Easy as Riding a Bike

You know what happens when you hold a cup under a running tap. It fills with water, right? What happens if you leave it there? It overflows, doesn’t it?

The same is true of your brain when you’re trying to learn something. If you are trying to fill it with too many things at once, it will overflow.

Like the cup, it will keep some of the things you’ve learned. Everything else will spill over and be lost down the sink.

Brain scientists call it cognitive load. Cog-nit-ive load simply means how much we can hold in our short-term memory. Short-term memories last a few seconds if we don’t do something with them.

Ever been talking to a friend and you think of something cool to say? But right when you’re about to say it, you forget what it was? That’s cognitive load.

Short-term memory can hold about 10 things at once. That number shrinks if you’re learning something new. It goes away entirely if you get distracted and miss something.

The good news? Just one of those things can be huge.

Make a list of all the things you know about riding a bike. Most likely, you’ll list more than ten. That list counts as one item in your short-term memory. Next time, we’ll talk about long-term memory.