If taken individually, trying to absorb each and every piece of information as a single entity?

Then, yes, I would agree the information overload can be quite overwhelming.

There is seemingly so much to learn and so little time.

What is one to make of it all?

HALF-CENTURY ago Marshall McLuhan wrote: “We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in two contrasted forms of society and experience.” His electric age had no email, no web-surfing, no cellphones, much less Facebook and Twitter. McLuhan was mainly watching television.

We don’t call it the electric age any more. We know perfectly well that we are living in the information age. But McLuhan was right: we are still experiencing “confusions and indecisions”, more than ever before. There is a universally recognised metaphor for our predicament: flood. There is a sensation of drowning, of information as a rising, churning deluge. Data washes over us from above and below. One may lose the ability to impose order on the chaos of sensations. Truth seems hard to find amid a multitude of plausible fictions.

Our world is built on the science of information theory, created by engineers and mathematicians in the 1940s, but hard on the heels of information theory have come “information overload”, “information glut”, “information anxiety”, and “information fatigue”. This last was recognised by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2009 as a syndrome for our times: “apathy, indifference, or mental exhaustion arising from exposure to too much information, especially (in later use) stress induced by the attempt to assimilate excessive amounts of information from the media, the internet, or at work”.

In 2007, the writer David Foster Wallace coined a more ominous name for this modern condition: “total noise”, created by “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective”. He talked about the sensation of drowning and also of a loss of autonomy, of personal responsibility for being informed.

Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee enlightenment or wisdom. As T. S. Eliot asked in his pageant play The Rock: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” It is an ancient observation, but it seems to bear restating as information becomes ubiquitous – and we live in a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning. [Read More]

This is the way MOST people take and look at information, tis true…

Piece by piece.

Read, comprehend, absorb and move on to the next abstract piece of information individuality.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are other ways to look at information and that is in regards to how it fits/connects with others…

A way that promotes personal intellectual enlightenment through the utilization of knowledge, and a pathway to wisdom.

Wisdom?

It doesn’t have to be lost.

Going on the assumption, of course that everything is connected.

And if the brain is given the chance to interlace the pieces?

It will do just that.

Interconnect.

After all, the brain works this way interlacing what we see, hear or experience…

Filling in the gaps where needed.

Why wouldn’t it do it with what we think, comprehend and reason?

[via Physorg] The team from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology conducted a series of experiments that showed how our brains predict what cannot be seen by drawing on our previous experiences to build up an accurate picture.

The results show that our brains do not rely solely on what is shown to the eyes in order to ‘see’. Instead the brain constructs a complex prediction.

Dr Lars Muckli, from the University’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology said: “We are continuously anticipating what we will see, hear or feel next. If parts of an image are obstructed we still have precise expectation of what the whole object will look like.

“When direct input from the eye is obstructed, the brain still predicts what is likely to be present behind the object by using some of the other inputs to come up with best ‘guesses’.

“We showed three different images to a group of subjects. The lower right section of each image was covered with a white rectangle. Using MRI brain imaging equipment we then measured brain activity in the region responding to the white rectangle.”

Dr Fraser Smith, from the same Institute, said: “On first sight, the brains response to the white rectangle is quite similar for each image but we were able to use brain reading techniques to reveal what the subject’s brain ‘saw’ behind the white panel. Subjects don’t see what is hidden but the brain is still able to make a good estimate.

“Effectively, our brains construct an incredibly complex jigsaw puzzle using any pieces it can get access to. These are provided by the context in which we see them, our memories and our other senses.”

Dr Muckli added: “Sometimes the brain’s guess can be so convincing that we see visual illusions; in our example there was no visual illusion seen – the white space was not filled-in by an actual illusion. Nevertheless we found a way to reveal the brains guess of what lies behind the object.” [Read More]

Much like it would in regards to perceived truths or thoughts?

Like pieces of a puzzle, everything interconnects.

Everything.

Information?

Should be looked at no different.

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.  ~Martin H. Fischer

And once you figure that out?

Hello, wisdom!