Why Meaning-Making Is Hard

Cognitive Limits in a World of Moral and Political Disagreement

“Doesn’t it concern you that maybe bit by bit we’re losing our capacity to engage?”
— Ian Williams

On attention overload, and the limits of understanding

Conversations today often feel brittle. Discussions stall. Nuance collapses. People talk past one another, or stop talking altogether. These failures are commonly explained in moral terms—people are unwilling, acting in bad faith, or too polarized—or in political terms—tribalism, ideology, or misinformation. These explanations matter. But they don’t go deep enough.

This paper grew out of my dissertation and a longer personal curiosity about why so many conversations fail even when people seem well-intentioned. It’s more conceptual than most things I write about, but I’m sharing it because the question feels increasingly unavoidable. That curiosity leads to a simple but uncomfortable question:

What if some of what we are witnessing is not primarily a failure of values or goodwill, but a failure of capacity?

What if meaning-making itself has become harder—not because people care less, but because the cognitive systems required to sustain understanding are already saturated?

This paper explores that possibility by taking another look at our conversational ecosystems and stepping beneath belief and ideology to examine the work the human brain must do simply to understand—to process words, images, arguments, and stories—and how that work is shaped, limited, and regulated. It does not deny the importance of values, ethics, or accountability, but asks what becomes possible when cognitive limits are treated as part of the ethical terrain of conversation.

Making Meaning Is Work

We often speak as if understanding were automatic: if only people listened carefully, read closely, or paid attention, meaning would naturally emerge. But comprehension is not a passive act. It’s cognitive labour. Critical thinking—connecting propositions, integrating evidence, holding competing ideas at the same time, revising assumptions—adds an additional layer of effort that is frequently assumed but rarely acknowledged.

Discourse scholar Teun A. van Dijk has spent decades demonstrating that even the most elementary narratives require substantial cognitive work. To follow a story, whether a political argument or a child’s tale, listeners must retain earlier information in working memory, activate relevant background knowledge, draw inferences, resolve ambiguity, and maintain coherence across time. Meaning does not arrive fully formed; it is constructed incrementally, within seconds.

This process is inherently fragile. Distraction, trauma, emotional arousal, fatigue, stress and time all reduce the brain’s capacity to sustain itself. Misunderstanding, then, may not be an exception to communication but one of its most persistent risks. When conversations break down, it is often because the cognitive scaffolding required to hold meaning together has quietly collapsed under load.

When Listening Held Us

When was the last time you couldn’t turn the radio off because something was so compelling you needed to hear it through? Or, when was the last time you found yourself sitting on a kitchen floor at two in the morning, fully absorbed in a conversation you couldn’t abandon? I grew up listening to a small transistor radio long after my parents thought I had gone to bed. That little box carried voices from far beyond my bedroom—voices from other cities, other lives, other ways of speaking and seeing. I was captivated not only by what was said, but by cadence, hesitation, inflection, and silence. Listening required effort, but it didn’t feel like labour. It felt like an invitation.

These moments matter because they remind us that sustained attention is not impossible. They are evidence that humans are capable of deep listening, patience, and presence. But they also raise a more difficult question: what conditions made those moments possible—and what has changed?

Those late-night broadcasts and unguarded conversations unfolded slowly. They assumed time. They allowed silence. They didn’t demand an immediate response or reward constant interruption. Attention was not being competed for; it was being held. Meaning arrived not all at once, but through rhythm, pacing, and trust.

If meaning-making feels harder now, it may not be because human capacity has disappeared, but because the conditions that once supported it have eroded. Understanding this shift requires looking not only at what we say, but at the environments in which listening is asked to occur.

Lived Constraint and Attentional Scarcity

This cognitive labour doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is asked for in the midst of busy, uneven, and often messy lives. Conversations unfold alongside care-giving, financial strain, health concerns, digital distraction, time pressure, and the low-grade exhaustion that accompanies contemporary life. Attention is fractured not because people don’t care, but because it’s already spoken for. The capacity required for careful listening and thoughtful response is often drawn on elsewhere, long before a conversation begins.

