"Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers— 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 —right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds."
- Malcolm Gladwell [born 1963], Outliers: The Story of Success, pp. 227-228
An earlier reference to Gladwell here.
