How Your Brain Actually Works (And Why Smart People Make Dumb Decisions)

A split-second police simulation shows how fast the brain can be wrong, then we map the same mechanics onto work, parenting, and leadership. We break down cognitive budgets, working memory limits, mental models, load types, and four practical strategies to decide better under pressure.

Your brain has 4-7 slots of working memory. That's it. And every decision you make, every problem you solve, every conversation you have is competing for those slots.

In this episode, I break down the architecture of thought—how working memory actually works, what cognitive load is, and why intelligence and wisdom are not the same thing.

You'll learn:

• Why you can only hold 4-7 things in your head at once (and what happens when you exceed that limit)
• How to offload cognitive load to free up mental space (and why writing things down literally makes you smarter)
• The difference between knowing something and being able to apply it under pressure
• Why the smartest person in the room often makes the worst decisions

This isn't abstract neuroscience—this is practical framework for understanding why you forgot what you walked into a room for, why meetings drain you even when you're just listening, and why your best ideas come in the shower (not at your desk).

Plus: The one habit that instantly upgrades your thinking capacity (it takes 2 minutes and costs nothing).

Chapters

• 0:01 Dark Hallway Simulation
• 2:36 Split-Second Errors And Mental Models
• 3:06 Everyday Cognitive Load Outside Policing
• 3:06 Show Intro And Host Background
• 3:28 From Failure To How Brains Work
• 4:02 The Cognitive Budget Explained
• 6:03 Working Memory Limits In Action
• 9:19 The Research On Memory Slots
• 10:26 Mental Models: Power And Peril
• 13:22 Education Example And Invisible Bias
• 16:08 Three Types Of Cognitive Load
• 18:44 Clarity Versus Noise Problem
• 20:31 Strategy 1: Protect Working Memory
• 22:13 Strategy 2: Update Mental Models
• 24:11 Strategy 3: Reduce Extraneous Load
• 25:22 Strategy 4: Write It Down
• 26:21 Join The Thinking Lab And Next Week’s Tease
• 27:35 Support, Thanks, And Sign-Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

