The History of Cognitive Overload

Unravel the intricate journey of cognitive overload, a concept deeply rooted in our understanding of human cognition. Explore its historical evolution, from its initial conception to its modern-day implications, and delve into the profound impact it has on our daily lives.

Satisficing

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior

• It prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter
• All of us engage in satisficing every time we clean our homes
• If we got down on the floor with a toothbrush every day to clean the grout, the house would be spotless. But few of us go to this much trouble.

Shadow Work

Companies large and small have off-loaded work onto the backs of consumers

• Things that used to be done for us, as part of the value-added service of working with a company, we are now expected to do ourselves
• At the grocery store, we’re expected to bag our own groceries and, in some supermarkets, to scan our own purchases
• We pump our own gas at filling stations
• Telephone operators used to look up numbers for us
• Some companies no longer send out bills for their services
• Collectively, this is known as shadow work
• Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it

Want What You Already Have

The easiest way to be happy is to want what you already have

Third principle of attention

Switching attention comes with a high cost

• Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time
• The plethora of information and the technologies that serve it changed the way we use our brains
• Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system
• You are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you take charge of this process to good effect
• Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today, it has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%-85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items.

That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.

Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine

When dopamine is released, it unlocks them, like a key in your front door, and they start firing tiny electrical impulses that stimulate other neurons in their network.

• The system also works for auditory filtering- if we are expecting a particular pitch or timbre in a sound, our auditory neurons become selectively tuned to those characteristics.

As knowledge becomes more available- and decentralized through the Internet- the notions of accuracy and authoritativeness have become clouded

Conflicting viewpoints are more readily available than ever, and in many cases they are disseminated by people who have no regard for facts or truth

• Our brains focus on vivid, social accounts more than dry, boring, statistical accounts
• We are easily swayed by first-person stories and vivid accounts of a single experience
• The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload is a fascinating look at our minds

This comes with a cost

Unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload

• Although most of us have no trouble ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don’t automatically do this.
• The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second
• This bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time
• Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism
• It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness

Information Overload

The average American owns thousands of times more possessions than the average hunter-gatherer

• In a biological sense, we have more things to keep track of than our brains are designed to handle
• We need not fear cognitive overload
• More than ever, effective external systems are available for organizing, categorizing, and keeping track of things
• Too much information could be harmful to your mental health
• Printed words were promiscuous- it was impossible to control where they went or who would receive them, and they could circulate easily without the author’s knowledge or control
• Such externalization of facts and stories meant people would no longer need to mentally retain large quantities of information themselves and would come to rely on stories and facts conveyed in written form by others

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