I should say here that I'm not trying to say if you spend several hours thinking hard, taking in new concepts, stretching your mind you don't get tired. You do, most definitely. But you bounce back.
What I'm talking about more is the pervasive idea that because we now read blogs, wikis, books if you're old school, twitter/plurk if that's your thing and so on, we live in a world of information overload, or at risk of it.
Our brains have filters. Sometimes they're conscious ones, but usually not. Depending on your age and nationality, you may have answers to some of these questions that aren't "huh?" or "It happened before I was born!"
- Where were you when you heard Kennedy had been shot? I wasn't born, I don't remember to be honest, because it wasn't important to me.
- How late did you stay up in '97 as New Labour came to power and who was the last Tory grandee you saw/heard lose his seat? FAR too late given I had an interview the next morning in Liverpool for a post-doc (unsuccessful). Far past Portillo, but he was the last big name I remember
- Where were you when you heard about 9/11? What was the first thing you did? I'd just got in from work, turned the TV on to watch something and all of the BBC was showing the news. I texted my American friend to check she'd seen the news.
- Where were you when you heard that the Franco regime had gone and there was monarchy in Spain? Not a clue. I know it happened during my life time, but I couldn't guess how old I was even.
See, I have answers to some of these, most of you will have at least one (9/11 I imagine). What do you remember from a week before and a week after those news stories that you do remember? Me, I'm drawing a blank. That's filtering - they're all major, significant events. All of them probably qualify as life-changing, although some in far more tragic ways than others.
Reading blogs is similar for me. Actually, reading is a misnomer quite often. Skimming blogs is similar for me. I have about 300 blogs that cross my desk through RSS feeds. Probably there are about 200 posts per day that I skim over. Call it, in round numbers (and because weekends are a bit slower) 1,000 a week. I retain, for a while, some idea about them, but if you ask me in detail what blog posts I remember reading in the last week, out of that approximately 1,000 posts, I remember... um 4 in any detail. I stopped and read them carefully, I considered them, I posted replies to them (sometimes to the blog, sometimes an email or chat with the author), something like that. I have a vague impression of most of the rest. I use that in particular actually in a negative way - if my feeling is that I'm skimming and not reading postings from a particular blog for too long, then I'll cut the blog from my feeds. So it's probably fair to say all of the posts I skim have some impact (and I can tell you some general things, like there were several posts of new outfits from BareRose, but I didn't like any of them) but it's way less than 1% of the posts I read that pass my filters in any significant way.
We do this all the time by the way. Not just in what we read. If you've travelled today - from home to work, from home to the shops even, what do you actually remember? Lets ask an easy one - how many red lights did you see? How many dogs? How many prams? For your next journey you might suddenly notice red lights more, and dogs, and prams. You're sensitised all of a sudden. Yet, despite not remembering any of these details, and you probably don't remember the number of cars and may not remember ANY details about ANY of the cars unless there was someone driving erratically, you managed to negotiate that journey safely, so (pedestrian or driver) you must have noticed them at the time.
Going back to that pain of studying too hard... concentrating for several hours on any task is hard work. That's why we have coffee breaks, lunch breaks and the like. It's rarely because we need the calories, not in the UK nor the US at least, but we still have the breaks. They're there, more, because we need the time to let our brains unwind, our eyes to focus further away than the book or the screen.
But I also strongly suspect some of that strain is setting up the new filters. I can, now, skim a set of instructions about using Second Life and easily spot errors and new information. Five and bit years ago, it was hard work, because it was new. I can still, today (well earlier in the week actually) read an entry about a particular bacterial species in a medical microbiology textbook and easily extract the pertinent details. A couple of decades or so ago, that was a skill in my first year as an undergraduate that I was learning and I remember it being hard (but rewarding) work. Actually I'm not sure how precisely I remember it being hard work, and how much I've reinvented those memories as part of my learning support work - where I've had to go back and work out how to describe to others techniques for remembering large amounts of information. Go and pick a blog about something you know nothing about and read it - Medieval French romantic poetry perhaps, control of expression of genes in bacteria if Medieval French romantic poetry is your thing. For a while it will be hard work, but you'll get into the habit of it and find it easier after a while. Your filters will adjust and you won't remember much about it, unless it's suddenly a new passion for you.
