When the Brain is Full

From my study of psychology and for various reasons, I am convinced that, as humorous as Gary Larson is, the brain can not fill up. But your hard drive can. When your hard drive fills up, strange things begin to happen... or, to be more accurate, normal things stop happening.

For instance: I was recently capturing footage onto a drive that has been working just fine, when all of a sudden the computer would start "dropping frames" whenever I was dumping footage. It would seem that a "dropped frame" would happen when the computer wasn't working fast enough; the computer just couldn't keep up for whatever reason. But once I cleared out 50 more gigs on the drive, it's been capturing just fine ever since.

Why is this? Well, when you've got space, stuff works better.

And that's true of your brain too. Granted, not quite in the same way.

I've got a lot on my mind today; some really heavy stuff. And so the prospect of writing a blog entry was more than a little daunting. With all this other stuff going on, I was having trouble focusing. So, I needed to delete some stuff.

Not like in "Pi"--which, if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's perfectly okay--but in a "clear the mind" kind of way. Almost like a shift is focus, where you force (or allow) your brain to get on a different subject so you can move forward.

How do you do that?


Move.

Go someplace different, walk around, or maybe even just turn your chair around for a while.

This isn't writer's block, or anything like that. This is just too much information stuffed into your brain. You need a chance to purge it.

~Luke Holzmann
Your Media Production Mentor