Cognitive Load and Working Memory

The amount of information entering our consciousness at any instant is referred to as our cognitive load. When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit. Information zips into and out of our mind so quickly that we never gain a good mental grip on it. (Which is why you can’t remember what you went to the kitchen to do.) The information vanishes before we’ve had an opportunity to transfer it into our long-term memory and weave it i...

 Davy Poem on Growing Old

Davy was now forty, and like every man of science and every poet, he hoped against hope that original work and ‘powers of inspiration’ still lay ahead in his maturity. His description of these longings was nakedly Romantic, and surely recalled his moonlit walks along the banks of the Avon some twenty years before. Though many chequered years have passed away Since first the sense of Beauty thrilled my nerves, Yet still my heart is sensible to Thee, As when it first received the flood of ...

 Cultural Impacts of Easy Access to Pornography on the Int...

The Internet is awash with sex. In a few hours, an innocent can see more of the pleasures and perversions of sex, in a greater number of close-up couplings, than a eighteenth century roué could experience in a lifetime devoted to illicit encounters. The Internet is the greatest sex education machine — or the greatest pornographer — that has ever existed. Having spent time teaching at a Muslim university, where the torrent of Internet sex was a hot topic, I would not underestimate its imp...