MaggieMae
Reality bits
- Apr 3, 2009
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How often do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of "information" now available on the information highway that you feel is needed to make accurate and hopefully wise decisions, from everyday life occasions to politics? Me? Very often. This article theorizes that our brains aren't yet capable of absorbing EVERYTHING and often results in bad decisions.
I CAN'T THINK!
Read more at link.
I CAN'T THINK!
Imagine the most mind-numbing choice youve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes peoples decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study combinatorial auctions, bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest pricea diabolical puzzle if youre considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.
This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. The bidders reach cognitive and information overload, says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brains emotion regionspreviously held in check by the dorsolateral PFCrun as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. With too much information, says Dimoka, peoples decisions make less and less sense.
So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops.
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The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the horrible mass of books which keeps on growing, and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land, as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of whats out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added information fatigue in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.
The research should give pause to anyone addicted to incoming texts and tweets. The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information. And it has shown that decisions requiring creativity benefit from letting the problem incubate below the level of awarenesssomething that becomes ever-more difficult when information never stops arriving.
Read more at link.