Sunday, September 25, 2011

The problem of excess

Somebody unknown wrote: give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks. In the current age roti, kapada aur makhan has a new companion: information. Information has become integral part of our lives, and we have devised many mechanisms to obtain them. In 90s and early 2000s, we saw revolution is terms of internet and satellite technology, as we amassed various methods to obtain quick information. But now we live in age where there is an overload of information. This overload of information is a problem of excess, and many of us will have to think deeply about its consequences.

Information overload has many outcomes. One of them is multitasking. We tend to tackle many different issues at a given period of time by dividing our attention to various tasks at hand. We will have to introspect about this division of attention. Researchers at Stanford University have looked into the concept of social media multitasking and it consequence on cognitive control (PNAS paper), and their results show that attention-to-detail decreases as multitasking increases. This is obvious because the average time that one spends on each task is reduced, and the continuity of thought is interrupted every time one switches task. This can be easily evidenced when we browse on the internet. Just observe how many tabs are open in your window, this a fair indication of how your attention is divided between tasks. Another assessment you could make is to check how many times you log-in to your e-mail. You will be surprised that one does this more than the required number. Why do we do this? After all, e-mail gives us the freedom of access at our own will, but even then we sometimes over use it.

What is further surprising about the Stanford study is that it shows that heavy-multitaskers tend to be more susceptible to interference from irrelevant information. This is indeed a cause for concern as our decision making can be affected due to multitasking.

Now the important question is how do you overcome the problem of information overload? First thing is to acknowledge that we cannot stop the inflow of information, so the choice at our hand is to filter the incoming information carefully. We will have to somehow set priority on the basis of importance and interest, and stick to one task at a time. In this context let me give 2 examples of great minds:

1) Isaac Newton was asked how he could successfully solve so many scientific problems. His answer was that he paid patient attention to the problem at hand and thought about it for long periods of time. Some of his contemporaries have mentioned that Newton could think about a problem not for hours or days but for months. Such unperturbed attention is indeed hard to achieve, especially in the present context, but it is indeed fascinating to learn that Newton had this remarkable capability.

2) Henry Poincare, who was one of the greatest mathematicians, describes in detail about his mathematical creativity, and in there he mentions that a conscious unsuccessful effort to solve a problem is usually followed by a unconscious effort by his brain, and this unconscious effort further leads to an answer that one was seeking while working consciously. For this unconscious effort to perform well, we need to put-in concentrated effort during the conscious effort, and this can happen only when we perform a single task at a time.

The above two examples give an overview of how deep, unperturbed thinking has interesting consequences, and also indicates that one thing at a time is indeed far more productive than multitasking.

It is an intriguing situation we live in today. Around 20 years ago people were struggling hard to obtain information, and the most powerful people were the ones who had the information. Now we are in a more democratic situation where information is just a matter of a mouse click but we struggle hard to discriminate the intellectual wheat from the chaff. The problem of excess is here to stay, it is up to us make a choice whether we want to multi-task or multiply our effort on each task.

There is a short, funny movie made by XEROX on Information Overload Syndrome: you may want to watch it.

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