What Are Zoom Calls Doing to Your Brain?
Advice from a clinical psychologist.
Since the start of the pandemic, video calls have been helping us stay employed and connected. But many of us leave them feeling exhausted, so much so that a new phrase has entered our vocabulary — Zoom fatigue.
I recently finished another day of back-to-back video calls, and immediately fell asleep in our spare bedroom, which now doubles as my home office. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve felt tired from work before, but never passed out from exhaustion.
Wanting to understand what was going on I spoke to Dr. Colin Hicks, a friend of mine who works as a clinical psychologist. Here’s what he said.
Our brains can only to so many things at once
The first thing Dr. Hicks explained to me was cognitive load theory. Originally applied to the context of learning, cognitive load theory characterizes our mind as information processing systems made up of three parts: sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory.
When the brain receives information, it categorizes it with the aim of moving it into…
