If your brain is busy trying to hold too much information in its working memory – if its cognitive load is too great – it won’t have the ability to store that information, let alone process it in a way that makes it useful, or to create the proteins necessary to transfer the memory into long-term storage. It’s like trying to organise your wallet while juggling: you can’t. And that brings us to our phones: everything about smartphones overloads our working memories. The apps, the emails, the news feeds, the headlines, even the home screen itself – a smartphone is a virtual avalanche of
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