In this context, asking someone to stay with complexity is not simply a request for openness; it is a request for time, energy, and cognitive slack. When those resources are scarce, even well-intentioned conversations can falter—not out of resistance, but out of depletion.

What’s Under the Hood

To understand why this cognitive labour often feels overwhelming, it helps to examine how different forms of information are processed.

In Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth draws attention to the speed and efficiency of visual cognition. Drawing on cognitive psychology, she notes that the human brain can recognize a visual image in roughly 150 milliseconds and attach meaning within a fraction of a second thereafter. “Seeing comes before words,” she writes, emphasizing the immediacy with which visual information is processed.

Raworth contrasts this with language. Spoken and written words unfold sequentially and must be actively held in working memory in order for meaning to emerge. This distinction aligns closely with foundational research in cognitive psychology. George Miller’s influential paper on “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” offered an early estimate of working memory capacity, highlighting its narrow limits. Subsequent research has refined and, in many cases, further constrained this picture. Most of us recognize this limit intuitively—when an argument starts to feel slippery, earlier points fade, and holding the whole thing together becomes difficult.

Alan Baddeley’s multi-component model of working memory emphasizes its functional fragility. Rather than a single container, working memory comprises interacting systems—the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and a central executive that must coordinate everything under time pressure. Disruption to any part of this system reduces the ability to retain and integrate information.

John Sweller’s cognitive load theory adds an important applied dimension. Sweller distinguishes between intrinsic cognitive load (the inherent complexity of the material), extraneous load (the way information is presented), and germane load (the effort required to integrate new knowledge). When extraneous load is high—as it often is in emotionally charged or media-saturated environments—even modest intrinsic complexity can overwhelm available capacity. Visual forms of communication thrive under these conditions, not because they are simpler, but because they distribute cognitive effort differently—offloading work that language requires listeners to perform sequentially.

Anyone who has struggled to follow a complex argument while tired, distracted, or emotionally activated will recognize this moment: understanding does not fail all at once, but begins to slip. Threads are dropped, earlier points fade, and what remains is not disagreement so much as cognitive saturation.

Visual information, by contrast, is processed largely in parallel. It recruits multiple neural systems at once, allowing relationships to be grasped holistically rather than assembled step by step. Images, therefore, feel immediate not because they are simple, but because they distribute cognitive effort differently. They offload work that language requires us to perform step by step.

Listening, in this sense, is not merely attentiveness. It is a sustained cognitive effort.

Frames and Worldviews

When cognitive load increases, the brain does not simply fail; it regulates. One of the primary mechanisms through which this regulation occurs is framing.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has long argued that frames are not merely rhetorical devices or political tools. They are cognitive structures that shape perception itself, determining what counts as relevant, what fades into background noise, and how meaning is assigned before conscious deliberation begins.

This insight resonates strongly with the sociological work of Zygmunt Bauman, who describes how humans render the world intelligible by cutting it up—dividing an otherwise overwhelming reality into categories that permit orientation and action. Classification, in Bauman’s account, is not optional; it is a precondition for meaning-making. Yet the boundaries we draw are historically contingent and socially regulated, even as they feel natural and self-evident to those who inhabit them.

Seen through this lens, frames and worldviews function as cognitive economies. They reduce ambiguity, speed comprehension, and conserve mental energy. Information that fits within an established frame is relatively inexpensive to process; information that challenges it is metabolically costly.

Ian Williams captures this mismatch memorably when he observes that sometimes, “you think you’re talking to biochemistry, but you’re actually talking to poetry.” The problem is not disagreement alone, but misalignment—talking past one another at the level of how meaning is being made.

What is often interpreted as stubbornness, denial, or bad faith may, in many cases, reflect an operating system at the edge of its capacity.

