Thinking Overload Quotes & Sayings

Traditional ways to deal with information
reading, listening, writing, talking
are painfully slow in comparison to "viewing the big picture." Those who survive information overload will be those who search for information with broadband thinking but apply it with a single-minded focus. — Kathryn Alesandrini

Too much information is key to a more diverse, non-deterministic future. Once we have information overload we have choice, we never know which instructions a computer or a person is going to load into their thinking. We look at our newborn babies in a hospital maternity ward, and newborn computers stacked on a pallet, and we never know what rhetoric they may encounter, which instructions or question/answer sets they will leave more permanently loaded in their mental processing. Even the variance of permanence is a dimension no one knows, and will shape them or the world they shape. — Lance Miller

More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits. In act 1, Emily discovers why thinking requires so much energy, and develops new techniques for dealing with having too much to do. Paul learns about the space limits of his brain, and works out how to deal with information overload. Emily finds out why it's so hard to do two things at once, and rethinks how she organizes her work. Paul discovers why he is so easily distracted, and works on how to stay more focused. Then he finds out how to stay in his brain's "sweet spot." In the last scene, Emily discovers that her problem-solving techniques need improving, and learns how to have breakthroughs when she needs them most. — David Rock

Everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage. — Jane Smiley

everybody knows too much about everything to know anything. And somehow that turns into everyone thinking everything is probably the opposite of what it is, or maybe not the opposite, but something else anyway. Everything you always thought is always proved wrong so the only way to act is against whatever you think. — James W. Blinn

What's next for technology and design? A lot less thinking about technology for technology's sake, and a lot more thinking about design. Art humanizes technology and makes it understandable. Design is needed to make sense of information overload. It is why art and design will rise in importance during this century as we try to make sense of all the possibilities that digital technology now affords. — John Maeda