In the NYPD Academy, we're doing tactical training in this mock city. And I had a blast doing this stuff. But uh one of the things we did was threat assessment in high pressure scenarios. The instructor puts me in a simulation, dark hallway, unknown number of suspects, possible weapons, civilian bystanders. I have maybe two seconds to decide. Do I engage? Do I retreat? Do I call for backup? And here's what they taught us. Your brain is going to try to kill you. Not on purpose, but under pressure. Your brain defaults to patterns. It takes shortcuts. It grabs the first answer it finds and screams, This is it. Sometimes that saves your life. Sometimes it gets you or someone else killed. I remember one specific simulation. I'm walking down this hallway in the training facility. It's dimmed. There's ambient noise, shouting, movement. My heart's already pounding because I know something's about to happen. I just don't know what. I round the corner and there's a figure. My brain immediately registers threat. My hand goes to my weapon. But then half a second later, I see it's a kid, maybe twelve years old, clearly an actor, but that's not the point. Holding something. But it's not a gun. It's a phone. If I had pulled the trigger in the first half second, I would have shot an unarmed child. The instructor stopped the simulation and said something I've never forgotten. Your brain gave you the wrong answer in 0.2 seconds. That's how fast your mental models work. And here's why you need to understand how your brain actually works. Because it's making decisions before you even realize you're deciding. The difference between a good cop and a dead cop isn't courage, it's understanding how your brain works under load. And here's the thing, you're not a cop, but you're making decisions under cognitive load every single day. When you're in back-to-back meetings, when your inbox has forty-seven unread emails, when your kid's school just called, when your boss wants an answer right now, your brain is doing the exact same thing it does in that dark hallway. It's grabbing the first pattern it recognizes. It's taking shortcuts, and most of the time you don't even know it's happening. This is Thinking to Think, the podcast about making better decisions in a world designed to make you think worse. I'm Mike Aponte, also known as M.A. Aponte, former NYPD officer, former Merrill Lynch BlackRock Wealth Manager, former trained actor, and current executive director at a charter school in Florida. Last week we talked about why thinking fails. This week we're going deeper, how your brain actually works, and why understanding this changes everything. Not directly. It was this. Your brain has a budget. Not a money budget, a cognitive budget. Think of it like this. You wake up every morning with a hundred units of mental energy. Every decision you make, every problem you solve, every conversation you have, it all costs energy. Every decision costs one unit. Hypothetically. What I what do I want for breakfast? Maybe two units if you're thinking to eat healthy and you're tempted by the donuts in the break room. Hard decisions costs we'll say 10. Should I fire this employee who's struggling but has been here for five years? That's 10 units minimum. Decisions under stress? Well, that's about 20 units. There's a crisis happening right now, and I need to decide in the next three minutes. That's 20, maybe 30. And here's the kicker. You don't get to see the budget. There's no little meter or anything on your forehead that says you have 47 cognitive units remaining. You just spend and spend and spend until suddenly you're making terrible decisions and you don't know why. You snap at your kid, you approve a budget you shouldn't have approved, you avoid a conversation you should have had, you eat the entire bag of chips. And you think, what's wrong with me? Why can't I get this right? Nothing's wrong with you. You ran out of budget. That's cognitive load. And if you don't understand it, it's running your life. So before I get into strategies on, like, okay, now what do I do? How do I fix this? We need to still understand the problem. We need to go a little bit deeper. So let me break down how your brain actually works when you're trying to think. There are four components you need to understand. Component one, the working memory, that's your brain's RAM. You know how your computer slows down when you have too many tabs open. Your brain does the same thing. Working memory is where active thinking happens. It's where you hold information, manipulate it, and make decisions with it. And the research is brutal. Most people can hold about four to seven pieces of information in working memory at the same time. Not 40, not 20, 4 to 7. And let me give you a practical example from my current role. Last Tuesday, I'm sitting in my office, I'm trying to finish an email to a parent about their child's IEP accommodations. That's one thing, and working memory, that's one. The details of the IEP, what I need to communicate, how to frame it diplomatically. My assistant knocks on the door, and we have a substitute teacher who didn't show up. Do you want me to call the backup list or can you cover the class? Now I'm holding two things: the IEP, email, and the substitute problem. My phone buzzes, it's a text from my leadership team. Uh, can we move our meeting to 2 p.m. instead of 1 p.m.? Now I'm holding three things. But all I also need to check my calendar to see if 1 p.m. is free. Or 2 p.m., excuse me. Uh so now I'm holding the IAP email, the substitute problem, the meeting time, and I'm trying to recall what's on my calendar. Another email concern comes in. It's from the district. They need enrollment projections by the end of the day. Now I'm at five things. And here's what happens: I send the IAP email with a typo. I tell my assistant to call the backup list, but I forgot to tell her which class needs coverage. I say yes to moving the meeting without actually checking my calendar. And it turns out I already have something scheduled at that time. My working memory was full, so my brain started dropping things. And what's worse part is I didn't feel overwhelmed in that moment. I've I felt like I was handling it, but the evidence, the typo, the incomplete instruction, the scheduling conflict, that tells the real story. Here's the research behind this. George Miller published a famous paper in 1956 called The Magical Number Seven, plus or minus two. You found that most people can hold about seven items in short-term memory, but more recent research by Nelson Cohen suggests it actually closer to four for complex information. And here's the key: it doesn't matter how smart you are. A genius with an IQ of, we'll say 160 has the same working memory limitation as someone with an IQ of 100. Intelligence doesn't give you more slots. It might help you process information faster or make connections more easily, but you still only have four to seven slots. So when you're in a meeting and someone's talking about the budget and you're thinking about the email you need to send, and you're worried about the conflict with that staff member, and you're trying to remember if you're locked your car and someone asks you a question, you're over capacity. Your working memory is full. And when that happens, your brain doesn't think better, thinks