Active High Cognitive Load: Unlocking the Pro Mode of Attention

Sophisticated people don’t believe that the world’s scarcest resource is money—money might be the least scarce resource in the world. Some think it’s time; after all, everyone has only 24 hours a day, but time cannot be traded directly. What is truly scarce is your attention.

Attention is the cognitive resource you consistently allocate to a task, the focus of your mind on a single point in the world, which simultaneously implies the ruthless filtering of a massive amount of other information.

You have only so much attention. Yet, with so many good things you could be looking at, you choose to focus on this. Isn’t that the most fundamental investment, the highest reward, the greatest luxury?

Every click, every stay, every emotional fluctuation of yours could be an asset meticulously calculated and monetized by tech giants. Some call this the “Attention Economy,” but considering your attention is mostly drawn away for free, I see it more like an attention hunting ground.

Perhaps the simplest way to ruin a person is to give them infinite, low-threshold, fragmented shallow entertainment, making them feel that “thinking” is an extremely painful thing.

Thus, wise people emphasize guarding their attention. General advice is usually defensive and disciplinary: uninstall apps, turn off notifications, resist temptation, learn meditation if you lack discipline, or seek medication if it’s ADHD. More proactive advice is to do things that turn attention into productivity, such as the two best-selling books by Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, which serve as standard textbooks for the contemporary “anti-distraction movement”: Deep Work (2016) emphasizes focusing on high-difficulty tasks in a distraction-free state; Slow Productivity (2024) advocates for reducing tasks, aligning with natural rhythms, and pursuing high quality to achieve high accomplishment without burnout…

These are all correct. But these suggestions focus on external behavior—whether you are sitting at your desk, whether you are offline—but what you seem to be doing and what your brain is actually doing are two different things.

If your task is just filling out boring reimbursement forms, or if you are listening to a content-free report, what is there to focus on? Conversely, if you are playing a high-difficulty game or debugging code, you will automatically focus without needing a reminder.

Focus is not a posture, not willpower, and certainly not a virtue. Focus is when the task you are doing should naturally call for that many attention resources.

The mental tool in this lecture is called “Active High Cognitive Load,” which I hope will help you use your attention rationally.

✵

The term “Active High Cognitive Load” is my own invention, inspired by “Cognitive Load Theory (CLT)” proposed by educational psychologist John Sweller in 1988 [1]. Let’s first talk about what cognitive load is, and then how to be “active.”

First, we need to know that the human brain’s working memory—what you can think about at any given moment, equivalent to a computer’s RAM—is extremely limited. Psychologists used to think working memory capacity was 7±2, meaning you could think about roughly 7 “chunks” simultaneously. Now, it’s believed that managing 4 is already quite good [2].

In other words, your computer’s hard drive—long-term memory—is large, and you know many things, but your RAM is small, so the amount of information you can mobilize at any moment is very limited.

“Cognitive load” is the occupancy rate of this “RAM” by your current task.

There is intrinsic load, which is how many elements the task itself requires to be processed simultaneously; there is extraneous load, which is worthless consumption, such as poor textbook layout, a teacher’s heavy accent, or a noisy environment. Most critical is germane load, now considered part of intrinsic load [3], specifically referring to the mental resources you actively invest in building “schemas”—integrating new knowledge into your brain’s models.

Every information product has an obligation to reduce extraneous load so that people can use their precious RAM for useful things. But even if cognitive load is low and you feel relaxed, the brain doesn’t idle completely. If the task is simple and your working memory has a lot of idle space, the brain’s “Default Mode Network (DMN)” will automatically take over, scanning the environment, ruminating on the past, or worrying about the future—that is, “mind-wandering.”

True focus is not using willpower to suppress mind-wandering, but using high-difficulty tasks to “crowd out” mind-wandering.

Extraneous load should be reduced, intrinsic load should be managed, but what truly brings learning and output is germane load.

✵

When we are fully concentrated on a high-difficulty task, we particularly dislike being interrupted, to the point that many people think focus is simply not being interrupted. Why is that? Because you have a context switching cost.

Think of the brain as a computer again. Handling a high-cognitive-load task is like running a large game that needs to render complex 3D scenes. Before starting work, the brain needs a long “pre-load” process: moving concepts, logic, and variables from long-term memory (hard drive) into working memory (RAM and VRAM) to build a complex temporary model.

Once this model is built, you enter “flow,” and your operational efficiency is extremely high. Your RAM is fully occupied.

At this point, if your boss suddenly asks you, “What’s for lunch?” it’s like pulling the plug on your RAM.

To reply to your boss, you must load the low-level “lunch menu” model into the cleared RAM. After answering, if you want to return to your work, you must go through that painful pre-loading process all over again—rebuilding those complex logics brick by brick. You’ve wasted a chunk of loading time, and you might even make a mistake.

This is why programmers hate being interrupted and why high-level work cannot be multi-tasked.

In this sense, not every task requires focus. For low-cognitive-load things, like cleaning or cooking, it’s fine to chat, check your phone, or listen to an audio program while doing them. But for high-cognitive-load tasks, you must find a large block of time, close the door, and do it alone.

Transactional and procedural tasks don’t need much RAM; once mastered, they can be scripted and are suitable for batch processing. Only modeling and exploratory tasks, which either require you to consider many elements simultaneously or have high uncertainty, are high-cognitive-load tasks.

What requires deep work is not just “high-level” industries, but tasks that require you to “hold up” many interdependent variables simultaneously. The most valuable attention is your ability to maintain complex contexts.

Some people never do high-cognitive-load things again after graduation; they can no longer imagine what pre-loading is.

