(Newswire.net — October 27, 2014) — In an article in the Psychology Today, American neurologist and author Richard E. Cytowic M.D. questioned our brains ability to handle all the necessary information modern society requires.
“We lie awake at night, worrying that we’ve grown inefficient and indecisive, and poor at prioritizing,” said Cytowic in an article. Our work, relations and our home life are all affected, he said, “public and private compartments no longer exist.”
Cytowic said the reason we are feeling constantly under pressure is because our brain’s attention capacity has profound limitations.
“Blame our stone–age brain for this unhappy state. We have exactly the same brain [capacity] that our distant ancestors had,” he said.
It is all about switching attention that our brain uses to prioritize tasks. A higher rate of switching attention incurs at a higher energy cost, and we’re not good at it, “especially when you consider how many items vie for our attention each hour compared to what our ancient brains were made to handle,” Cytowic wrote.
The human brain operates at low speeds of about 120 bits (~15 bytes) per second, which is, for example, five thousand times lower than a fiber optic connection. If it takes about 60 bits per second to pay attention to one person speaking, that is half our allotted bandwidth just to comprehend and we still need to give proper response which uses communication.
Multitasking, however, is not something new and too complicated to perform but it degrades our performance. It wears us out more than we realize, “which makes it even harder to sort the trivial from the important,” wrote Cytowic.
Therefore, that is the reason we often miss something in our surroundings, because there is a lot to miss in modern society. Apart for our normal behavior, our attention is divided into various stimuluses’ that came with the digital age: Smartphones, Internet based exchange of information, faster and more demanding communication, not only amongst humans but between us and various devices as well, the necessity of ‘seeing the whole picture’, etc.
“Management experts, efficiency specialists, and others have weighed in on the problem of overload, categorizing your commitments, structuring your to–do lists, and coordinating your commitments. But no amount of organization can truly address the problem. We already hit overload 10 or 20 years ago,” said Cytowic, that’s why all of us are stressed.
“The obvious solution is to start saying no and have fewer things to juggle in the first place,” Cytowic added.