Today, each of usa individually generates more information than always before in man history. Our earth is now brimful in an unprecedented book of data. The trouble is, our brains oasis't evolved to be able to process it all.

More And More . . . And More

As old Boeing scientist and New York Times writer Dennis Overbye notes, this information stream contains "more and more information near our lives—where we shop and what we buy, indeed, where we are right now—the economic system, the genomes of countless organisms we tin can't fifty-fifty name yet, galaxies full of stars we oasis't counted, traffic jams in Singapore, and the weather on Mars." That information "tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody's fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing ability than the Apollo mission control."

Information scientists take quantified all this: In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 174 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of united states of america processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day. The globe'due south 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every solar day equally we lookout man an average of v hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images. That's not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every 60 minutes. And estimator gaming? Information technology consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Net.

Merely 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 data stored in our cell phones or in the magnetic stripe on the back of our credit cards. We've created a world with 300 exabytes (300,000,000,000,000,000,000 pieces) of human-fabricated information. If each of those pieces of information were written on a 3-past-five-inch index card and so spread out side by side, but one person'south share—your share of this information—would encompass every square inch of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

Mental Filters On Overdrive

Our brains take the ability to procedure the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the fiddling from the important, and all this information processing makes the states tired.

Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they've been working difficult, we experience fatigue. Every status update y'all read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you lot 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 all-time to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated (past the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and, independently, by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky) at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we tin can pay conscious attending to at any one fourth dimension.

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 function of your experience, yous need to have paid witting attending to it.

What does this bandwidth restriction—this information speed limit—hateful in terms of our interactions with others? In society to understand one person speaking to us, we need to procedure lx bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means yous tin barely understand 2 people talking to you at the aforementioned time. Nether most circumstances, you won't be able to understand three people talking at the aforementioned fourth dimension. Nosotros're surrounded on this planet by billions of other humans, but we can empathise only 2 at a time at the most! It's no wonder that the earth is filled with and so much misunderstanding.

With such attentional restrictions, it's clear why many of u.s. feel overwhelmed by managing some of the virtually bones aspects of life. Part of the reason is that our brains evolved to assistance us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when nosotros might encounter no more than than a thou people beyond the entire span of our lifetime. Walking effectually midtown Manhattan, yous'll pass that number of people in half an hour.

What Paying Attention Costs Your Brain

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, hidden processes make the correct choice most what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the surround to select the nearly important things for us to focus on.

These neurons are collectively the "attentional filter." They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious sensation. This is why most of the perceptual detritus of our daily lives doesn't register, or why, when yous've been driving on the pike for several hours at a stretch, y'all don't call back much of the scenery that has whizzed past: Your attentional organisation "protects" yous from registering it because it isn't accounted of import. This unconscious filter follows certain principles about what it will let through to your witting sensation.

The attentional filter is one of evolution's greatest achievements. In nonhumans, it ensures that they don't get distracted by irrelevant things. Squirrels are interested in nuts and predators and not much else. Dogs, whose olfactory sense is 1 meg times more than sensitive than ours, utilize scent to assemble data about the world more than they use sound, and their attentional filter has evolved to make it so. If you've e'er tried to call your canis familiaris while he'due south smelling something interesting, you know that information technology is very hard to grab his attending with sound—odor trumps sound in the dog brain.

How We Are (And Aren't) Coping

No ane has yet worked out all of the hierarchies and trumping factors in the man attentional filter, but we've learned a great deal about it. When our protohuman ancestors left the cover of the trees to seek new sources of food, they simultaneously opened upwards a vast range of new possibilities for nourishment and exposed themselves to a wide range of new predators. Existence warning and vigilant to threatening sounds and visual cues is what allowed them to survive; this meant allowing an increasing amount of data through the attentional filter.

Humans are, by near biological measures, the nigh successful species our planet has seen. We have managed to survive in about every climate our planet has offered (so far), and the rate of our population expansion exceeds that of any other known organism. Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock deemed for nigh 0.i% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the globe; nosotros now account for 98%. Our success owes in large function to our cerebral capacity, the power of our brains to flexibly handle information. But our brains evolved in a much simpler world with far less information coming at us. Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed.

Successful people—or those who can beget it—utilize layers of other people whose job information technology is to narrow their ain attentional filters. Corporate heads, political leaders, motion picture stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff effectually them who are basically extensions of their own brains, replicating and refining the functions of the prefrontal cortex's attentional filter. For the unlucky rest of usa, though, the fact is that paying attending will proceed to cost our mental faculties a slap-up bargain.