Have you ever had so many windows open on your computer at once that it caused the computer to freeze? It happens on my computer all the time.
The solution, of course, is to close things down. To preserve your computer’s processing power, you sometimes need to prioritize the programs that are the most important to have running.
The human brain is like that as well. Psychologists sometimes use the term “cognitive load” to describe the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory at any one time. If a person has too high of a cognitive load—that is, if the person is multitasking or if their short-term memory is focused on too many things at once—then the brain will work below peak capacity and may even freeze up.
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