Mini Ep. 106: Cognitive Load

Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Hey there, everybody, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I am Steve Kwan and BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And today we're going to be talking about one of the most common problems that people bring up in Jiu-Jitsu, running out of memory. We're going to talk about cognitive load. Now, this might make sense as a series of episodes, but today let's just focus on defining the issue and why it happens. We've all felt this before. You're training Jiu-Jitsu, you can't remember everything your instructor told you to do, you're trying to do a move, but all of the steps escape you in the middle of a round. Often this happens because of cognitive load. Cognitive load refers to your working memory. You might have heard people jokingly refer to this as your RAM, like with a computer, your random access memory, your short-term memory, you can only hold so much in there at one time. This is the working memory that you rely on in the moment, as opposed to your long-term memory. When you're training Jiu-Jitsu, this is often a world of working memory. You have just a few split seconds to make a good decision, and so whatever information you need to draw on, it needs to be readily available in your brain when you do it. That's especially a problem for beginners, because when everything is new to you, that information is not easily retrieved in your brain. You're struggling just to keep it there. And then to have this added layer of pressure of having to pull out those techniques and those moves in the middle of a roll, it makes it just that much more difficult. So the challenge that we're trying to to paint around here when we talk about cognitive load, we're talking about our brain's struggle to learn when it runs out of working memory. What do we do when we run out of RAM? And all of the stuff that we're trying to keep in our relatively straightforward simple working memory just won't fit anymore. There's a term for this, it's called Miller's Law. You may have heard of this before, sometimes called Miller's Magical Number. It refers to how short-term memory can usually hold about seven items at once, give or take two. That's been revised since George Miller discussed this. Now people say that your mind can mostly hold four items at once, give or take one. That's not a lot of working memory. And that probably jives, as much as we like to talk about multitasking, human beings are not good at multitasking. It's expensive for our brain to switch context and have to juggle a bunch of things at once. Our brains work better when you give them fewer things to focus on. So this number of four things at once, give or take one, that's really important when it comes to Jiu-Jitsu. That's kind of a limit as to how much we want to stuff into our brain. If you've ever wondered why your credit card, the 16-digit sequence is broken down into groups of four, that is to exploit the limitations of human memory. Memorizing a 16-digit sequence is hard. Memorizing groups of four-digit sequences are easier. And that process of taking a complicated idea and breaking it down is called chunking, a very intuitive name. You take this big thing and you break it down into chunks, the chunks are more memorable than the item as a whole. We can map this to Jiu-Jitsu as well. Think about how difficult it is to try to learn a technique when you plot it out by steps. How many steps are there to do an armbar properly? If you want to get really pedantic, there could be dozens of steps. Hard to remember that, especially against a resisting opponent where you have to pull out the right answer in just a second. So maybe rather than memorizing all of the steps, we can group the idea of an armbar into discrete pieces. Maybe one of those pieces is I want to isolate the elbow. Maybe another one is I want to clamp down against their head. There could be a variety of different pieces depending on how you look at this technique. And now, instead of trying to memorize all of these different details, 16 or so details, you can get it down to just a few. And when you've been practicing long enough, you can compress that idea even further into just a single concept. Armbar. And if you've been training for any length of time, there's a good chance that if I tell you to do an armbar from pretty much any position, you can do it with minimal thought because you've got the practice. Your brain has already compressed all of those steps down into something simpler, and that makes it easier for you to retrieve in the moment. So this is always a goal we should be striving for when we're trying to make faster decisions in Jiu-Jitsu. How can we manage our cognitive load by reducing the amount of things that our brain has to remember at once? Can we take four or five steps and compress them down into one thing? Can we take the whole sequence and compress it down into a concept? On BJJ Mental Models, we talk about concepts a lot. This is why we do it, because concepts are a great way to take a series of complicated details and compress them down into something smaller. There's also multiple types of cognitive load. There is intrinsic cognitive load. That's the inherent level of difficulty of a task. Some are just harder than others. That's just the way it is. And no amount of simplifying is going to change the fact that you're trying to do a harder thing. Then there's extraneous cognitive load. That's how the information is being taught to you. Is it being communicated simply or is it being made harder than it needs to be? And then there's germane cognitive load. This is where we talk about mental models. How do you take all of this information that's been presented to you and compress it down into simpler steps? Build a simpler mental schema. Look for the recurring patterns in Jiu-Jitsu, the things that happen over and over again, and try to simplify your thinking. Try to find a way to take that 10-step process and break it down into a five-step process, and then ultimately into a single concept. When you do that, it's easier to see patterns amongst the different areas of Jiu-Jitsu, and it's also easier to remember and pull these things out of your memory on the fly when you really need them. So I hope this equips you with a toolkit for understanding cognitive load and understanding that chunking is a great way to manage cognitive load, to take a bunch of things and compress them down into smaller things. There are many more ways that you can deal with this problem, and we will talk about that more in future mini episodes. For now, if you would like more content like this, go to BJJ Mental Models.com. That is where you can find more mini episodes like this, plus full-length episodes of the podcast and our newsletter. And if you would like to level up with us, check out BJJ Mental Models Premium. It is the world's largest audio library of Jiu-Jitsu master classes. All of that is at BJJ Mental Models.com. Thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you soon.