Too much contact with information makes people not concentrate enough and affects their deep thinking ability.
Sacrificing Depth The University of California, San Diego initiated a project called "How much information is there" to study how Americans get information. Researchers estimate that an American gets about 100500 words from e-mail, internet, television and other media every day, which is equivalent to the brain contacting 23 words every second.
Researchers believe that such a large amount of information puts pressure on the brain and shortens the time for people to concentrate.
The British "Daily Telegraph" quoted Roger Born, one of the authors of the study, as saying: "People's attention is divided into shorter segments. This is not conducive to deep thinking. "
Psychologist Edward Hallowell said that some people are "too busy getting information from various sources to think and feel".
Hallowell believes that a lot of information that these people come into contact with is superficial, "sacrificing deep thinking and feelings, becoming isolated and losing contact with others".
Unprecedented, according to researchers' estimation, an American gets about 34 g of information every day, and it takes an average of 1 1.6 hours to receive this information. In 2008, the total amount of information obtained by Americans from various media was 3.6 million g.
Hallowell said: "In the history of mankind, our brains have never had to deal with so much information as they do today."
"We now have a generation that can be called computer addicts because they spend a lot of time in front of computer screens or on mobile phones," he said.
According to this study, Americans get the most information from TV programs, accounting for 44.9% of the total information in words; The amount of computer information ranks second, accounting for 27%; The amount of broadcast information ranks third, reaching 10.6%. Followed by print media 8.6%, telephone 5.2%, computer games 2.4%, music records 1. 1%, movies 0.2%.
The study of growth potential shows that the total number of English words "consumed" by Americans in 1980 was 4,500 trillion, and in 2008 it was close to 1.1trillion, with an average annual growth rate of 5.4%. The sources of these words include e-mail, short messages, Internet, print media and TV broadcast programs. The number of words used in people's daily conversations is not counted.
Although some researchers worry that too much information may lead to the decline of people's deep thinking ability, other experts believe that a lot of information can promote the evolution of the brain.
Colin blakemore, a professor of neurobiology in Britain, told The Sunday Times that "the brain has the ability to grow" and that "processing this information may stimulate the production of new nerve cells, thus creating new nerve connections in the brain".