What Changes — and What Doesn’t

When understanding falters, it’s often assumed that something essential has been lost — intelligence, insight, or ability.

Cognitive research suggests a different explanation: some aspects of understanding are highly sensitive to conditions, while others remain comparatively stable.

Distinguishing between the two helps explain why clarity can feel inconsistent without implying personal failure.

What changes easily

Certain cognitive functions are especially sensitive to load, stress, and uncertainty. These tend to fluctuate first.

Access to working memory

Working memory — the system that allows information to be held and manipulated — is sharply limited and highly state-dependent.

Under stress, time pressure, or emotional load, working memory capacity reliably decreases.1 This makes it harder to:

The underlying knowledge may still exist, but access to it is reduced.

Cognitive flexibility

Cognitive flexibility — the ability to shift perspective or revise a model — is also sensitive to stress and load.2

As flexibility decreases:

This often feels like “losing clarity,” even though no information has disappeared.

Sense-making under uncertainty

In complex situations, understanding depends not only on information but on the ability to organize it into a coherent model.

As uncertainty increases, the brain prioritizes speed and threat detection over integration, reducing the quality of sense-making.3

What tends to remain more stable

Other aspects of cognition are comparatively resilient — even when clarity feels compromised.

Core knowledge and experience

Well-learned knowledge and experience are stored in long-term memory, which is far more robust than working memory.4

These do not disappear under stress. They may become temporarily inaccessible, but they are not erased.

Pattern recognition

Humans are particularly good at recognizing patterns, even under degraded conditions.

This is why people often retain a sense that “something isn’t right” even when they can’t articulate why.5

That intuition is not mystical. It reflects preserved pattern sensitivity operating with reduced explanatory capacity.

Values and priorities

While situational judgment can fluctuate, core values and long-standing priorities tend to remain stable.

Confusion may obscure how to act, but it rarely erases what matters.

Why this distinction matters

When fluctuating functions are mistaken for permanent loss, people often respond by:

Understanding which aspects of cognition are state-dependent helps explain why these responses often make things worse.

Clarity does not always return because effort increased. It often returns because conditions changed.

What this does — and does not — imply

This does not mean understanding is fragile or unreliable.

It means understanding is conditional. Some components fluctuate with context, while others persist beneath the surface.

Confusion, in this light, is not a signal that everything has changed — only that certain capacities are temporarily constrained.

References

  1. Arnsten, A. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.
  2. Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
  3. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  4. Baddeley, A. (2007). Working Memory, Thought, and Action. Oxford University Press.
  5. Klein, G. (1998). Sources of Power. MIT Press.