Here’s a figure to boggle the mind: we consume about 74 gigabytes – nine DVDs worth of data every day.
It’s amazing we’re able to process and make sense of it all. So how do you think straight in the age of information overload?
According to neuroscientist and
psychologist, Daniel Levitin.
“Information overload refers to the
notion that we’re trying to take in more than the brain can handle. We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time.
“We now know that’s not true. That’s a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once.
Trying to juggle any more than that, and you’re going to lose some brainpower.”
Information overload also leads to
something called “decision fatigue.” It’s why Albert Einstein is nearly always pictured wearing a gray suit, why Steve Jobs usually wore a black
turtleneck and why Mark Zuckerberg is almost always sporting his signature gray T-shirt.
They didn’t want to waste valuable
energy making inconsequential
decisions about their clothes.
In order to find out more, CNN’s Dr.
Sanjay Gupta spoke to Levitin, who is professor of Psychology and
Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill
University in Montreal, and the author of “The Organized Mind.”
Dr. Sanjay Gupta: What does it mean to have information overload? How do we know if we’re overloaded?
Daniel Levitin : If you’re making a
bunch of little decisions, like do I read this email now or later? Do I file it? Do I forward it? Do I have to get more information? Do I put it in the Spam folder? That’s a handful of decisions right there, and you haven’t done
anything meaningful.
It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue. Turns out, the neurons that are doing the business of helping us
make decisions, they’re living cells
with metabolism, they require glucose to function, and they don’t distinguish between making important decisions and unimportant ones. It takes up almost as much energy and nutrients to process trivial decisions or important ones.
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