Imagine trying to fill a water bottle with a fire hose at full pressure. Most of the water would spill out, and the bottle would still be half empty. Something very similar happens in our brains when we try to learn by rote memorization, which is why we’ve all found ourselves reading a text over and over again without being able to retain anything.

Faced with these kinds of situations, we often believe that spending more time studying or increasing our study materials will improve our understanding. But this quantitative approach is rarely effective, because the human brain doesn’t learn by accumulation, but by integration. In other words, in learning, less is more.

Why does this happen, and what is its relationship to the concept of “cognitive load”?

Cognitive load and working memory

Cognitive load is the mental effort we exert to process new information. It has two components: intrinsic, which is the inherent difficulty of the subject matter; and extrinsic. The latter can be “bad” or ineffective when mental effort is wasted due to excessive stimuli, irrelevant information, confusing explanations, or redundant content; or adequate when mental effort is optimal for selecting new information, processing it, and relating it to previously learned knowledge.

To learn, the ideal is to reduce the extrinsic load and modulate the intrinsic load, to leave space in the place where learning is processed to pass into memory: working memory.

Our “RAM” can only hold between 5 and 9 elements

Working memory is the processor or RAM of our brain; that is, the ability to retain and manipulate information for a short period of time. The problem is that its capacity is very limited, only able to hold between 5 and 9 items. So much so that if we exceed this capacity, if we are suddenly bombarded with more information than our brain can process, it will simply be lost.

So our ability to learn depends on using our working memory efficiently. In fact, we know that working memory is predictive of academic performance , especially in reading and math, and that it increases with training.

How to improve working memory?

Teachers can contribute to the development of working memory by improving the design of their teaching practices. Intrinsic workload is obviously unavoidable; we cannot eliminate it, but we can reduce it, for example, by segmenting information from simple to complex.

Extrinsic burden, however, does depend primarily on us. Some simple actions to reduce it are:

• Eliminate unnecessary distractions, such as excessive animations in a presentation or poorly designed gamification.
• Create visual or linguistic narratives that guide attention to what is essential.
• If different materials are provided for the same content (presentation, videos, texts), guide students to select the one that stimulates them the most, so as not to fall into redundancy or saturate working memory.
• Avoid redundancy in presentations as well. If an image or graphic is self-explanatory, adding text not only doesn’t help, but actually hinders, because it forces the user to process two sources of information.
• Regarding the activities, make sure to provide the necessary steps to be able to carry them out clearly.
• When using examples, show the reasoning step by step in the first ones, and let them reason it out on their own in the following ones.
• Applying scaffolding to tasks means providing support at the beginning and gradually withdrawing it as students gain autonomy.

A strong brain that works less

One of the most intuitive assumptions is that a “stronger” brain should show more activity, like a flexing muscle. However, neuroscience reveals the opposite. Working memory training leads to decreased activation in key brain regions, especially the frontoparietal network, which is crucial for executive functions.

Just as an experienced athlete uses less energy and performs more fluid and economical movements to execute an action compared to a beginner, as the brain becomes more skilled at a task, it needs to recruit fewer neural resources to achieve the same or even better performance.

How to improve performance?

When we study, the time we invest and the type of task we use are fundamental to achieving maximum brain performance. Evidence suggests that studying for a couple of hours a day for several weeks is more effective than studying for many consecutive hours on the same day.

Regarding the tasks performed for learning, maintenance tasks (such as rereading or recalling a list of items) have limited neural effects. However, updating tasks (those involving thinking), which constantly challenge the brain to manipulate information and not just retain it, are most consistently associated with increased activity in brain regions key to learning and reward.

Some tasks of this type are:

• Changing formats: converting text into a diagram or drawing, or turning a graphic into a verbal explanation, forces you to mentally reorganize the content.
• Explain to someone what you remember or record an audio of the explanation, and then review and correct it.
• Perform self-assessment tests and rewrite the answer, correcting and adjusting the reasoning.
• Alternate slightly different exercises on the same topic, so that each exercise requires adapting what was already known.
• Update outlines by summarizing a concept and then reviewing it to add any missing key ideas.
• Practice the “two-back” technique. That is, while reading a list of steps or terms, stop and explain the link between the current concept and the one that appeared two positions earlier.

Effective learning isn’t about having more discipline or pushing our brains beyond their limits, but about being smarter in how we present information to our brains. It’s about understanding and respecting the cognitive architecture we all operate with to minimize wasted effort and maximize deep learning.

By reducing unnecessary burden, managing time better, and using more stimulating strategies, we can create a much more efficient, effective, and less frustrating learning path.

Author Bio: Noelia Valle is Professor of Physiology, Creator of Noah’s Blackboard at Francisco de Vitoria University