Human Response to Cognitive Workload

Context: This piece started as a question to a researcher in Psychology.

There's a topic I've been trying to find research results for some time.
I call it "(Human) Cognitive Response to Workload".

There is a bunch of qualitative data for "Physiological response to Workload" available - e.g. US Navy for "stokers" working in different levels of heat.

I found Prof. Lisanne Bainbridge in the UK. She's retired now. Her field is 'mental load' and couldn't point me at research in the area or help me properly phrase my question.
She pointed me at Penny Sanderston, now Prof. at University of Queensland.

What I'm interested in is any information to apply to Software Developers and other Knowledge workers:

• In the short, medium & longer term (day, week, year) how do you maximise cognitive output?
• What roles do sleep, recreation & holidays play in 'recharging' cognitive abilities?
• For different levels (degrees of difficulty) of cognitive task (or skilled manual task) what are the optimum work rates and duty cycles? (ratio of work/rest)

Related areas are Rates of Error & 'tiredness' effect on maximum cognitive task.
[James T. Reason has very good work on "Human Error" and "Organisational Error". His work is used extensively in Aviation and Nuclear safety. He originated "the swiss-cheese" model of accidents.]

Solving 'Spam'

It never ceases to amaze me, the Politician attitude to Porn and 'Spam' & it's friend, malware.

Porn is "bad, bad, bad" and Pollies show very high interest - including policy & legislation.

Lots of angst & trashing around about eradicating something that 2,000+ years of writing/publishing shows can't be controlled/legislated away. The physical publishing world & (cable) TV show that the only effective is means of control is to allow-but-license.

Same as tobacco. Never going to eradicate it, only control it.

'Restricted Content' access can only be controlled iff:

• every page is 'classified' at source (meta-tags),
• an unforgeable Internet 'proof-of-age' card/system is created,
• there are criminal penalties for subverting the system, forging identities or misclassifying pages,
• there are no legal jurisdictions outside 'the system' [e.g. on the high-seas],
• all browsers enforce 'the rules',
• and browsers can't be built/written to ignore 'the rules'.

i.e. It is impossible to eliminate 'restricted content', and possibly provably so...