At MindWorks, we love talking about how the mind works, but it’s also equally important to understand what prevents it from working effectively. That’s why we love the recent article in Newsweek about research done by Angelika Dimoka at the Center for Neural Decision-Making at Temple University. Dimoka and her team looked at the impact of the so-called “information overload” to determine if it’s real and, if so, what its impact could be. The research has some things to teach us about how we live in the Information Age and what we could be doing better.
Information Overload is Real
First, it seems that information overload is real. The impact of more and more information being thrown at us is that we’re less able to make effective decisions about what’s important, or even make effective decisions, period. The activity in our brains actually moves from one region – the one good at making decisions – to another that raises our anxiety and frustration and urges us to make a decision, any decision, while discounting the important criteria that go into good decision-making. Think of it as filling your office with little paper notes until you can no longer get in the door to do your work.
The Biggest Casualty is Creativity
If all you do is work requiring no creativity or creative problem-solving… wait, scratch that. Of course you have work (at your job, home, or elsewhere) that requires creative thinking. But information overload impacts creative decisions most. Dimoka’s research shows that, to get to creative answers, we need to slow down and let our brains do what they do without trying to force-feed them more information. In other words, we need to stop drinking from the fire hose.
The problem is that our brains appear to be wired to notice change in such a fundamental way that newness trumps value of information. If a new email comes to your inbox, your mind sees that as more important than the email you just read, ignoring the relative value of the information itself.
So, how do you counter this impact and make great creative decisions? The answer may be as simple as this: stop thinking. If you consciously stop working the information over in your head, you let your unconscious mind – which seemingly is better at creative matters – process the problem and come up with the answer.
It may seem counterintuitive to turn off our electronics and stop the flow of information to improve our understanding of the information we’ve consumed through those media, but that’s precisely what research is showing. Though we love our shiny gadgets, just about the best thing we can do to get the most value from them is to turn them off. For a little while, anyway.