Allen Leech Quotes

I don't really like filling my brain with a lot of stuff.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

There is simply too much to think about.

Overload 'em with information an' they'll kill yeh jus' to simplify things.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

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

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Remember that we can only in our forebrains handle 5-7 items. Our backbrains can handle massive amounts. So when you're given a problem, think about it before you go sleep, and chances are you can solve it by the next morning.

One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

Experts say you can't concentrate on more than one task at a time.

Multi-tasking arises out of distraction itself.

The mind can be but full. It will be as much filled with a small disagreeable occurrence, having no other, as with a large one.

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: the attention of its recipients.

Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.