Brainwork. David A. SousaЧитать онлайн книгу.

Figure 1.3: How much we remember in a learning situation depends largely on when it is presented. We remember the first and last items best.

Too Much Information or Too Little Attention?

      Every instant, the human brain does an enormous amount of information processing as signals race across neurons to keep our minds alert and our bodies alive. Some experts claim that there are as many as a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) instructions zooming around the brain every second. Granted, many of these signals are handling internal information, such as body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, movement, and other such functional data. But even if this estimate is only partially close to reality, why does such processing power prevent us from coping with external information overload? Actually, the problem is not processing capacity so much as it is attention span.

      As we noted earlier, working memory has a limited capacity. The human brain tries to focus on a small number of items to determine whether they should be stored or rejected. As more items enter the system, attention shifts among them and focus diminishes. In effect, we lose our ability to concentrate on single items long enough to determine their importance. Items blur into a vague mass of unknown importance, and the brain responds with frustration and anxiety.

      British marketing analyst Gary Giddings offers a simple mathematical expression for this phenomenon.⁷ He says that the amount of total attention available (A) is equal to the number of items in an information source (s) multiplied by the amount of attention needed to examine each item (a). Thus, A = a × s. Let’s take a closer look at the import of this expression. Total attention available, or A, can be both a constant and a variable. At work, we subconsciously set the attention span time for items based on our previous experiences handling similar problems and by estimating how much time we can devote to the task before something else comes along. As a result, most people have a fairly constant attention span (A) when dealing with information at work. Consequently, if A is constant, then as the number of information items (s) increases, the amount of time spent on each (a) has to decrease. Giddings wisely avoids putting numbers into his equation, because the attention resources and allocations are not that precise.

      The total attention available, however, can vary dramatically when the situation changes. For example, the time we are able to attend to a task may be much longer when we are dealing with information related to home activities, such as interacting with a spouse or children, or when involved in a hobby. When I was a superintendent of schools, I often had to struggle to concentrate for just a few minutes on what seemed to be a silly problem that someone should have solved at a lower level. (I had lots of these on some days.) Yet, I could go home that same day and spend hours concentrating on an article about new discoveries in brain research. My attention span increased when the situation changed to something of greater interest to me. This example also explains why most of us are apt to respond to the ring of a cell phone even though we are trying to complete a work-related project. Oh, who could that be? How important is it? Interest perks up, and some of the attention resources devoted to the work project are diverted to musing about—and perhaps answering—the phone call. We might justify this action by saying that we are simply multitasking, but as we shall see in the next chapter, that explanation just doesn’t cut it.

Too Much Information May Not Be Good for Your Health

      You know the drill. You want to get some information for a presentation you are giving to the senior vice presidents. As part of your presentation, you want to show your competitors’ sales numbers from the last quarter. You decide to search the Internet or an online database: Hmm, which of the 200,000 sites should I search? Which of the 150 press reports on these companies should I read? Oh, great! There are conflicting sales data from different sources. Which ones should I trust?

      Information overload is described as the feeling you get when being inundated by too much information at too fast a pace to use it appropriately. It is often associated with a sense of being overwhelmed and a loss of control. It is not a new phenomenon. In the Bible we find, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”⁸ The eighteenth-century French author Voltaire noted, “The multitude of books is making us ignorant.” Only a few decades ago, the major sources of information were radio, television, printed media, and phone calls. Today, we have technologies, such as the Internet, personal digital assistants, computers, smartphones, iPads, and iPods, that allow us to send and receive music, videos, text messages, instant messages, and digital attachments, as well as set up our own social media pages, blogs, and websites.

      A few people have the remarkable ability to scan and process enormous amounts of information quickly and accurately—but they are very few and far between. It doesn’t always mean that those people will make a good or even a timely decision. I once had a boss who insisted on amassing copious data and analyzing every possible aspect of a problem and the potential solutions, no matter how trivial the problem. He would write each chunk of data, option, and possible consequence on separate index cards and shuffle them around a table in his office like a battlefield commander planning an invasion. By the time he made a decision, either the problem had resolved itself or no one cared about it anymore.

      Most of us have much smaller processing limits, and when those limits are reached, anxiety begins to build. This anxiety is described as perceived information overload, and it may not be good for your health. Researchers Shalini Misra and Daniel Stokols of the University of California, Irvine worked with nearly 500 college students to determine how they responded to perceived information overload.⁹ The students were to consider two sources of information over a six-week period: cyber-based and place-based. The cyber-based sources were those in which information flowed through the Internet and portable technologies. Place-based sources were those that did not involve electronic technologies but came instead from social interactions in physical settings at home, in the workplace, or in the community. These sources also included environmental pollution, noise, crowding, and commuting and traffic congestion.

      At the beginning of the study, the participants completed questionnaires about their perceived information overload, perceived stress, health status, activities for contemplation and reflection, and their sensation-seeking levels. This last category was studied to test the notion of whether high sensation seekers would be more resistant to stress than low sensation seekers. Participants answered questions about their general health and identified any stressful life events (such as separation or divorce, illness, personal injury, or death of a family member) that occurred during the previous year. The survey on perceived information overload from cyber-based sources asked the participants if they: (1) were frequently overwhelmed with electronic messages and phone calls, (2) had too many instant messages, as well as Facebook and MySpace messages, (3) were pressured to respond quickly to such messages, (4) were spending too much time attending to their technology, and (5) received more messages than they could handle. Questions regarding place-based sources of information asked whether they (1) felt hassled by their commute to and from work, (2) were bothered by noisy work or home environments, (3) were overwhelmed by the demands of their workplace, and (4) had too little time for rest and recreational activities.