# Cognitive Load **Cognitive load refers to how much of our [[Short-Term and Working Memory]] capacity we're using at any given moment.** Too much cognitive load is why we're having difficulties learning complicated concepts, and so **some teachers are even defining 'teaching' as the art of managing students' cognitive load.** They are maintaining that we should break-up more complicated topics into [[Chunking|chunks]] of 4 new concepts or ideas, due to the limited capacity of our [[Short-Term and Working Memory]]. An interesting demonstration of this was done by Adriaan de Groot, who was a famous chess mathematician. **He showed an actual chess setup to two groups — professional chess players and complete novices. The professionals were better at remembering the board, however when the setup was a random one (one that makes no sense in chess), the professionals were as bad as novices.** He concluded that what happened was that the professionals remembered the board as ‘a Sicilian opening with an extra piece’ thereby compressing the whole board into a chunk. **Another example is that of difficulties most beginner programmers (think kids) face when learning simple loops, because they can include well over 4 new concepts**, which is considered to be the limit of [[Short-Term and Working Memory]]. Programmers on the other hand find it much easier to learn new programming concepts because have already internalized things like keywords, semi-colons and ints, allowing them to focus on what's important. The extreme example of this is that of a Java programmer learning `for` loops in C#, which are practically the same.