chunking. Learn to chunk and you can nearly double your Simon score.

Three tricks that push past the limit

1. Chunk by pairs or triples. Instead of remembering "red, red, green, blue, yellow, yellow, red," remember "red-red, green-blue, yellow-yellow, red." Three chunks instead of seven.
2. Create a narrative. Imagine red = apple, green = grass, blue = sky, yellow = sun. Then picture a sentence: "apple on grass, sky over sun" becomes a mini-story you can replay.
3. Use spatial imagination. Each color has a position (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right). Imagine your finger tracing a path between positions. Spatial memory has its own separate capacity and can supplement working memory.

Why you cannot just "practice harder"

Brain-training research consistently shows that capacity limits are largely fixed. You cannot practice working memory into a bigger container. What you can practice is using the container more efficiently: better chunking strategies, better spatial techniques, better narrative devices. A skilled player with one of those techniques can reach round 15 or beyond. An unskilled player pushing harder almost never breaks round 10.

What Simon teaches about real life

The Simon ceiling is actually informative about everyday situations. It explains why reading out a ten-digit number once and expecting someone to dial it is unrealistic, why checklists beat memorization in aviation, and why phone numbers in the United States are structured in three chunks (XXX-XXX-XXXX) rather than one long string.

Try our Simon Says game and pay attention to which round you hit. If you find yourself reaching round 12 or beyond consistently, you are almost certainly using chunking without realizing it.