Too Much Information, Too Little Time: How the Brain Separates Important from Unimportant Things in Our Fast-Paced Media World

Abstract

Wait. What? Often, we miss something that we wanted to see, hear, or feel— especially when there is a lot of information competing for our attention. We mostly notice this problem when we try to make the brain process lots of information at high speed. Imagine for instance that you are playing a video game and browsing the internet while checking text messages on your phone. Here, we look at how neuroscientists (scientists who study the brain and behavior) answer questions about information that comes at us very quickly: What draws our attention? How does paying attention to one thing affect how we see other things? How long does it take to notice and remember something important? Neuroscientists have found that the brain uses a trick to pay attention to one thing in a rapid stream, but it comes at a cost. Also, what we want to pay attention to is often not what we end up noticing, despite our best efforts.