Want to learn faster? Reduce cognitive load

Hi.

Today I'm gonna talk about cognitive load theory or cognitive overload, which is

uh, a new theory on learning, about how the sort of intrinsic or even extraneous

difficulty of a learning task impacts our ability to learn, to remember,

to retrieve information and so forth.

And I want to give you my perspective on this because I think it's quite

interesting and it kind of touches on something that I've talked about before.

In its essence, I feel that cognitive load theory is about how do you make the task

easier, essentially, and the way you make a learning task easier as it applies to

languages, is to activate prior knowledge.

In other words, if you can learn something that you kind of in a way already know,

it's gonna be easier to learn that.

And if it's easier, you're gonna be happier and more satisfied,

uh, with the learning process and you'll probably stay with the task.

I've often said that language learning is a sort of a reiterative

or an iterative process.

You learn it once, you forget, you go back again.

I've used the metaphor of my lawnmower,

where if the grass of my lawn is very high, I will actually set the

blaze a little higher, an inch or so higher so that my first pass

through the grass will be easier.

And then my second pass will also be easier and I'll have the same grass,

but I'll have walked through the lawn twice with a little effort as opposed to

pushing against, uh, much more resistance.

Uh, another example I used is cross-country skiing.

If it's snowing and you're going through tracks that have already been

made by a skier ahead of you, even if more snow has fallen on these tracks,

you're now gliding more easily.

It's more comfortable.

You're moving faster, and so you're also taking advantage of

in a way, prior work or prior knowledge.

Again, I think a lot of these education experts have a tendency to overcomplicate

things, so they talk about the effect of, uh, cognitive overload on your short term

memory or working memory and retrieving, and those are a lot of details that I

don't fully understand, but I can use my brain without knowing these things.

If I have a, a learning system and process that works, I don't need to know in great

detail how that all functions in my brain.

I don't need to know how my car works in order to drive my car.

So one of the things that I have found is that prior knowledge, in other words, my