On Chunking:

"chess masters do not deal with the individual places of the pieces, but with positions, i.e. chunks involving many pieces simultaneously. Thus when pieces are distributed randomly on the chess board, and subjects are allowed to view them for a limited period, chess masters are no better than others at remembering the positions occupied by the pieces. But if the pieces actually illustrate meaningful positions, chess masters produce very much higher scores. To them this is not a meaningless collection of so many different pieces, but the position arrived at after 25 moves in the CapablancaTartakover match of 1925. Thus they have to remember one item, not hundreds, as must the unfortunate novice.
Some 50000 chunks, about the same magnitude as the recognition vocabulary of college-educated readers, may be required for expert mastery of a given field. The highest achievement in scientific disciplines, however, may require a memory store of a million chunks - probably the equivalent of 70 hours of concentrated effort each week for a decade even for a talented student! Without chunking the whole process would be utterly impossible.
Child prodigies and exceptionally early achievers, to quote the title of an interesting book by Radford (1990), seem able to curtail this prodigious expenditure of mental energy; a Mozart, Newton, or Einstein, by combining outstandingly high IQ, special abilities, motivation and creativity may get by with less, and achieve outstanding success at an abnormally early age. But even for them a long period of information acquisition is needed before creativity can emerge to restructure the chunks now available. Because not only do we have to transmute the material in question into chunks, these chunks are themselves tied together with pretty pink ribbons, and the most difficult task of the genius is to undo these ties, and fit the chunks together in a different pattern."

Genius - H. J. Eysenck