Nicholas Carr's Essay On Cognitive Overload

Not just black and white: Cognitive Overload In Nicholas Carr’s article Cognitive Load he theorizes that the brain can only retain so much information before it becomes too much. Carr infers that everyone has a mental capacity and once it is expended trying to learn more information becomes pointless. Carr calls this cognitive overload, when the brain exceeds the capacity of working memory. However, Carr says that cognitive overload is manageable once we become aware of how it works and how to compensate for it. I do believe everyone could have mental lapses and forget where they were going or what they were doing, I myself have found it a very common experience throughout the day. Although I agree with Carr’s claim that everyone has cognitive overload at one point or another, I do not agree that everyone has the same mental capacity. If people can have a variation of intellectual capabilities who’s to say that they can’t have a variation of cognitive load capabilities? Carr’s article introduces cognitive overload as a casual, normal, reoccurring element in everyday life, describing a working memory as the mind’s temporary information store. He talks …show more content…
He makes great tips on how to manage it, and it’s especially helpful if you are a first year undergraduate student. It essentially gives an idea on how to study and how to reduce the feelings of absentmindedness while increasing the information that is transferred from the short-term memory into the long-term memory. Managing cognitive overload is definitely a key to success. However, Carr’s ideas on cognitive overload suggest that everyone has the same maximum capacity for how much information that they can hold in their working memory. This is not the case, though, due to the fact that not every single person’s brain is alike. In order for this to be true everyone’s metal processing would have to be the