Affect of Cognitive Resources in learning complicated Skills

I have just completed three courses at Mongo University mainly on MongoDB and Node.js. In the process of studying, I kept on getting really tired and was continously looking for breaks, where the best being a 10 minute power nap. Near the end of the course it was getting easier to learn new things and then I started on the Mean Stack.  I chose to study the Mean Stack as it came free with Google Cloud and had Node.js which I learnt from the course just completed at Mongo University.


In my process of studying I came across the following youtube  on Cognitive Resources

This has totally change my outlook in learning news skills and way I am aproach learning complex concepts.

At an IT person one of our keys has always been the tools we use either the programming language or the IDE and frameworks. As the tools we use has a significant affect on meeting requirements of whatever project we are working on.  One tool that have never been aware of is congitive resources besides drinking a lot of coffee and being physicall fit assist codying.

I now realised that our brain is like a mana bar we have in  mmo games. The amount of mana you use is dependant on how complex and new the problem you are facing. So the reason I was getting tired so often was not because of boredem which I thought, but because of the effort my brain was trying to do in processing the new information. So my congnitive resources was being exausted without being refilled.

What is interesting to me is when I was addressing the learning through spatial means i.e Coggle (Mind map). I was not getting tired also it was hard for me to get tired when I was writing code. So for me the reading and visual processing of information was making me tired.

So to increase my Brain Tank, I kneed to address how my mental fitness has declined significantly so need to train it again and also build up the muscles in my brain.  I will write some new posts in my journey of getting mentally fit again but the main thing is that I have addressed my main barriers to learning and aknowledge that conginitive resources is a very important layer in my tools.

Reason I wrote this post to put in the details of the scaffolding I have already done with Cognitive Resources. Things that have I have learnt in writing this blog post.

• Physically doing work is the same concept as warmdown in exercise in terms of getting rid of lactic acid and is reason why can do more complicated work for longer, so replentishing the tank
• Process of writing a blog post does help in fleshing out details of new concepts
• Scaffolding is very important to build understandings from
• More tired I got when the the subject was more fuzzier and no scaffolds to attach too.