COGNITIVE OVERLOAD
CONTROL YOUR MIND CONTROL YOUR FOCUS
In 2014, like many newly retired people, I was fighting for a way to organize my day and my mind. Freshly released from my incarceration as a government attorney, my newfound freedom found me rushing from one thing to another. Feeling relieved to have escaped the suffocating burden of working for “the man” and all that entailed, I felt adrift.
I wanted to write, but the words would not come, and when they did come, I couldn’t recognize them. Finally, I understand what Miles Davis meant when he said, “Sometimes, it takes a long time for you to sound like yourself.” In trying to heal my overly burdened mind, I was suffering from cognitive overload.
In 2015, I discovered Daniel Levitin's “Organized Mind.” Barack Obama was still president at the time. At that time, we were concerned about the mind-boggling information explosion we were constantly subjected to. Every news organization, blogger, and organization hawking information appeared to want our attention. This information explosion made it even more challenging to do the actual work of finding one’s path.
Mr. Levitin warned that the information age drowned us in a daily data deluge. At the same time, we were expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. The “information” dump” made making good decisions virtually impossible. No matter how smart we are, our brains cannot sort through mountains of information to reach the most common and mundane decisions for our lives.
Using Mr. Levin’s timely and instructive book, I became pretty accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.
Levitin reveals how the emerging field of cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be used to face the challenges of our daily lives. The Organized Mind uses the same neuroscientific perspective and tools to navigate the churning flood of information threatening to drown us. Information, or noise masquerading as information, comes at us fast and furiously. After thousands of false starts, I could eventually sit down and write. But instead of a book of memoirs, I started writing personal essays, which is an excellent and vastly fulfilling way to excavate the self.
No matter how keen our minds are, it is limited to how much new knowledge we can process simultaneously. An intense cognitive load or a wave of complicated subjects can push the human cognitive architecture beyond its limits. Add an oppressive emotional component, and the task becomes almost impossible to contemplate. This psychological component plays a vital role in diverting audience attention away from audience actions.
This is how our leaders conspire to take over and confuse our minds by flooding our mental zones. There are too many things to think about and problems to solve, and we feel defeated before we even start.
Imagine that a Head of State signs hundreds of official documents in weeks, setting forth changes to how the nation does business. The result is an overwhelming sense of chaos and fear. This flurry of activities disorients us and damages our ability to resist or act effectively. It stretches our cognitive limits, leaving us disengaged and passive.
These obscene moves play on human nature, leading our overloaded minds to suppress our thoughts (if indeed we have any) and suppress our critical thinking skills. When so overloaded, the average listener will lose the ability to discern whether a proposal is for the greater good or injurious to our welfare and fundamental freedoms.
I suggest using Levitin's Blueprint to help clear our minds and regain our focus. The solution is to narrow our focus and avoid dealing with too many things simultaneously. Please take a deep breath, take it slowly, and convince yourself that you control your mind. If you can control your mind, you can begin to control the world around you!
The question asked to be answered is whether we should be free, be or not be who we are. Then, a crack will come into the stone-cold darkness of our cognitive overload, and the light may come in.
