Transcript

I'd like you to experience heavy cognitive load, so you know what the term means. So we're going to do a little scientific task, and I'm going to put some colors on the screen. Now, it's very important that you each speak out loud and say the colors from left to right as fast as you can so we're not doing it in unison. It's like a race. It's a fluency task. See how fast you can. Name the colors out loud, left to right. Now, there's a little catch. You can't read any words, okay? So if the word red is written in blue, what are you going to say? That's right. All right, as fast as you can, let's go faster.

No, no stop. I can't take that anymore. I went to a black screen. That's terrible. It's just your colors, okay, but inhibition takes brain energy as well as activation, and you had to inhibit the reading and activate the color, and that increased the cognitive load. So could you feel the effort? Okay, that's cognitive load. What you felt that exertion? Did you make any mistakes? Right? Would you want to read a whole book that way? Okay, well, now you know what they're going through when they're learning something new, heavy cognitive load, or what your brain is like when you're multitasking. But we won't go into all that.