Chunk It Down

Perhaps the easiest way to conceive of cognitive load theory and intrinsic and extrinsic loads is to use the brain as a muscle analogy. Any muscle has limitations, so how do you pace yourself so you learn efficiently and prevent burnout? There are three elements you can manipulate to make sure your load is manageable: intensity, frequency, and duration.

Intense, difficult learning depletes your units of energy more quickly than easier, simpler learning material. Similarly, your energy is depleted each time you study, and studying more frequently will deplete your reserves more frequently. It’s also true that each minute you study takes a little more energy to keep you going, no matter how easy the material you’re learning might be. Consequently, studying for a long period of time inevitably depletes many of your units of energy.

Intensity, frequency, and duration all have to be managed. You can allot 33 units of energy to each, but this is going to wear you down fast.

Intensity can be determined by the difficulty of your topic, but more often than not, it’s just about how much effort you have to expend in a given hour. Reading is not so intense, while a practice test is very intense. You can also use this to measure your expectations—if you want to just get by, it will not be so intense, but if you want perfection, expect to expend more effort. Lowering your expectations lowers your stress level and makes the study session less draining.

Frequency of study is the second factor you need to consider when setting expectations for your progress. Each time you study will drain your energy a little bit, and the more difficult the topic is, the more quickly it will drain your reserves each time. If you aim to study during every bit of downtime you have, it ends up being too much of a good thing, because your brain might not get the downtime it needs to integrate your new knowledge and, of course, the space it needs. Our brains need rest to function! If you feel worn out and unable to think at any point, you might be studying too frequently! and should slow down a bit.

As for duration? Well, we already know how lacking our attention spans are, so how much focus should you really put on this? Not much, it turns out.

So for instance, if you focus on only intensity and frequency, intense study sessions every day will allow your mind and body to rest and properly synthesize. If you want to crank up the duration of your sessions, it either needs to be less intense or less frequent—two hours every three days, for instance. Leave your brain the room it needs, and the results you want will follow.

You might be dedicated, but your brain can’t match it. It’s essential to remember this when managing your own studying and to take it into account when scheduling your own sessions. to studying that subject. The longer you study in a single session, the more time you will need between sessions to ensure complete processing and absorption of what you’re studying. You can combine intensity, duration, or frequency, but never all three. Learn smarter, not harder.

Chunk It Down

Another way to reduce the load on our brains is to “chunk” information. Chunking is a simple concept: if you have 10 items and you chunk them together to make two groups of five, your brain can absorb them as fewer items, even though the total information is roughly the same. You spend less energy on recall, your cognitive load goes down—and this means you have more available to push yourself, if you want to. And in fact, this is essentially what the third element of the cognitive load theory is about—the germane load.

Chunking can improve your capacity for clear and accurate perception of the data coming through your senses, and it is a smart way to work around the limits of just how much your brain can process. In fact, many people who are naturally adept at developing expertise and learning complex topics may already be unwittingly learning this way, or they at least have taught themselves how. When you were first learning to read, you did the same thing. You realized that all the individual letters came together to form new chunks—words. You learned the letters first, then put them together into chunks. As you became more familiar with the words, you realized that they themselves could be grouped together into chunks—sentences. And sentences could make whole stories.

In each case, the chunked group from the previous level becomes the fundamental unit for the next level. Fluent readers no longer focus on each individual letter or even individual words. When you read these sentences right here, your brain is not massively overworked with the cognitive load of processing each and every letter—even though you found this incredibly difficult at one point. The idea is that experts in any field can use the same process to develop supreme efficiency at any task, including memory.

To the casual observer it may seem like they’re performing a miraculous feat by juggling countless details, but really, they have only constructed elaborate hierarchies of chunked information, which means that they’re not overtaxing their mental capacities at all. With time, real experts seemingly spend no effort at all on their mastery, even describing it as intuitive or unconscious.

So theoretically, anyone can reach virtuoso level if they understand this process and commit to the hours of practice needed to lay down each of those building blocks over and over. You need to understand the building blocks you’re working with and how they’re connected. Then you need to practice or drill these chunks until they become automatic.

Chunking certainly reduces cognitive load, but the act of thinking through how you are going to chunk also helps information synthesis and retention—it’s most often thought of for retention, in fact. It’s pretty neat. Let’s look at some concrete ways you can use chunking in your own life and in learning.

The easiest and most obvious way to use chunking is to transform X amount of information into

Categorization: You can use the same strategy for things such as shopping lists, such as by categorizing the items by use, dish, or type of food. A list of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, ground beef, soy sauce, wasabi, raw fish, and ginger has eight elements, but in reality, there are two obvious categories: pasta sauce and sushi.

Pattern-seeking: To use patterns in chunking, you are finding or imposing a rule that applies to everything in the information you want to reduce the load for. This would also even allow you to predict what may arise in the future regarding this information set.

Chunking is a much deeper rabbit hole, however. Recall that chunking essentially works by reducing memory load, and another way to do this is to replace short-term memory items with long-term memory ones.