When Capacity Becomes an Invisible Inequality

Cognitive capacity is neither evenly distributed nor stable across contexts. Individuals vary in processing speed, tolerance for ambiguity, and ability to sustain abstract or conflicting ideas in working memory. These capacities are shaped by education, experience, emotional safety, fatigue, stress, and prior saturation, often in ways that remain invisible in public discourse.

As a result, many conversations contain unacknowledged asymmetries. Some participants can linger in complexity, track long argumentative chains, and revise their positions incrementally. Others experience the same demands as disorienting or threatening—not because they are unwilling to engage, but because the cognitive cost is too high in that moment.

Crucially, this is not a moral hierarchy. Faster processing is not a virtue, and slower or more concrete processing is not failure. But when these differences go unacknowledged, they are easily misread as intellectual deficiency or ideological rigidity. In polarized contexts, this misrecognition hardens division, as people attribute cognitive overload to a moral flaw rather than a structural constraint.

From this perspective, polarization is not only a clash of beliefs and values, but a mismatch between cognitive demand and cognitive capacity—between what a conversation requires and what its participants can reasonably carry. By foregrounding cognitive capacity rather than moral intent, this way of looking at polarization may help explain why well-meaning critique so often fails to land—and why calls for “better dialogue” can underestimate the work understanding actually requires.

What This Changes

If meaning-making is cognitively constrained, then persuasion that ignores those constraints is likely to fail. Piling on facts assumes a surplus of attention and working memory that is often not available. Shaming raises emotional arousal and identity threat, further shrinking the capacity required for reflection. Speed and volume privilege slogans and images over careful speech, not because people prefer simplicity, but because complexity demands time and cognitive availability.

This is not an argument against persuasion, but against forms of persuasion that may mistake overload for engagement. Influence that leads to reconsideration is more likely to emerge from conditions of safety, pacing, and relational continuity—conditions that make meaning-making possible in the first place.

A “beautiful question,” in the sense articulated by David Whyte, is not beautiful because it is clever or profound. It is beautiful because it is carryable. Its intention is not to extract an answer, but to create a meeting place. In cognitive terms, a beautiful question alters the conditions under which meaning is made: it slows the tempo of exchange, reduces threat, and lowers the load placed on working memory. It does not demand immediate integration or defence. It invites orientation.

This frontier describes the lived edge between self and world, where encounter becomes possible. At that frontier, intention matters. A question asked to persuade or to win closes the space. A question asked in genuine curiosity changes the cognitive resonance of the exchange. Meaning does not arrive fully formed; it becomes possible because the ground has been prepared.

A similar insight underpins the work of nursing theorist Jean Watson, whose Theory of Human Caring emphasizes presence, intentionality, and relational attunement as prerequisites for healing. While developed in a clinical context, Watson’s insight travels well beyond it: care is not something added after understanding occurs; it is the condition that allows understanding to take place at all. Without a felt sense of safety and regard, cognitive capacity contracts. With it, attention widens, and meaning can be carried.

Seen this way, practices such as asking beautiful questions or engaging in a kind of vulnerable reciprocity are not sentimental gestures or rhetorical techniques. They are cognitive accommodations. They respect the limits under which understanding must operate and redistribute the burden of meaning so that no one is asked to carry it alone. In this sense, care and curiosity converge—not as virtues imposed from above, but as ways of meeting at the frontier where conversation can still happen.

The ethical burden of conversation, then, shifts. It lies not only in what we say, but in how much we ask others to carry—and under what conditions. In a world of moral and political disagreement, understanding the cognitive limits under which humans operate may be a prerequisite for keeping conversation alive at all.

If polarization is understood not only as a clash of values but as a mismatch between cognitive demand and cognitive capacity, then the ethics of conversation shift—from winning arguments to sustaining the conditions under which understanding remains possible. If we continue to ask people to carry cognitive work they cannot reasonably bear, we will keep mistaking exhaustion for refusal—and that mistake has ethical consequences.

Note: The quotations from Ian Williams used here are drawn from a conversation we recorded for The Conversation Lab. I’m grateful for his generosity in thinking aloud with me. The full conversation is available here.