Neotenic

(previous title: Very low cognitive load) > Trusting choices made by the same brain that turns my hot 9th grade teacher into a knife-bearing possum at the last second every damn night. Sean Thomason We can't trust brains when taken as a whole. Why should we trust their subareas? Cognitive load is the load related to the executive control of working memory. Depending on what you are doing, the more parallel/extraneous cognitive load you have, the worse you'll do it. (The process may be the same as what the literature calls "Ego Depletion" or "system 2 depletion", the jury is still up on that) If you go here and enter 0 as lower limit and 1.000.000 as upper limit, and try to keep the number in mind until you are done reading post and comments, you'll get a bit of load while you read this post. Now you may process numbers verbally, visually, or both. More generally, for anything you keep in mind, you are likely allocating it in a part of the brain that is primarily concerned with a sensory modality, so it will have some "flavour","shape", "location", "sound", or "proprioceptual location". It is harder to consciously memorize things using odours, since those have shortcuts within the brain. Let us in turn examine two domains in which understanding cognitive load can help you win: Moral Dilemmas and Personal Policy Moral Games/Dilemmas In Dictator game (you're given $20 and you can give any amount to a stranger and keep the rest) the effect of load is negligible. In the tested versions of the Trolley problems (kill/indirectly kill/let die one to save five) people are likely to become less utilitarian when under non-visual load. It is assumed that higher functions of the brain (in VMPF cortex) - which integrate higher moral judgement with emotional taste buttons - fails to integrate, making the "fast thinking", emotional mode be the only one reacting. Visual information about the problem brings into salience the gory aspect of killing someone,