Essential Knowledge - Cognitive Load

Cognitive Load

But why do we get a headache? Back in the 1950's, a professor of Psychology named George Miller observed that the average human being could retain seven items in short term memory, plus or minus two items. When we work with ideas or concept in any sort of analytical thinking, we run up against this limitation again and again.

John Sweller, a professor of Education, came up with the idea of cognitive load in the late 1980's. The basic idea was that your ability to learn and problem solve was limited by your short term memory. If a particular learning task required keeping track of many concept at the same time, it is said to have a high cognitive load and as a result you don't learn as well or as easily. In fact, in analytical tasks like doing complex arithmetic, it can increase the rate at which you make errors. There's a whole body of literature on cognitive load, cognitive stress, etc. Applied to our example of web application development, we see that juggling all of those different concepts in different programming and markup languages and runtime environments in our head, creates a high cognitive load, increases our error rate and impedes our ability to problem solve.

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To deal with such problem - you need a doctor !!