worse. It starts dropping things, it starts making errors, it starts grabbing shortcuts. Component two, mental models, your brain's shortcut. So here's the good news. Your brain is incredibly efficient. It doesn't reanalyze every situation from scratch. It uses mental models, patterns. It's seen before. When you see a red octagon on the street, you don't think, hmm, what could this geometric shape mean? Let me consider the context. It's on a poll, it has text. The text says S T O P. What could that spell? No, you think stop sign. Instant. Automatic. That's a mental model. And you have thousands of them. Mental models of how meetings work, how conversations go, how people react when you give them feedback, how students behave when they're struggling, how your boss responds when you bring up a problem. Mental models are why you can drive a car while having a conversation. Your brain has a model for driving. It runs in the background while you're consciously think about other things. This is incredibly useful if you had to consciously think about every single thing you do. You'd be paralyzed. And here's the problem: your mental models aren't always accurate. And worse, you don't know when they're inaccurate. So let me tell you a story from my time at Merrill Lynch that illustrates this perfectly. I had a client, a successful entrepreneur, built a software company from nothing, sold it for eight-figure, smart guy, really smart. And he had a mental model that went like this I got rich by taking big risks. Therefore, to stay rich, I need to keep taking big risks. That model worked when he was building his company. When you're going from zero to something, symmetrically, bets make sense. But now he had wealth to preserve. The game had changed, but his mental model hadn't. So he kept making aggressive investments, high risk, high reward plays. And some of them worked, which reinforced the model. But then 2008 happened, the financial crisis. And because his portfolio was so aggressive, he lost 60% of his wealth in six months. I remember sitting across from him in my office. He was devastated. He said something I'll never forget. I did everything that made me successful. Why did it stop working? Because the context changed, but his mental model didn't. He had a model that said big risk equal big rewards. But the more accurate model is big risk equal big rewards when you have limited downside and significant upside. But when you have a lot to lose, big risk equal potential catastrophes. Context matters, but mental models don't update automatically. Here's another example from education. I have a mental model, and I bet you do too, if you're a teacher or a school leader, that when a student is disruptive in class, they're either seeking attention, trying to avoid work, or testing boundaries. That's my default model. And most of the time it's accurate enough to be useful. But what if the student is dysregulated because something happened at home? What if they're hungry? What if they have undiagnosed ADHD and sitting still for 45 minutes is neurologically impossible for them? My model gives me the wrong answer, but it's fast and under cognitive load, when I'm managing 30 students and I don't have time to do a deep diagnostic, my brain grabs the model and runs with it. And I respond accordingly, which might be exactly the wrong response. The scariest part about mental models, you can't see them operating. When I saw that figure in the dark hallway during training in the NYPD, my brain didn't give me a report that said mental model activated, unknown figure in tactical scenario. Potential threat. Recommendation, draw a weapon. It just felt like the obvious thing to do. It felt like reality. That's how mental models work. They don't announce themselves, they just become your perception of what's true. Component three, cognitive load, the weight you're carrying. There are three types of cognitive load, and understanding the difference between them is critical. One, intrinsic load, the inherent difficulty of the task. Teaching algebra to a seventh grader has intrinsic load. The concept itself is complex. You can't make it simpler than it is without making it wrong. Leading a crisis meeting has intrinsic load. There are multiple variables, competing priorities, high stakes. The problem itself is hard. Intrinsic load is unavoidable. It's the price of doing hard things. Unnecessary difficulty caused by how the task is presented. This is the load you can control. If I'm trying to teach you, say civics or government, but the room is loud, the projector isn't working, I'm using jargon you don't understand, and I'm keeping, excuse me, I keep getting interrupted, that's extraneous load. The social science isn't harder, but I'm making it harder. Let me give you a real example from a staff meeting I led last month. We were discussing our new student behavior intervention system. It's a complex system, lots of tears, lots of decision points. That's intrinsic load, excuse me. But I made it worse. I projected a slide with 12 bullet points, each with sub-bullets. I was talking while people were trying to read. I used acronyms that not everyone knew, and I didn't give people time to process before moving to the next slide. All of that is extraneous load. I was adding cognitive weight that didn't need to be there. One of my teachers, one of them experienced ones who feel comfortable giving me feedback, came up to me after and I said, I wanted to understand what you were saying, but I couldn't keep up. She's smart, she wanted to learn, but I overloaded her. That's on me. That's extraneous load. Three, germane load. The mental effort required to build new mental models. This is the good load. This is learning. This is when your brain is actually updating its patterns, making new connections, building better frameworks. When you're learning something new and it feels hard, that's germane load. That's your brain doing the work of growth. But here's the critical insight: all three types draw from the same budget. See, that full circle. You don't have separate buckets of mental energy. You have one pool. So if you're in a meeting with high intrinsic load, complex problems, high extraneous load, bad PowerPoint, people talking over each other, no agenda, and you're trying to learn something new, germane load, you're over budget and your brain shuts down. It stops processing, it starts defending, it gets irritable, it looks for exits, and you walk out of that meeting thinking, that was a waste of time, I didn't learn anything. But the problem wasn't the content, the problem was the load. Component for the clarity-noise ratio. Your brain is constantly filtering signal from noise. Signal, the information that matters, noise, everything else. But here's the problem: your brain doesn't always know the difference. If you get 100 emails a day, your brain treats all 100 as potential signals. It has to scan each one to determine if it's important. That's 100 micro decisions, that's 100 units of cognitive load. And that's before you've done any actual work. Here's what this looks like in practice. I start my day, I sit down on my computer, I open my inbox. 