Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining our fight for focus

t seems ages since we started referring to life in these “uncertain times”. For months now, our routines have been disrupted and we’ve been forced to adapt. Anecdotally, one major consequence is a state of mental fatigue. It feels hard to concentrate for any length of time, as if we’re in a collective state of near-constant distraction. 

“It felt like I had a mental block preventing me from focusing on the page,” says writer and book lover Sophie Vershbow, who captured the mood early in the pandemic when her tweet about “not being able to concentrate enough to read a book” was liked more than 2,000 times. She’s not alone; do a quick search and you’ll find an avalanche of articles on people who can’t concentrate, the prevalence of ‘brain fog’ and different ways to ‘hack your concentration’.   

Of course, much of this subjective feeling of mental distraction comes down to the practicalities of life now. For many people, most notably working parents, the sudden switch to home working has meant an intensification of work/life conflict; it’s tricky to focus on a spreadsheet as your kids wrestle for the TV remote control. But it feels like there’s more to it than that. Even when work is finished for the day and the kids are in bed, it’s hard to find any focus to escape into a novel or box-set. 

There’s a psychological theory, originally applied in the context of learning, that might help explain why living in the age of Covid-19 may have turned our minds to soup. It’s called Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), and it was first developed by the Australian educational psychologist John Sweller. Put simply, CLT characterises our minds as information processing systems. When we’re working on a problem, especially an unfamiliar one, we depend on our “working memory”, which is very limited both in its capacity and the length of time it holds information. The less familiar you are with a task, the more you depend on your working memory to help juggle the relevant information; in contrast, when you’re an expert, most of what you need to know is stored in long-term memory and you can complete the task on auto-pilot.