Our brains evolved to help us survive life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time in which we might encounter no more than 1000 people across the entire span of our life… today, in a bustling city we can encounter 1000 people over the course of just half an hour. Our brains aren’t built to withstand the information overload of today’s world.
Here’s to being gentle with yourself when you want to do less, know less, talk less. The western world pathologizes any of us who don’t want to conform, but I’m telling you that you, as you exist, are a perfectly natural being. It’s the world around us that’s not natural. It may sound like satire but I mean it when I say: in a world full of more, be less.
MUM’S THE WORD is a newsletter featuring multimedia musings and unpopular opinions by yours truly. Take a walk inside my mind palace. Stay awhile.
These days I’m trying to do less. Less work. Less texting. Less TV. I’ve lowered my expectations drastically for what I can and should accomplish in a day. It’s a key part to my personal practice of unplugging from the capitalist matrix and rejecting the productivity paradigm.
But one of the biggest obstacles to allowing myself to do less is the deluge of information that is constantly at my fingertips. The FOMO! What if I miss out on an important current event? Or an opportunity? What about pop culture moments? The latest celebrity break up? The newest incomprehensible string of wild words that some right wing nut tweets? I’ve gotta know what’s happening in the world!
But our brains have not evolved to accommodate this level of information influx. The rate of technological advancement and knowledge creation has moved lightyears faster than our brains can feasibly adapt to. Let’s contextualize this a bit.
In 1900, knowledge doubled every 400 years. A century later we entered the information age, and in 2000 knowledge was doubling every 8 years. Today? Today knowledge doubles every 12 hours. For some, this is thrilling. Human ingenuity! Look at us go! For me, this is terrifying. We’re hurtling towards an unknown future that is increasingly out of human hands. Ray Kurzweil predicted that the singularity will occur around 2045— this is when the abilities of a computer overtake the abilities of the human brain, and technological growth will become increasingly fast and uncontrollable. Steven Hawking warned that singularity could ultimately spell the end of humankind.
I don’t know if they’re right. Future Sarah might find out. But until then, I do know that we are not machines. We are not designed to compete with the computing powers of technology.
A group of UCL cognitive neuroscientists published a study in 2020 that suggests there is a very real metabolic limit to our brains’ information processing capacity. If you’re human and alive in 2022, you’ve likely experienced what we call “information overload”— you’ve felt overwhelmed by the amount of information you’re receiving at any given time, possibly frustrated that you cannot concurrently process and store all of the data in your brain. Maybe you didn’t hear your partner tell you something because you were watching a TikTok at the same time, or you have to read the same paragraph in your book four times over in order to actually process what’s written because you can’t help but eavesdrop on an interesting conversation happening nearby at the same time.
Well there’s a neurophysiological reason that you cannot multitask with information processing! Essentially, this UCL study demonstrates that our perceptual capacity is limited by an overall limit to the energy supply to our brain. Our brain constantly receives the same amount of energy —about 20% of our body’s metabolic energy— regardless of mental processing demands. This study found that when our mental task becomes harder (perhaps due to the difficulty of the task itself, or perhaps due to distractions outside of our desired focus) the brain allocates less energy to the neurons responding to information outside of the focus of our attention. So when a given task becomes more mentally demanding, our brain naturally decreases our sensitivity to other stimuli in order to tune it out.
Guess what that means? We can’t overcome information overload with more focus. It’s empirically impossible. There is a hard limit to our brain’s metabolic capacity, and at capacity we will fail to process some amount of the information we are consuming. And when our brain is chronically at capacity trying to stay focused and productive, we have less self control, we are not as helpful or prosocial, and we are more impulsive. This is why I’m trying to do less.
I’ve been multitasking for most of my life. I thought I had to in order to keep up. Keep up with what? I truly don’t know— that’s the wild thing about socialization. And when the products of my multitasking did not meet my standards, I rationalized that it was because I needed to be more focused. I put the blame on my internal locus of control. But now, I understand it’s far more complex than that. The systems and society that I am embedded within are largely to blame. So the solution is not to increase my focus, but rather to decrease my focus.
I need to decrease my focus on the vast information ecosystem that surrounds me. I need my information vacuum to have a filter with the finest mesh, so that fewer things make it through to me. Fewer and fewer data points meet the threshold of importance and relevance in my life to be processed by my precious brain. I’m caring about fewer things, but I am able to care more deeply. Connect more deeply. Understand more deeply.
I’m allowing my brain to be unfocused more often. To be— *gasp* — “unproductive.” The reformed workaholic in me finds it hilarious that science shows time and again that the unfocused brain is necessary and helpful! If you want to learn, understand, and remember more, you need to consume less information. You need to shift your brain from collection mode to connection mode.
When we our brains are constantly in collection mode, consuming information left and right, we don’t get a chance to process, synthesize, or connect the data points and ideas we’ve collected. But when we allow ourselves to be unfocused, our brain engages a circuit called the “default mode network” or DMN, something scientists jokingly call the Do Mostly Nothing circuit. When we unfocus, the Do Mostly Nothing circuit gets all 20% of our body’s energy dedicated to the brain, and with that energy the DMN opens pathways in the brain to revisit old memories, travel back and forth between past, present, and future, integrate new ideas and recombine old ones. When we let our brain enter into this state, we experience increased creativity and capacity for divergent thinking. When we unfocus, we can become not only more effective (and dare I say… productive?) but also more compassionate and self-aware.
So if you’ve hit a wall, leave your work unfinished for now. If you’re feeling saturated with communications, leave your text messages unanswered. I am giving you my ~very authoritative~ permission to do less.
Be easy on your brain. Listen to instrumental music and let your mind wander. Go for a walk and let your brain unravel. Spend some time in your garden and let yourself daydream. Lose the sense of urgency and let your thoughts flow like honey. It’s very likely that you will find greater happiness, fulfillment, and ease when you do less.