Define Memory and discuss how Miller's Law and Hick's Law allow us to " ethically manipulate memory"

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Memory is stored data. In our case, our brain is encoding everything it sense from the outside world through electrical impulses.
Those notions are then accessed when most needed, as the organism utilize them to survive.

Memory is required to adapt to different environmental changes and helped us and many organisms to arrive this far in the evolution process.
Usually there are 2 kind of memories involved in our brain’s functionality: short term memory and long term memory.

STM is a fast memory which stores immediate information that our body observed in the last 15/20 seconds. This memory is useful to the organism to avoid loosing important information before is even analysed, and to perform common tasks smoothly.

LTM can hold an undefined amount of data for an illimited amount of time. This is achieved through connection of our neurons at a biological level, and since is a long and expensive process, our body use it for the most important information.

Miller and Hick’s laws are very useful observation about short term memory, that help us designing efficient elements:
 - Miller’s law states that our STM has a limited amount of storage, measuring it in chunks of simple notions, such as colours, words, digits and so on. He observed that the average amount of this chunks that we remember within a short amount of time is from 2 to 7.
 - Hick’s law states that the more elements are presented to our brain, the more time it will take to make that decision, and there will be less chances of success.
For us UX designer, we can use this laws to create a smooth experience for everyone, separating information in chunks and avoiding exceeding with the amount of them on screen.

We also know that our interface needs to convey information quickly and simply, as the STM is short, and usually those interfaces are used only once (no LTM involved).

This methods help us guiding users towards their experience without active effort involved, and help them making the best decisions in their best interests. For example, having sections with titles over a long list of links, help them searching their interest without having to scan through all the links, but just simply remembering the category of the element needed, and search through a much more limited list, easing the final decision.