How does chunking help people hold information in immediate memory?

In the context of cognitive science, chunking is a process that helps individuals overcome the inherent capacity limits of short-term memory.

Human immediate memory is generally limited to holding about seven units of information, plus or minus two, as famously proposed by psychologist George A. Miller. Because this capacity is restricted, the brain struggles to retain long strings of individual items, such as a 10-digit phone number or a long sequence of letters.12

Chunking helps by recoding individual pieces of information into larger, meaningful units or groups. By organizing data based on relationships, function, or hierarchical importance, the brain reduces the total number of units that must be held in memory. For example, rather than remembering a string of 12 digits, one might group them into three familiar dates, effectively using only three "chunks" of memory capacity. This strategy allows people to recall significantly more information than they could if the items remained as separate, unorganized units.3451