David McCandless Quotes

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.

Information work is thinking work.

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Facts themselves do not give knowledge

It's very easy to make something that is new. So we are trying to make things that are better.

I believe that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed.

Some may be helped by images, some may not. Some require an image outside, others one inside the brain.

One can only display complex information in the mind. Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

The human brain has left and right brain symmetry with its own nature and can process information which initially appears to have no pattern or order. However, the brain has the ability to process visual information much more efficiently.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

the mind is a neural computer

Statistics do not speak for themselves.

The eye and brain are not like a fax machine, nor are there little people looking at the images coming in.

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

One thing about mildly dyslexic people - they're good at setting everything else aside to pursue one goal.

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.