Information Overload

Are social media sites like Facebook and Twitter actually hindering our ability to make decisions?

According to this editorial on The Daily Beast, they are.

The director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, Angelika Dimoka, conducted studies where she measured volunteers' brain activity as they engaged in a decision-making activity. As the volunteers received more information, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the brain appeared to suddently drop off, while levels of activity in the emotional regions of the brain skyrocketed.

The editorial argues that this constant streamlining of information, provided in large part by sites such as Twitter, is actually hindering our ability to make smarter, well thought-out decisions.

Reasons include our inability to make a single decision out of a multitude of choices, regretting a decision by ruminating over the other options not chosen, our tendency to prefer the most recent information over the best quality information, and not letting the brain rest from information intake and letting the subconscious take over to soak it all in.

I think the ideas presented in this editorial have some merit. Often times I get overwhelmed while researching because I come across so much information that it's difficult to process it all together. The key is to weed out everything that isn't relevant to my topic and to really narrow it down to specifics. Still, that can be challenging to achieve and it is tedious to go through pages search engine results to find exactly what you're looking for. I think the instantaneous delivery of all this information via these technological mediums is making people overwhelmed when it comes to decision making.

Also, I found it ironic that at the end of the editorial it encouraged readers to become a fan of The Daily Beast on Facebook and to follow them on Twitter.