Some thoughts on the information flood of modern society.
I woke up this morning, scrolled through Zhihu for a bit, and saw an article QbitAI posted last night introducing a new piece of research.
The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
It belongs to the field of neurocognitive science, and its central idea is that there is an enormous gap between how much information humans take in and how much they can process.
"Human information processing runs at only 10 bits per second, yet our sensory systems can collect data at a rate of one billion bits per second."
I skimmed the paper (with help from DeepSeek). Setting aside for now the paper’s academic value and how well-accepted its methodology is, and although I have doubts about the specific numbers in the conclusion, it is undeniable that, at present, the amount of information we receive is far larger than the amount we can process.
Actually I had been thinking along these lines for a while already. The reason is that I often feel I take in too much information to process it properly, a kind of helplessness of drowning in the information flood. Purely in theory, because of the structural limits of the human brain, the vast majority of people cannot process information in parallel; at best they can do it concurrently, and with worrying efficiency. This means that even outside modern society, for a primitive human, processing the information they perceived would have been difficult. But primitive humans obviously did not have this problem, and I guess the credit again goes to the brain, which compresses/filters out invalid information, or noise, through some such processing.
Of course, research in neurobiology and cognitive science is not what I want to focus on here (nor am I able to do such research). The point of this thinking is how to adopt an active strategy to cope with the ever-expanding information flood of modern society.
I believe that as the times progress, the human brain must be evolving as well; in other words, its capacity to process information keeps improving (for now this is only a guess, of course). But clearly this change is far too slow to keep up with the speed at which new information is produced and perceived, especially the massive proliferation of invalid information.
Before I start the thoughts below, a disclaimer first: everything that follows is personal speculation, not fully academically verified, and is shown only as a record of my thinking process rather than as academic research or conclusions.
As far as the brain/nervous system goes, from my shallow knowledge I know that the knowledge we learn and the memories we hold are, in essence, different connections formed between neurons, either permanent or lasting for a certain time. The formation and disappearance of these connections is a dynamic process that can be strengthened or weakened through training. What does this tell us? When you take in a large amount of weakly related information, the connections in this system become complex and chaotic; in other words, the noise has too much influence. Translated into real life: you keep randomly browsing all kinds of websites/platforms, and even though what you see may be content the recommendation system has matched to your taste, the huge amount of invalid, weakly correlated information greatly impairs your processing of information. Seen from a certain angle, you cannot extract many features, or even any features at all, and the compression of the information is pitifully small; so even though the volume of this information is large, taking it in does you more harm than good.
So the solution is practically begging to be said: yes, be proactive. Actively choose your information; or rather, be clear from the start about what you want to know, and then keep reinforcing the connections during the search, instead of random-walking through the complex information flood. Setting aside the randomness that may arise in the physical world, we can at least control our information intake in the virtual world: perceive whatever you want. Even though this goes very much against human nature; for instance, short videos were invented precisely to capture your attention, and that mechanism is very hard to overcome.
Actually I believe there must be a lot of related research in this area, but I have not looked it up; maybe I will add more later once I learn more and have more thoughts. The above is only a record of some immature personal thinking.
As a side note, the author’s academic background is also quite interesting: an undergraduate degree in food engineering from Jiao Tong University, a bachelor’s in biological engineering from Cornell, a master’s in education and psychology from Cambridge, and a PhD in Neurobiology from Caltech.
Addendum:
It just occurred to me that random walks have their upside too. For example, I came across this very paper by chance while scrolling through Zhihu; without it, perhaps I would not have written this post. This is somewhat like the exploration-versus-exploitation relationship in reinforcement learning; in the end it comes down to a personal tradeoff. When you are burned out, be less random, take in less information, and think more to actively reinforce the knowledge connections you already have. When you want to explore new knowledge / break through the walls of your existing knowledge, random-walk more and go explore new information.
Translated from the Chinese original.
