Future Now
The IFTF Blog
the neuroscience of information obesity
I recently heard a podcast of a lecture given by Dr. David Kessler, Professor of Pediatrics and Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF and author of The End of Overeating. He discussed recent research showing that given an unlimited supply of highly varied kinds of food, animals will overeat and become overweight. It happens to mice, to monkeys, and to humans.
Doesn't it seem obvious that given an unlimited supply of highly varied kinds of information, we will overindulge on that as well? And that we will soon discover in the lab that the same kinds of neural rewards (i.e., dopamine bursts) that are being uncovered in overeating will turn out to be happening when we over-eat information?
In ten years we’ll look back on our current practice of wide-open exposure to the Internet as a time of ignorance, is my guess. We’ll see the emergence of technological solutions to keep us data-thin, such as devices that disconnect after a certain amount of time, or much narrower filters for information-health.
Because right now, as we know, we’re already drowning. Check out this beautiful graphic of how much data, in bytes, we consume today. Artist Rob Vargas created it from a study called How Much Information by the University of California at San Diego.
(via neatorama.
According to the report, "consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video)."
Here's the kicker: Information at work is not included.