Too Much Information: Cognitive Overload in the Digital Information Era and How it’s Impacting our Mental Health

In this course, psychologist Jocelyn Brewer, Founder of Digital Nutrition, begins by contrasting the vast streams of information coming at us in the current era with the days when news came from two newspapers and the 6:00 news on the television – and information was found in the library. Asserting that information overload is not new, Brewer briefly traces the history of information availability, citing the sudden need for information management with the advent of the printing press in the 1400s. When the internet arrived, followed soon by social media and now the development of virtual reality, extended reality, and AI, the world experienced – again – “seismic shifts” in how our (still old-design) brains must process information. Explaining cognitive load theory and memory storage in the context of current exponential overload, Brewer offers multiple strategies to confront the five “digital dilemmas” of displacement, dramas, dependence, distraction, and data deluge, with a focus on the last two.