We’re flooded with more and more information every day, and it doesn’t seem that it’ll be slowing down. However, similar to food, taking time to properly digest is key.
On an episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast, Yuval Noah Harari shared some thoughts on this. He made this comparsion:
- In the past, food was scarce and you had to get what you could. Now food is abundant for many people, and you need to learn to control it.
- Similarly, information used to be scarce and now it’s abundant, and we need to learn to control it as well.
During the show, Harari gives this example:
“With food, it’s obvious if you just eat all the time and you don’t give your stomach time to digest, it’s not a good idea. Same with your mind. If we just sit for hours putting more in, we don’t give the mind any time to digest. So we need information fasts that we don’t consume any new information.”
So how do you digest information? I suspect it’s different for everyone.
Some will journal or blog (like I’m doing right now).
Some will take long walks to think about things.
Some simply mix their inputs with different sources, like reading a mix of fiction and non-fiction to help give the brain some breaks.
How do you like to digest your information?
I’m not there yet, but I think AI will be able to help me a lot in the future. I’m building a digital library of stuff I’m interested in our curious about. I don’t always spend a lot of time on the source information in the moment. My future hope is that I will be able to have AI be my reference librarian and review all my digital library to pull everything about any particular topic, and maybe even summarize it for me and give me links to dig deeper.
With some things, particularly books (new or old) that have specific value, I somewhat “waste” time and go through the audiobook over an over, sometimes capturing a few voice notes as I go. Then I physically go through the book and try to do chapter summaries and pull out specific quotes or notes. I’m terribly inefficient at this. Another thing I’m gathering data for is “how to summarize faster.”
I fear that I need at least 50 years for this to pay off. So I’m hoping for a miracle of the next great unknown technology that will do all this for me and make it available (maybe even put it into my brain) when I need it.
I don’t see that as being inefficient at all. In fact, I’m striving to do more of exactly what you’re doing!
Summarizing faster is pretty easy thanks to AI, but actually retaining it simply takes repetition. That said, something to automatically put it into my brain would indeed be great!