How Too Much Information Can Make Us Stupid and Miserable

From the moment we look at our phone in the morning, we’re almost immediately assaulted by a barrage of information. Emails. Texts. News app alerts. Social media notifications. Weather forecast. Calendar appointments. New podcast episode nudges.

Some experts have also compared our inboxes, news and social media feeds, etc., to slot machines. And while this might not sound so bad — especially if you’re into gambling — it’s no secret that Vegas wasn’t built on winners, isn’t it?

A study by researchers in Germany, published earlier this year, also confirms this. After analysing the highest-ranked pages for several product review search terms on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, the team found that many top results aren’t only low-quality, mass-produced information — they’re often just spam .

But can we hope for the right thing to happen when the capitalist addiction to relentless growth and prioritisation of profit over anything else remains the dominant force in our world?

Our prefrontal cortex — the part of our brain that regulates our thoughts, actions, and emotions — has a ‘novelty bias,’ meaning that its attention is easily hijacked by something new, whether it’s a bird landing on your balcony’s rail to rest (one did just as I was writing this sentence) a text from a friend or a breaking news notification.

several studies have found that even knowing there’s a wealth of (seemingly) reliable information available 24/7 at our fingertips makes us less likely to store new knowledge in our own memory since we can just ‘look it up’ when needed. This is the so-called ‘Google Effect.’

A systematic review of nearly a hundred studies on this issue, published in Frontiers in Psychology last year, found that information overload can lead to emotional and physical exhaustion, burnout, low job satisfaction, poor decision-making, as well as change in cognitive performance, sometimes significant. In other words, constantly giving the no... See more

information pollution

quality of information online is rapidly diminishing .