Leadership Advantedge: Leadership | Influence | Talent | Neuroscience

Have you ever sat in a presentation and successfully listened to everything that the speaker shared, remembered what was essential and acted on the information whilst simultaneously fielding emails, carrying out a chat message and planning lunch and all before a really important client meeting.OK, now in this very short space of time, what do you remember? Not a lot huh?You just experienced cognitive overload. And that was just thinking about those 5 things happening in theory."That went right over my head!Cognitive overload is more common than you might realise.Cognitive overload occurs when your brain is being tasked with too many things at once or you are trying to process too much information. It happens when you use too much mental effort in your brains working memory to continue effective processing. You may well feel that the words flew over your head. You stopped taking any more information in and tried to clear the backlog.It is also remarkably common. A leader does a data dump of the facts and figur