““Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long-term memory. If you didn’t know the dates of Pearl Harbor or September 11, you’d never be able to chunk that twelve-digit numerical string. If you spoke Swahili and not English, the nursery rhyme would remain a jumble of letters. In other words, when it comes to chunking—and to our memory more broadly—what we already know determines what we’re able to learn.””
