Cognitive Load
The Flow Research Collective distributed the following article in February 2024.
As we explore team topologies and explore together how the cognitive complexity of workflow design can be an inhibitor to getting teams in flow and driving productivity, the concepts and metaphors in this article offer an easy way to get your head around the main ideas!
Throughout the ages, a subtle thread has woven its way through the lives
of the world’s highest performers.
It’s a pattern that has shaped the destinies of everyone from warriors, artists, Olympians, surfers, and business leaders. This often-overlooked pattern has played a key role in their remarkable achievements.
Take for example the legendary Spartans, whose rigorous military discipline and frugal lifestyle were the bedrock of their strength. They owned little, focusing instead on the mastery of their martial skills. With minimal resources, a few hundred Spartans held off thousands of Persian soldiers at Thermopylae, demonstrating exceptional military efficiency and endurance.
Or consider Stoics, like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, who eschewed the trappings
of wealth in favor of a life centered around inner virtue and simplicity. Their philosophy allowed them to maintain composure and effective decision-making even in the face of extreme stress and adversity. Aurelius, for instance, successfully led Rome through multiple crises, including war and plague, guided by his stoic principles—principles that have survived since 300 BCE.
These examples might suggest a rejection of material wealth or a life of asceticism. But that’s not quite it. It’s something more profound, more intentional. Across wildly differing contexts and cultures, there’s a unifying pattern among these peak performers: the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it. It’s not about deprivation… but radically excluding everything except the essential.
Of course, it’s not the sole key to the success of history’s greats, but rather, a recurring pattern that has contributed to and allowed them to channel their energies and talents most effectively.
Contrast this approach with what the average knowledge worker deals with every day.
You probably know how this goes… You go to get dressed in the morning, searching for your favorite shirt, but it’s lost in the chaos of your cluttered closet. Clothes pile upon clothes, some rarely worn, yet they all jostle for space and attention.
You check the laundry room and pull your jeans out of the dryer, only to discover they’ve shrunk. They were just right, and now they’re too tight—in all the wrong places.
As you pack your bag for work, trying to find your charger, you rummage through drawers, moving aside gadgets you don’t use, cables you don’t recognize, and miscellaneous items that somehow found their way there. You go to make coffee, forgetting that you lent the electric kettle to a friend… only you can’t remember who you lent it to. Damn.
You head toward the door to commute to work and spot a pile of boxes—stuff you ordered online on impulse. Each unopened box is a task pending, a decision delayed.
You slice one open with your keys but see the item doesn’t work as expected, and now
it has to be returned.
…You get the drill.
All of this “thinking about things” is part of the cost of ownership. Possessions get lost, or damaged, or have to be returned or maintained, or become an obstacle between you and some other more important target of your attention. This degrades our performance and impairs our creativity and cognition. This cost of ownership is a consequence of how our brains are wired. It’s a double-edged sword where we’re hardcoded to crave and collect possessions and also hardcoded to get bogged down by the possessions we crave and collect.
In the 1960s, a significant discovery about human memory emerged from the work of George Miller, a psychologist at Harvard University. His research identified that the average number of objects an individual can hold in short-term memory is around seven, give or take two.
Building on Miller’s foundational work, John Sweller, psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales, delved deeper into how our cognitive system handles information.
Cognitive load refers to the amount of information we’re holding in working memory at any given time.
These neural dynamics can be likened to a computer under a heavy load. You know when you’re using your computer, and it starts to stall? You’re writing an email, and the text appears several seconds after you type it. Websites take longer to load. You get the dreaded “pinwheel of death.”
Well, this happens to our brains too. Figuratively, your brain has a finite amount of RAM—working memory. The higher the cognitive load, the more RAM is used up. Your brain gets slower, your ability to learn plummets, and your attention gets whipsawed. You’re left with fewer attentional resources—such as focus and creativity—to devote to your priorities.
