It hurts to think.  A huge research project that studied 5,000 people in 29 countries found that we would rather do almost anything than think, because it causes us to feel irritation, annoyance, frustration, and stress.  The study covered a wide range of professions, from health care to the military, and the results were the same across different groups, professions, and kinds of thinking.

And the more we have to think, the more we don’t like it.  That’s why we so often respond with mental tricks and stereotypes to avoid thinking through a new problem or situation. And presumably why we are so capable of not noticing – not thinking about – the masses of information that we find overwhelming us every day, from basic sensory inputs to the pings and dings from our digital devices.  We’ve all had the experience of driving some distance without being consciously aware of all the sights and sounds that flowed past us as we kept the car safely on the road.  Or zoning out during a meeting, and suddenly snapping to attention to realize that we’ve missed much of whatever was said in the last ten minutes when our boss was droning on and on.

There is good news along with this discouraging idea that we don’t like to think.  Another recent study found that one of the ways in which we cope with information overload is very simple and yet effective – and one which you can practice consciously to get better at handling large amounts of information.  How does this mental trick work?  We organize the information that comes at us in chapters, separated by simple changes in the environment.  For example, we might be driving home listening to the news.  When we get out of the car, we automatically start a new chapter – going in the house, say – and that would facilitate learning something new during that chapter.  The idea is that you can remember more things by deliberately starting new chapters.  Going into the house might be followed by ‘greeting our partner,’ which might begin a new chapter.  Our ability to remember information can be improved by consciously training ourselves to create new chapters.  We don’t have to wait for a natural environmental change; we can deliberately complete one ‘chapter’ and start another.

Given how important motion is to memory – there is evidence, as I’ve reported on before, that we naturally tie memory to motion in the way that an actor does, blocking stage movement to help remember lines – it would only make sense to focus new chapters on motion.  In other words, start a new chapter when you went from the kitchen to the living room to talk about your day with your spouse.

Putting chunks of information into mental chapters that you locate in various places throughout your environment thus seems like a particularly good way to increase your daily memory capacity.  An older study from 2017 further noted that lighting matters – we don’t learn as well in low lighting, and our memory capacity increases when the lights are bright – so it might make sense to turn the lights on when you move into a new space to start a new mental chapter.

Thinking about memory in these ways further suggest that speakers, teachers, and leaders can improve the memory of their audiences large and small by providing them chapters of information as clearly as possible — in good lighting, of course.

If thinking hurts, we might as well make it as easy on ourselves as possible.