brain overload

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Stop!

Don't read this!

Don't! Don't! Don't!

It could be the one piece of information that overloads your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and compromises your brain's ability to make good decisions today. You may end up ordering a double dusted cinnamon mocha latte and you really don't like double dusted cinnamon mocha lattes. All you really want is a cup of coffee with cream.

Henry David, the master of Walden, says to keep it simple.

Actually our brains have changed very little since our innovative ancestors the Cro-Magnon people began to paint aurochs on the cave walls at Lascaux in France. And that was some 32,000 years ago. Why did they do it? They were passing on information, stories. "Big beasts! Big horns! Bad!"

Flash forward: In our twitter, Google, Facebook, web-surfing, blogosphere world, the Information Age is inundating our paleolithic brains with too much information. In an article appearing in Newsweek in 2011 titled, "Brain Freeze: How the deluge of information paralyzes our ability to make good decisions" writer Sharon Begley reports that recent studies conducted in various venues all seem to prove that too much information is just that...too much. The end result: we make poorer and poorer decisions. Our brains freeze at critical moments.

Is there a brand new lemon yellow SUV parked in your driveway? What were you thinking?

Perhaps you should turn off your computer and go outside and sit under a tree. Or better still maybe go creatively express yourself by painting a prehistoric cow on the side of your house.

Your over-taxed brain will thank me.


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