[BITList] information overload and decision-making -- 3/03/15

Tue Mar 3 10:03:38 GMT 2015

interesting read
frank
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Today's selection --from /The Organized Mind/ by Daniel J. Levitin. We 
live in a world with 300 exabytes (300 billion billion) of information, 
an amount that is rapidly expanding to ever greater amounts from this 
already brobdingnagian level. And yet the processing capacity of the 
conscious mind is a mere 120 bits per second. This presents a challenge 
to not only our processing capacity, but also our decision-making ability:

"Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductively and loss of drive 
can result from /decision overload/. Although most of us have no problem 
ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don't 
automatically do this. ... The mere situation of facing ... many [small] 
decisions in daily life creates neural fatigue, leaving no energy for 
the important decisions. Recent research shows that people who were 
asked to make a series of meaningless decisions ... showed poorer 
impulse control and lack of judgment about subsequent decisions. It's as 
though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions 
per day and once we reach that limit, we can't make any more, regardless 
of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent 
neuroscience could be summed up as: /The decision-making network in our 
brain doesn't prioritize./

"Today, we are confronted with an unprecedented amount of information, 
and each of us generates more information than ever before in human 
history. ... Information scientists have quantified all this: In 2011, 
Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did 
in 1986 -- the equivalent of 175 newspapers. During our leisure time, 
not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words 
every day. The world's 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours 
of original programming every day as we watch an average of 5 hours of 
television each day, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video 
images. That's not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video 
every hour. And computer gaming? It consumes more bytes than all other 
media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet.

"Just trying to keep our own media and electronic files organized can be 
overwhelming. Each of us has the equivalent of over half a million books 
stored on our computers, not to mention all the information stored in 
our cell phones or in the magnetic stripe on the back of our credit 
cards. We have created a world with 300 exabytes 
(300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-made information. If each 
of those pieces of information were written on a 3 x 5 index card and 
then spread out side by side, just one person's share -- /your/ share of 
this information -- would cover every square inch of Massachusetts and 
Connecticut combined.

"Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in, 
but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the 
important, and all this information processing makes us tired. Neurons 
are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to 
survive and when they've been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every 
status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get 
from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important 
things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you 
left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you 
just had an argument with.

"The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 
bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the 
traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at anyone time. 
While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this 
has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in 
order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you 
need to have paid conscious attention to it.

"What does this bandwidth restriction -- this information speed limit 
mean in terms of our interactions with others? In order to understand 
one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per 
second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you 
can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Under 
most circumstances, you will not be able to understand three people 
talking at the same time. We're surrounded on this planet by billions of 
other humans, but we can understand only two at a time at the most! It's 
no wonder that the world is filled with so much misunderstanding. With 
such attentional restrictions, it's clear why many of us feel 
overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life."

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Penguin Group
Copyright 2014 by Daniel J. Levin
Pages 6-7

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