Each neuron in the brain, part of a vast network of about 86 billion, can form thousands of synaptic connections. However, there is a limit to how many connections can be active simultaneously, constraining how much information can be processed at a given time. It’s like a vast network of roads in a city; too much traffic, and everything slows to a crawl. In the case of neurons, this traffic is the electrical and chemical signals they use to communicate.
Minimalism also removes friction, which is the invisible enemy between you and peak performance. You no longer waste time searching for, untangling, or organizing stuff.
These signals are facilitated by neurotransmitters, such as glutamate and GABA, which act as the vehicles moving along these neural pathways.
Glutamate typically excites neuronal activity, while GABA inhibits it, creating a delicate balance essential for efficient brain function. However, there’s only so much neurotransmitter ‘traffic’a neuron can handle before the signals start to get jammed, akin to a traffic bottleneck on a busy road.
The prefrontal cortex, a key player in working memory, also has its limits. It functions like a sophisticated command center, managing various cognitive tasks. However, its resources are finite. When we overburden it with information, akin to overloading a command center with too much data, its efficiency diminishes. We struggle to concentrate, remember, and make decisions.
Then, our brain’s energy demands, primarily for glucose and oxygen, add another layer of constraint. The brain, despite constituting only about 2% of the body’s mass, consumes around 20% of its energy. This high energy requirement means that there is a threshold to how much information processing the brain can sustain before its performance starts to decline.
All of these neurological limitations may have played a key role in our survival and evolution: The ability to quickly process a few relevant pieces of information (like threats or resources) was more adaptive than the ability to process a large amount of information slowly.
These factors combined—neuronal traffic, neurotransmitter balance, prefrontal cortex capacity, and energy demands—create a threshold for cognitive load. Exceed this threshold, and our cognitive functions, like learning, attention, and problem-solving, start to falter.
And here’s the problem:
Every misplaced shirt or jeans, every borrowed item not returned properly unnecessarily increases cognitive load; a constant background of noise, irrelevant to your goals, overloading your attention. Conversely, the lower the cognitive load, the easier it is to get into a flow state—that optimal state of consciousness where we feel and function at our best.
Flow can only arise when all of our attention is focused on the present moment. That’s what flow triggers do: Neurologically, they increase focusing chemicals—such as dopamine and norepinephrine—or they reduce cognitive load.
But here’s the thing… possessions can actively block Flow from happening. For every possession you own, some increment of your attention is captured. Each possession represents a piece of information the brain needs to process—requiring attentional resources for recognition, categorization, and decision-making, thereby contributing to the cognitive load. And some objects consume more cognitive load than others, based on the cost of the possession, its irreplaceability, how much you identify with it,
its sentimental value or emotional context, resale value, maintenance requirements, and a whole host of other variables.
In a year, this adds up to a staggering 805 hours, or approximately 34 days spent just attending to these possessions. That’s almost a month of continuous, waking attention dedicated solely to a handful of items.
But here’s the thing:
The average knowledge worker has way more possessions than a pair of pants, an iPad, a watch, and a boat or house. The average number of possessions in a typical American household is often cited as 300,000 items. This can’t be empirically validated, but even if the amount is 10,000… there comes a point when your mind is almost completely absorbed by stuff.
Now the question is… what happens if you strip all of the nonessential possessions out—all of that stuff cluttering up your cognition? What happens when you prune the garden of your mind and, like a Samurai warrior, concentrate all of your cognition on your craft, career, and goals?
Well, you get the opposite side of the “cost of ownership:” Freedom from flow.
Every possession that you have is a piece of cognitive load that’s being taken up
and could otherwise be used for flow. Imagine each possession as a tab open in your brain’s browser. Too many open tabs slow down your processing speed. Minimalism closes these tabs, freeing up mental bandwidth. For every physical possession you remove, you reclaim and speed up attentional capacity, and you can channel it into a task and propel yourself into flow.
Minimalism also removes friction, which is the invisible enemy between you and peak performance. You no longer waste time searching for, untangling, or organizing stuff.
