I work in a brain science-related job and I see this sort of misunderstanding all the time. This one isn’t the worst one… I recently discovered that an impressively large number of people believe that the brain physically “lights up” in different places as they are activated… I blame Discovery channel animations and sloppy, unclear language in their narration scripts for this one.

So, no claim to measure cognitive load, just “alterations” in cognition. As others point out, there is little alteration in attention or cognition when you are basically in a sedentary or meditative state. However, it seems to me that we should expect a lively, engaging learning experience to be more dynamic – to move us from receptive to constructive (or imaginative) states of cognition and back as the new material is presented and digested – and therefore we’d like to see more alterations in cognition and attention (and emotion for that matter, because we should feel something when we are learning, something like passion).

How gauche

I think that’s the point of a post like that. 

The resident business major in the suite in college probably spent 30 minutes or less per day on his work, and yet moaned about it.

While the engineering majors spent 4+ hours per day on our work, not to mention once you started doing projects the countless hours spent in lab.

Also what namnezia said.

For myself I attended every class in collage, and did my best to pay attention, but I still found that studying from my textbook was twice as efficient as learning in lecture.

Lectures are gold for auditory learners, but mostly useless for visual learners like myself.