✵

Next is one of my insights—

You can actively turn any task into a high-cognitive-load task by unilaterally increasing germane load.

Current AI large language models have “fast” modes and “Pro” or “Heavy Thinking” modes. The former just gives answers based on intuition, while the latter mobilizes massive computing resources, performing long “Chain of Thought” reasoning in the background before giving an answer.

Active high cognitive load means you manually force-start the “Pro mode” of your attention.

For example, when watching a short video, you can just laugh and let it pass. But you can also analyze it while watching: Why is it interesting? Where is the “hook”? What are its camera movements, emotional triggers, narrative structure, and platform distribution logic? Its comment section is practically an anthropological sample! The former is passive consumption; the latter is reverse engineering.

AI in Pro mode always comes up with something, and so can you.

So the real difference is neither the posture nor the task, but the thinking mode.

If it’s just passive consumption, then even if you are reading Kant, it’s shallow reading. But if you turn on Pro mode, even if you are watching cat videos, you can engage in deep thinking.

Active high cognitive load is not waiting for the world to give you difficult problems, but turning the world itself into a difficult problem.

When traveling, don’t just take photos for social media; think about why the palace roofs have that particular curvature. How does it relate to drainage technology at the time? What was the production cost of those yellow glazed tiles? What kind of imperial finance does it reflect? When reading news, don’t just listen to the story; ask where the source is. Who benefits? In a meeting, don’t just listen to what the boss says; analyze why he is saying this now. What is he hiding? Even when watching a TV show, you can question why the screenwriter arranged a plot twist here. If I were writing it, how would I change it?

Add constraints and questions to your input, upgrade from “passive seeing” to “constructive seeing,” force yourself to explain, summarize experiences, and find patterns. You will reap huge rewards. Now with AI, doing this is even more convenient.

Many of my article topics come from inspiration on X. I can follow a piece of gossip or a comment to track down a paper and a theory. Once you’re used to active high cognitive load, you’ll find the world is full of “cracks” and “pipes” through which you can glimpse the truth.

Cognitive load is an extremely important status parameter; you should be very sensitive to which mode your brain is in at this moment.

✵

Now you might say this is too exhausting. Why be so tense? Can’t I just want peace and quiet? Of course, you can, but high cognitive load is the source of happiness.

In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a famous paper in Science titled “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” [4].

They created an iPhone app that randomly pinged people in their real lives, asking volunteers three questions: How do you feel right now? What are you doing? Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing? They collected 250,000 data points from over 5,000 participants across 83 countries.

The results showed that humans are extremely prone to mind-wandering. Except for sexual activity, which was very focused, mind-wandering occurred in over 30% of all other activities. Overall, we spend 46.9% of our waking hours mind-wandering.

Crucially, we are unhappy when our minds wander. Data analysis showed that no matter what you are doing, once your attention drifts, your happiness drops. Conversely, even focusing on washing dishes makes you happier than washing dishes while thinking about something else. Furthermore, the researchers used time-lag analysis to establish a causal relationship: mind-wandering leads to unhappiness, rather than unhappiness leading to mind-wandering.

Why? As mentioned earlier, low-cognitive-load states let the brain switch to the Default Mode Network, which usually tends to ruminate on the past, worry about the future, or engage in negative self-evaluation—it is often an “unhappiness network.” But when you are fully absorbed in a high-load task, your self-consciousness disappears, your sense of time disappears, anxiety disappears, and you enter flow.

Cognitive idling easily leads to internal friction. This is why some people feel mentally refreshed after a day of work despite being physically tired, while others feel their souls hollowed out after scrolling through their phones all day. “Living in the moment” is not just “chicken soup for the soul”; it is a statistical conclusion.

✵

I really don’t want to create anxiety, but low cognitive load is worth your anxiety.

A 2025 Financial Times report [5] detailed a large-scale study spanning a decade, finding that the personalities of the younger generation are collectively drifting in a negative direction: from 2014 to 2024, American youth showed a significant drop in conscientiousness, a rise in neuroticism, and a decrease in agreeableness and extraversion. People over 40 showed similar trends, but to a lesser degree.

Simply put, people are becoming less able to handle things, more prone to breakdown, and more difficult to cooperate with.

Researchers analyze that this is likely related to the modern world making it increasingly difficult to concentrate.

Personality is the integral of habits. When you are used to the 15-second feedback loop of short videos and used to being interrupted at any time, and when your brain is in low-cognitive-load mode for a long time, your neural circuits will be reshaped. You become unable to tolerate delayed gratification, unable to maintain long-term goals, and unable to process complex causal chains.

Low conscientiousness and high neuroticism are the worst survival configurations in modern society.

Many people today cannot think continuously for 30 minutes. When all apps are trying to feed you with the simplest stimuli, the ability of “active high cognitive load” becomes an extremely scarce “Alpha advantage.”

【Closing Poem】

Chasing shadows scatters the mind, A scattered mind breeds sorrow; Bearing weight steadies the mind, A steady mind becomes a boat.

Notes

[1] Sweller, John. “Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning.” Cognitive Science 12, no. 2 (1988): 257-285.

[2] Cowan, Nelson. “The Magical Number 4 in Short-Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 1 (2001): 87-185.

[3] Kalyuga, Slava. “Cognitive Load Theory: How Many Types of Load Does It Really Need?” Educational Psychology Review 23, no. 1 (2011): 1–19.

[4] Killingsworth, Matthew A., and Daniel T. Gilbert. “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 330, no. 6006 (2010): 932.

[5] Burn-Murdoch, John. “The Troubling Decline in Conscientiousness.” Financial Times, Aug 7, 2025.