Applying Knowledge Under Pressure

On Cognitive Load, Resilience, and Training

Photo by Pedro Sanz on Unsplash

Field notes on what we’ve been taking in, and what we are thinking about at The Emergency Mind Project.

If you have ideas or things you’d like to see — or if you want to help and get more involved — I’d love to hear from you: dan@emergencymind.com

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Cognitive Load During Training for Out-of-Department Emergency Responses

In-press version of a recent paper in Academic Emergency Medicine: Education and Training focused on measuring the cognitive load that emergency medicine residents experience when training to respond to critical events outside the emergency department. Punchline: we found considerable differences across individuals and tasks, and found high levels of cognitive load overall. One important implication of this is that we might be overloading residents when we train them with existing methods.

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They save skiers and hikers in the wilderness. Here’s how they think about resilience.

Really, really worth a read. This piece from emergency physician Christopher Tedeschi on the psychology and lived experience of trauma, burnout, and resilience among avalanche and rescue workers is raw, challenging, deep…