There really is way too much information and there really are way too many distractions in our culture, as the first article we read pointed out. You may find that when working on a project for school you are actually spending most of that time filing through information or surfing the web on things like digg or facebook (well that applies to me at least). I have one friend who is so ADD, I swear to you he gets distracted from his own distractions when trying to meet a deadline very late the night before. This may be true for a lot of people but what do you expect when we have this magic place called the internet for most of our refernces where any information, valid or absurd, can be pulled up by hitting the "enter" key. This is why some of us, at times, actually begin to hate the internet.
Now as a wise friend pointed out, it's important to differentiate between information and truth, but that seems impossinle to do when we can get hundreds of thousands of results for any given topic on our favorite search engine. Luckily we have things like the "Power Search" as they showed us at the Library presentations (Freshman, you should know what I'm talking about), where we can use a filter to get legit resources from peer reviewed academic journals by experts in their fields. We still can get aburd amounts of results but at least it helps us in the process of narrowing down our potential reading material.
I believe I can remember a lot of details just from reading or watching something one time but there is always a limit to the information we can hold. And as one of the articles talked about, too much infromation can be a bad thing. I liked when it brought up the book Blink because I agree with the argument of instinct. Oddly enough, I base a lot of my life on instinct, so it makes sense to me that acting on instinct is often better then searching you mind for information that may be unreliable. This is why you were probably told to always go with your first instinct whenever taking a standardized test. If you over think something and try to go through all the information in your head you may manage to throw yourself off the righ track.
So though knowing things is good, the proverbial "Man who knew too much" doesn't seem all that absurd.
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I've recently been wondering if the distractions in our culture caused by too much information have anything to do with the number of cases of ADD and ADHD. Are we teaching our kids to constantly change their focus as they click on new links or chat with ten friends at once or respond to those annoying pop-up ads online? Most people don't even sit down to read an entire book anymore... I mean, why do it if you can just read the cliff notes and save hours? I think our culture encourages the attention deficit many adults moan about. Historically you don't read much about people who had a disease that made it hard for them to concentrate. You do read about people who didn't concentrate at school or work and who were then held accountable for their lack of attention. I'm not saying that ADD and ADHD are not real diseases, because I believe they are. However, they way in which our culture transmits information seems to encourage more cases of those diseases than would otherwise be present.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the point that much of the time we may make better decisions when we rely on our instinct. But we have to wonder where these “instincts”, some are truly imbedded in our genetic code like the “Fight or Flight” switch. Others though, like out “gut” feeling on tests can’t be attributed to true instinct, if only because we had to have learned them at one point in time. These could be better seen as the instant transfer of knowledge from our long-term memory to our short-term. As you said “there is always a limit to the information we can hold”, which is true, but mainly concerning our short-term memory. We can only process so much information at one time with any degree of efficiency, a sort of “Information Overload.” This is what I saw you getting at when you mention our “ADD culture”, we have so much information available to us that when we try to access, via the Internet or what not, it can overload what our short-term memory is capable of handling. I would disagree though, with the statement: the proverbial “Man who knew too much" doesn't seem all that absurd”, or at least the way I see you using it.
ReplyDeleteWe have no clue how much the human mind is capable of storing or learning. At times the statement that we use only 10% of our brains seems cliché, and now-a-days that is pretty much been proved wrong, but it still seems like we are capable of so much more then we think( and I’m not talking about telekinesis or what not). I agree with the phrase “knowledge is power”, any sort of power you wish to gain. An integral part of the Human condition is our desire to always learn more, our curiosity. We should always seek to gain more knowledge, but we run into problems when we start to over analyze what we have learned. Everything is interconnected, and therefore everything can lead from one topic to another. That of course only breeds confusion. Hope this all made a bit of sense.