Digesting Information

I came upon this article on technewsworld.com and found it absolutely fascinating. The article discusses the human brain's capacity for digesting information on a daily basis as shown by a group of researchers at UCSD. According to the article "The amount of information consumed by Americans in 2008 totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words...which equals 1 billion trillion bytes. Imagine a stack of paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire United States, including Alaska -- that's analogous to the amount of information Americans gobbled up. For an average person on an ordinary day, this represents 34 gigabytes of data and 100,500 words." To think about this for just a moment is really incredible. What is also fascinating are these results compared with results from the 1980s. "A 1980 study estimated that Americans received slightly more than seven hours of information on an average day, according to Bohn. Americans are now exposed to 11.8 hours of information each day, based on the new UCSD study, which calculated only the amount of information flowing into American households. It did not include the amount of information received in the workplace...Researchers looked at 20 sources of activities unrelated to work, including movies, cellphones, television, the Internet, video games, newspapers, magazines, books and music." This data is not surprising though. It just supports the fact that our society is very quick-paced compared to twenty years ago and our devices have a great deal of influence on our intake of information. Another interesting thought to ponder is how much quicker children should be learning bacause they are faced with more information.