And the Magic Number is...

Anything, really, but, if we talk about literature in various forms the answer is ‘three’.

‘Three’ forms the basis of many tales most of which begin in the nursery as rhymes. These are ‘Three Blind Mice’, ‘Three Little Pigs’, etc.

Some appear in more general literature as the famous ‘Three Wise Men’ or the ‘Three Kings’.

If you browse through Shakespeare and Bacon you will find a frequent triumvirate of heroes, victims or villains somewhere.

Sometimes the answer is five. Tolkien liked five. Kipling was obtuse, he liked ‘two’ for some reason although, in ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ he introduced ‘Johnny Ghurka’ as the No. 3 in the group.

Modern stories have three in the title as in ‘The Third Man’ that became a wonderful TV series starring Michael Rennie; Anton Karas played the theme tune on a zither. We were entranced by that tune and enthralled at anyone’s ability to play such an instrument!

Nowadays the writers are aware of this ‘Magic Number’ and so they have forced themselves away from it. A shame. Three is such a wonderful number to play with in writing.

It is enough to promote interest but not so many as to overwhelm the reader.

Five, you will note, is also a Prime Number. This makes it valuable as a magic number. It is also the number of points on a pentagram that is widely used in horror stories.

I used it in the story ‘Seventy Two’ because it was comfortable having a circle divided up into five angles of seventy-two degrees between each arc of separation. It was also convenient to construct the ending, the ending required five names to coincide with one each of the five vowels in the English language.

Other numbers have been used with varying degrees of success. We are all, no doubt, aware of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’. ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ being a compound of four but, added to Ali Baba himself we have five as the magic number—hidden, perhaps, but there nonetheless.

All these things are constructs. Every one of them. Very little in real life has ‘three’ in it except some plants (and their seeds) are trilobed. Nothing about the human person or most mammalian forms suggests three.

There are exceptions. The Three Toed Sloths spring to mind and, perhaps the parietal eye found in some lizards and other reptiles.

In any case, feet don’t count unless you are dealing with numbers above ten.

[That last was a joke, by the way. I do, in spite of what some people may say, have a sense of humour. It may be regarded as juvenile and tasteless but it is, nevertheless, humour.]

Are there any ‘Magic Numbers’ in real life?

It can be argued that ‘Seven’ is just such a number.

Why?

Many years ago, in 1956, cognitive psychology was in its infancy—and when is it not, I hear you say? Well, in that year George Miller published a journal that was developed from a presentation at a conference. George Miller had a great sense of humour, his presentation began with a humorous discourse on how he had been ‘persecuted’ by the number ‘Seven’. But, more seriously, he proposed three types of memory (remember we are talking about ‘Cognitive Psychology’ here?) in which the number ‘Seven’ plays an important role.

They are:

Immediate Memory. This is an exercise in which people can retell a series of words or digits precisely as told to them providing that the number does not rise above seven separate items. George Miller himself modified this to the notion of ‘The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two’ because different people have different mental abilities or capacities.

Absolute Judgement. A single stimulus to one of the senses has to be identified correctly in a succession of stimuli. This will be done in rapid succession, delays of more than (roughly) two seconds will cause the short-term memory to reject the input. This can only be achieved in a limit of seven stimuli inputs. For example, you may be required to identify the note ‘Middle C’ in a succession of notes but you will only be able to pick it out from a succession of seven notes or less.

Span of Attention.  How many people can you count in a crowd scene? Two? Easy. Twelve? Tough. You will lose track of the ones you have already counted especially if they are moving around. Some ‘primitive’ tribes have no numbers above seven because this is the limit of the items they can count in one scan, anything larger than that is called ‘a lot’!

Mysteriously, George Miller ends his discourse with this, “What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory?

Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all of these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it.  But I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.”

Told you George had a sense of humour, did I not?

Marketing people and those in the advertising ‘trade’ use this quite deliberately. They will not give you too much information in one go because your attention span will reject it, you will not remember it and that makes their message to you to buy this product irrelevant.

That makes ‘Seven’ a magic number.

Some of you may remember an advertisement for ‘Jaguar’ cars. It just said this:

GRACE

SPACE

PACE

That’s all. In the bottom corner was a small ‘Leaping Jaguar’ logo.

Three words.

It was enough.

The ‘Magic Number’.

Three.