Internet and Information Overload : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Internet and Information Overload

Category: Culture
Posted on: August 6, 2007 11:17 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

Thanks for your patience while I was on vacation. If I wasn't so jet-lagged, I'd probably feel really relaxed. (I'm currently in that circadian netherworld that not even caffeine can fix.)

Hopefully, I'll get around to blogging about the books I read while away. But for now, let me just say that I enjoyed my break from the internet. I think we underestimate the cognitive toll of being online all day. At first, I experienced the usual symptoms of withdrawal: there was the vague unease of disconnection, of being severed from this infinitude of information. But then I realized that I didn't need Mapquest, I just needed a map. And that I didn't need to continually refresh the nytimes.com; the dead tree edition would suffice. And that I could survive just fine without reading my favorite bloggers and webMD and wikipedia. It was pretty nice to read a chapter in a novel without being distracted by that ping sound coming from my inbox.

Of course, here I am again, transfixed in front of my computer. The human brain craves information and stimulation, and Google lets us sate our craving. But is there such a thing as too much information? Too much stimulation? Can our neural networks be overwhelmed by the electronic networks of the web? Those are my weary, jet-lagged thoughts from vacation. Being away from the internet for a few days gave me a fleeting glimpse of my brain circa 1994, and I kinda liked it.

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Comments (4)

I always notice this effect when I am doing field research. I am not a huge internet junkie (I do have a life), but I spend 2-3 hours online altogher throughout the day. For the first couple of days in the field I am anxious on everything I'm "missing" (including ScienceBlogs updates!), and feel like I'm getting behind on everything, and then it fades and I feel much more relaxed and by the end of my trip I am almost dreading coming back to the constant "pressure" to stay up to date on all the breaking news, posts, etc. Of course as soon as I'm home I make a beeline for my computer, so I can't be dreading it that much...but it is an interesting phenomenon I had never really thought about in depth, great post!

Posted by: Anne-Marie | August 6, 2007 6:05 PM

The bottleneck these days is not having access to information (thanks Internet), or even having access to good and relevant information (thanks Google), but "upgrading our brain" to the cognitive and emotional demands and opportunities that this new environment presents.

Taking some good vacations is certainly part of a good training program...

Posted by: Alvaro | August 6, 2007 7:32 PM

Welcome back.
I seriously wonder if one of the environmental realities that any biological predilection toward autism might contend with is a world with an unprecedented amount of continual stimulation.

Posted by: Ted | August 6, 2007 9:35 PM

I am not so sure that being plugged into the internet and wired with a cell phone and blackberry (or whatever that has now morphed into) is putting any more overload on our brains than we ever had before. After all, in any job above a menial task, a person is busy all day doing stuff. And what is all of this extra "overload" but reading and talking? And didn't people do alot of that kind of thing anyway, well before our modern day of information overload? I have wondered, myself, how am I able to maintain and do all these twenty-first century things? But maybe Emily Dickenson, sitting in her quiet Amherst, MA home in the nine-teenth century reading, and writing poetry, maybe she had just as much information overload as I have.

Posted by: Daniel | August 8, 2007 12:50 PM