VIDEO
Even though our
reward this kind of
, even though they make us
crave information, they're
actually not very good at
with the intensity and the quantity and the speed we find ourselves
today. And the reason is that our
working memory has a very small capacity. Working memory is essentially the
contents of your
at any given moment. What you're
aware of is in your working memory, what you're not
is not in your working memory. And you probably remember
at least the title of a famous paper that came out I think in the 1950s, it was called I think the magical number 7 and the
of it said that it looked like we could
in our working memory, in our consciousness, around 7 pieces of information
, and that was the maximum, and the
thrust of his paper was you know, this is a very small
store of information, and
we found that actually that's an
, that our working memory probably can only hold somewhere between 2 & 4 pieces of information at any given time, and when we
too much information at once, what happens inevitably, is that we start having this
where things are coming into and out of our working memory, out, into and out of our consciousness really really quickly, because
you take in a new bit of information
whatever screen you happen to be looking at, some other piece of information of your working memory has to leave, has to exit
for the new piece of information, and when this happens, and
, particularly
, have been studying this, particularly this
, particularly
as it relates to education, for a long time is you suffer quite literally
. You're overloading your mind, you're overloading your working memory and when that happens, you're never paying
to anything, you're never
on one thing, for an extended period of time, and unfortunately, there are all sorts of important intellectual
processes that as a result
, they never happen because they
us not to take in constant information, but to
information and to
.