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Comment by isitthough42 | Hacker News Reader

This is simply answered by https://www.google.com/search?q=925+8642+37654+627418

The first page results would have answered it already - better than the stackexchange answers quoting random slides:

    925
    8642
    37654
    627418
    0401473
    19223530
    486854332
    2531971768
    85129619450
    918546942937
    Figure 1: Digit Memory Test by Howard (1983, in Bernstein et al., 2008:215).

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Funnily enough, your comment is now the top search result for that query....

Is there a name for this phenomenon, yet? When a comment about an obscure search query becomes the top result of the query.

It's named after the parent user, and is called the "isitthough42 effect".

You can Google that term soon enough.

It worked! :D

Googlewhack[0] might be a close one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack

"Essentials of Psychology" Douglas A. Bernstein, Peggy W. Nash which is on the net has it (spaced out - "9 2 5")

They reference Howard which doesn't seem to be 'available'

Here is a test of your immediate memory span (Howard, 1983). Ask someone to read to you the numbers in the top row at the rate of about one per second; then try to repeat them back in the same order. Then try the next row, and the one after that, until you make a mistake. Your immediate memory span is the maximum number of items you can repeat back perfectly.

[can't edit above] Just a confirmation it's in Howard 1983 through Google Books.

But you have to search on the first number of each line "9836014289" because it's a table. This is why the books don't come up directly in search.

Also you can't 'see' it, you just know it's there -

https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=ho8QAQAAIAAJ&f...

Happy to report the full book can be borrowed on the Internet Archive. This can be found on page 92, as indicated in your link.

https://archive.org/details/cognitivepsychol00howa

Whoa. Did this exact test in '95.

They made a point of this being your memory span, but it's definitely something which can be trained. This is something we would do as part of (professional) language transcription/translation, just recording mass amounts of numbers, because those tend to be important.

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