You remove a significant amount of “have to deal with it” hassle, fuss, and stress. Each of these moments of friction is like being pinched—they’re tiny zaps of irritation that spike cortisol, which elevates stress.
In the Journal of Positive Psychology, researcher Joshua Hook of the University of North Texas published a systematic review of the empirical literature on minimalism. One of the findings was the strong link between minimalism and increased intrinsic motivation—including autonomy, mastery, and relatedness. When this happens, you engage in activities for their own sake instead of for extrinsic rewards. The higher your intrinsic motivation, the more flow you’ll get.
Thus, minimalism, with its focus on reducing possessions down to only what’s essential to our craft and profession, can increase the frequency, reliability, and depth of flow that we can access.
From there, a bigger, paradoxical transformation takes place that hugely affects your productivity, creativity, and performance…
Perhaps you can relate to this:
Growing up, for my whole life, I fantasized about being able to walk into a shop and buy any clothes I wanted. Or to walk into a jewelry store and buy a $300 watch without a second thought. Or to go into Whole Foods and grab whatever supplements I wanted off the shelf and ring them up without a care.
Now, this might sound silly, but the mere thought of having that kind of money was euphoria-inducing. This extrinsic motivation drove me night and day. I was utterly convinced I would love doing that once I had the means.
The crazy thing is that the shifts I had to make internally to reach the external financial position I fantasized about involved the eradication of the drive to do those external things in the first place.
Because to get the income, I had to go autotelic—enjoying the work for the flow of it, for its own sake. And once I went autotelic, the desire to get another high-quality 3-hour work block trumped, by a million miles, the desire to walk down the high street and buy a supplement or a watch.
It’s like training for a marathon; initially, you might aim for the prestige of finishing, but along the way, you fall in love with the rhythm and challenge of running itself. I had to transition from being extrinsically motivated (running for the medal) to autotelic (running for the joy of running). This shift meant that the satisfaction I got from a focused work session became far more fulfilling than any shopping spree.
This is what happens when you access flow with consistency and reliability — you shift to living a life that is autotelic, which means you’re focused on doing the work for its own sake, rather than for the outcomes the work brings you, which fundamentally changes your relationship toward possessions.
You can witness this “process over possessions” paradox play out in almost
any arena that’s extrinsically motivated, from fame, fortune, acclaim, and everything in between:
To get the thing that would lead to the extrinsic outcome, you have to eradicate
the part of you that wants the extrinsic outcome. And then you’ll get the thing that could get you the extrinsic outcome (the money, which could get you the watch, the success, which could get you the confidence, the lifestyle, which could win you the friends)… but will no longer even want it.
This is partly why, at a certain point, so many successful people strip back their possessions—like Warren Buffett, who, despite his immense wealth, lives in the same modest house he bought in 1950, Or Elon Musk, who sold most of his belongings in 2020 so he can focus on preserving the spark of human consciousness through Mars colonization and Earth sustainability.
So every time you prioritize flow over possessions, it’s a measurement of how much more autotelic and intrinsically motivated your life and personality are becoming. You reinforce the value of intrinsic motivation—which is tightly linked to flow, which boosts performance more than anything else that we know of.
And what the peak performer finds is that as the years go on, this shift deepens and accelerates. Your desire to acquire will slowly evaporate. As you get more flow, you’ll want less stuff. As flow increases, the need for material things decreases.
It’s not to say that you won’t ever want or have stuff. Consider the surfer or guitarist who obsesses about their surfboards or guitars. They love these objects, sure, but what they really love is how these objects drive them into flow. Possessions become tools for flow, not goals.
So here’s the key:
Minimalism drives flow, because you reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity. And flow drives minimalism — the more flow you get, the more you do the work for its own sake, so the less stuff you want, the more work you do, and the less stuff becomes an obstacle to the work.
In short, minimalism leads to maximalism in performance.
Cheers,
© Steven Kotler, Flow Research Collective 2024