does information overload affect my memory
Posted by briangreene on February 28, 2007
I can’t remember who was talking to me about this; 
twaz dcox yesterday!
from IT@INTEL Blog
- The brain can’t just switch back and forth instantly. It takes time to regain its focus after the interrupt is over. Interrupted tasks suffer, by some estimates, a 20-40% efficiency loss in time to complete when compared to uninterrupted tasks. (Assume, conservatively, that these “switching costs” come to a minute per interrupt – and with an interrupt every few minutes, do the math!)
- The endless interruptions dumb you down. HP reported research they’ve sponsored in the UK which showed that the IQ scores of information workers subjected to distracting alerts are reduced by 10 points, twice the reduction observed in people smoking marijuana…
- The ubiquity of interrupting devices means that people can no longer engage in long stretches of “thinking time”. This is alarming, because many kinds of creative work – inventing, problem solving, authoring, etc – require hours of concentration to be done really well.
I got the train to Cork and back. 35 people were on the train down, a shocker! only 35 paying passengers (maybe some OAPs) the count was by CIE staff. Flying above me on low fares those time stressed travelers of security check in.
I wrote up 10 A4 pages in pencil, ten pages of thought in comfort and got a days work done too. Where are those software agents we were promised to sift through our data before we had to. ???
