“When humans face too much information they resort to pattern recognition”—Marshall McLuhan, 1968 The average person is exposed to more information in a day the a person in the 1700s would face in a year.

From @wifizards

People underestimate the fact that you can poison yourself with information.

Information processing in the brain hasn't evolved since our hunter-gatherer days. Miller's Law (1956) showed we can only hold 7±2 items in working memory - our neural architecture is still optimized for spotting predators, not parsing petabytes.

This can't be quite right, because strolling through a rainforest delivers a fire hose of data to the senses. Is it a prioritization problem we're having in the modern environment?

The whole Mailer/McLuhan debate is worth watching several times.

McLuhan saw it early: Info overload doesn’t cause delusion—it forces pattern recognition. And the patterns? Not always comforting. What looks like psychosis is the mind decoding a shattered script. We weren’t built to know this much and trust this little. The veil isn’t just lifting—it’s pixelating.

my Pop was an IBM engineer in NJ ~1963-1995 he would discuss topics like these at the dinner table information overload was certainly a thing back then for the engineering staff, let alone today’s consumers the IBM engineers only saw it as exponential I introduced him to Apple 🍎 products the 80’s + NeXT computers in the 90’s… blew his mind the simplified versions of things and what could be done His first 10” iPad was info overload for him in his 80’s as a kid in 1970’s I would fiber optic cable and micro switch as toys… the things we built Good times…

Pattern recognition is just a stage towards greater understanding. Never underestimate the subconscious mind.

In the 90s I wrote a paper for my 9th grade English class about the "Internet" when AOL came online. It was titled Pandora's Box. Essentially it was about the amount of influence people had I'm history vs the potential of the Internet. You always had some crazy person on a soap box, but the amount of people you could influence was really limited

We definitely wouldn't have any concerns about what a celebrity had for dinner, or someone being called a bad name in the middle of Idaho someplace. :) But if we used this network to agree on something to ask God for, with everyone 'knowing' it would come true -- Powerful