67 unread emails. My brain immediately goes into triage mode. Which of these is urgent? Which can wait? Which is just noise? I start scanning subject lines. Uh RE, budget meeting follow-up, probably important. Uh FW, forward, forward, forward. Funny video, definitely noise. Urgent, student incident, definitely important. Newsletter, 10 tips for better leadership, noise, but maybe useful. Each one of these is a decision, and each decision costs cognitive load. By the time I've sorted through my email, I've already spent 30 units of my budget and I haven't actually done anything yet. Now multiply that by Slack messages, uh text messages, phone calls, people stopping by my office. By 10 a.m. I'm cognitively exhausted and I haven't had a single deep thought yet. That's the clarity noise problem. And the worst part most of the noise feels like signal in the moment. The newsletter about leadership tips, it feels productive to read, but it's not moving anything forward. It's noise disguised as signal. The problem is that we Live in a world where the noise is engineered to feel like signal. Every notification is designed to make you think this might be important. You should check this. And your brain, which evolved in an environment where missing a signal could mean death, defaults to check everything. But we're not in the savannah anymore. The line isn't going to get you if you miss an email. But your brain doesn't know that. So now we're going to get to applications. And what do we do with all this? Here's what I've learned. Both from training as a police officer, running a school, and managing wealth and businesses, and from completely reinventing myself multiple times, I believe I count four. And now I pass this on to you. Strategy one, protect your working memory like it's your most valuable resource. Because it is. If you know you have to make a big decision today, clear everything else. Don't schedule the hard conversation right after a budget meeting. Don't try to solve a complex problem while checking your email. One hard thing at a time. Here's my system. Every Sunday night, I look at the week ahead. I definitely, I excuse me, I identify the three most cognitive demanding things I need to do that week. Maybe it's a difficult conversation with a teacher who's struggling. Maybe it's finalizing the budget. Maybe it's designing a new intervention program. Whatever it is, I block time for those three things and I protect that time ruthlessly. No email during those blocks. No phone, no interruptions. I tell my assistant, unless the building is on fire, I'm unavailable. And I do those hard things first thing in the morning. Well, I try to, when my cognitive budget is full. Because here's what I learned at Merrill. Wealthy, intelligent people make catastrophic financial decisions when they're cognitively depleted. I've watched it happen over and over. A successful CEO would come in at the end of a long day after board meetings, after dealing with personal issues, after putting out fires, and I walk them through investment options. And then they make impulsive decisions, they ignore data, they revert to mental models that didn't fit the situation. Not because they were stupid, because their working memory was full and their cognitive budget was empty. So, remember, hard decisions, best time to do it is first thing in the morning. Strategy two, actively update your mental models. Your brain is using patterns from the past to navigate the present, but the past isn't always a good guide. So ask yourself regularly, what mental models am I using right now? Before I had a hard conversation with a staff member, I literally asked myself, what's my mental model for how this conversation is going to go? And usually I catch myself assuming uh descent defensiveness. I'm expecting resistance. But when I name that model, I can question it. Is this actually true or is that just my pattern? And often when I update the model, this person wants to do well. They just need clarity. The conversation goes completely different because my approach changes. If I expect defensiveness, I come in armored, I'm ready for a fight. And guess what? I usually get one. But if I expect collaboration, I come in open, I'm curious, I'm supportive, and I usually get collaboration. The model shapes the outcome. Strategy three. Ruthlessly reduce extenuative load. This is the load you control. If you're leading a meeting, make it easy for people to think. Clear agenda set 24 hours in advance, one topic at a time, simple language, visual aids that support understanding rather than overwhelm. I learned this from my acting training actually. Directors who are good at their job understand that actors can only focus on so many things at once. If a director gives you 10 notes at the same time, make this louder, slow down here, change your blocking, adjust your intention, remember your character's backstory. You can't do it, it's too much load. But a good director gives you one note at a time. Just focus on making this moment slower. That's it. Let everything else be instinctive. And suddenly you can actually do it. Because the extrenuous load is gone. Same with leadership, same with teaching, same with parenting. Reduce the noise. Make it easy to think. Strategy four, write it down. If you're making a decision, get it out of your working memory and onto paper. I keep a decision journal. Every big decision I make, I write, what's the decision? What are the options? What are the trade-offs? What mental models am I using? What's my emotional state right now? It takes five minutes. And it saves me from making the same mistake twice. Because here's what happens when you don't write it down. Six months later, you're faced with a similar decision and you can't remember what you learned last time. So you repeat the mistake. But if you write it down, you build a library of your own thinking and you get better over time. If you want to go deeper on this, if you want the exact templates I use to manage cognitive load, update mental models, and protect my working memory, come join the Thinking Lab at school or sign up for my Substack. Link is in the description. It's a community of leaders, educators, entrepreneurs, and those who are serious about upgrading how they think. We workshop real decisions together. I do a live call every month where we work through actual scenarios members are facing. And honestly, the value isn't just me. It's learning how other people think through the same problems you're facing. You get to see inside someone else's decision-making process. You get to test your mental models against other people's mental models. And you realize, oh, I've been thinking about this problem completely wrong. Link is in the show notes. Next week, we're talking about the knowing thinking gap, why smart people who know a lot still make terrible decisions. If you ever worked with someone who was brilliant on paper but couldn't solve a real-world problem to save their life, you want to hear this. You can also support this podcast by like, sharing, and subscribing. It really helps out with the algorithm. And then comment below. Just uh you can just make a simple comment and just say, this is great, this is not great, whatever the case may be, in order for the algorithm to do its thing. So thank you again. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for thinking with me. Um Mike Aponte, also known as M.A. Aponte, and this is Thinking to Think. Have an amazing day.