ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the increase in cognitive load throughout the major epochs of human development: hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial, arguing that each stage has successively increased the demand for attentional processing needed to sustain making a living. This increase is set against the backdrop of human brain morphology that has not fundamentally changed since the hunter-gatherer era. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle required minimal cognitive load due to the simplicity and predictability of life. The advent of agriculture imposed new cognitive burdens, including planning, property management, hard toil, and social stratification. Industrialization further exacerbated cognitive demands with the advent of capitalism. The cumulative effect of these epochal shifts is a modern-day cognitive load that far surpasses our attentional capacity, leading to a state of chronic cognitive overload at work. The chapter suggests that although material progress has been made, the psychological costs of it has been significant. It calls for understanding of these developments through the lens of cognitive load as a result of the imbalance between continuously increasing cognitive demands at work and the human brain’s attentional capacity still being at hunter-gatherer processing level.
