The overload that is making our brains snap

[Photo provided to China Daily]

Our minds are flooded with all sorts of information, messages and emails to reply to, assignments and research to do, decisions to make, relationships to maintain, and all kinds of puzzles to solve. All that takes upmost of our waking hours. Some of my friends have even told of having nightmares in which their phones run out of power and they feel cut off from the world.

The WeChat system asks me several times a day to clear my cache or get rid of temporarily saved information to make room for more. The other day it all proved just too much for WeChat, and the whole system collapsed. After I reinstalled the app, all my messages had disappeared, and that raised a question about us humans: Is there a limit to how much information we can take in, process and retain?

In a study by Temple University, Philadelphia, reported by Newsweek magazine in 2011, on the impact of information overload on decision-making, researchers found that as information load increased so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead responsible for decision-making and controlling emotions.

But given more and more information, activity in the region suddenly fell off "as if a circuit breaker popped", and research subjects, according to one researcher, "started making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision-making has essentially left the premises".

According to the study, decisions requiring creativity benefit from "letting the problem incubate below the level of awareness".

Experts advise those who never stop surfing and seek information to switch off their smartphones. I consider myself such an addict, but that path is obviously out of the question for me because of my job. The following steps may be more practical for me and others like me:

1 Deal with emails and messages in batches, rather than in real time. That helps prevent your time from being further fragmented.

2 Get your news from reliable and professional sources only.

3 Reduce to a minimum the number of apps and WeChat and Weibo accounts you follow.

4 Switch off the little red dot in your WeChat that prompts you to instantly refresh the page for new messages and photos posted by your friends. Check it once or twice a day and you will not miss out on anything. A recent survey by China Youth Daily suggested that plenty of people are about to do exactly that. Of 2,000 people it interviewed, 36 percent said they wanted to turn their WeChat updates off.

5 Set priorities and learn how to disregard needless information. Train yourself to say enough is enough.

This is an era in which a premium is put on immediacy and quantity, and it has never been more important to set aside periods in which we in effect turn off the clock and give space to quietness and reflection.