Why pressure makes us bad at decisions
High-pressure situations overload our brain's working memory, impairing quick decisions and leading to suboptimal choices when mental resources are stretched thin.
Under pressure, our brains struggle to make sound decisions because our working memory, the brain's short-term processing center, gets overloaded. This vital capacity, which psychologist George Miller noted in 1956 can only handle about seven pieces of information at once, quickly gets flooded by stress and overwhelming data. Think of a firefighter in a burning building; the chaos spikes their cognitive load, making complex reasoning difficult.
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