These days I can easily feel overwhelmed and overstimulated but not able to say what is overwhelming and overstimulating me.
They say 90% of your mind is subconscious, and I think that 90% if what we’re constantly polluting, ‘dispatching’ tasks to, and overworking:
If I ask you what you did on Saturday, you might first remember the most salient event of the day, maybe what you had for dinner and where you were. You can then follow the trail of time and place to build the events after and before dinner to create a coherent story of your Saturday from waking up to going to sleep.
But say you had 5 hours of screen time on Saturday, maybe you saw 140 Tiktok’s, 70 instagram posts, 50 tweets and 98 facebook posts. The chances are you can’t recall a single one of them when remembering your day.
So why can’t you remember any of that content? Not only because the posts have no relationship to the material aspects of your day but every post in a scroll is an atomised unit which has no relationship to the post above or below it. This gives us the intuitive feeling that the content we’re looking at is discarded and disappears as we scroll. The same way we can walk down a street past 12 cars of different make and model, and not have any recollection of which cars they were later.
But hold on, if I showed you one of those Tiktoks you’d seen on Saturday right now you’d very likely remember it and be able to confirm having ‘seen it’.
Then if I showed you a specific car of a specific make and model and asked if you walked past it on Saturday at an exact point in the street you’d have absolutely no idea.
The point here is even though your conscious mind flees with gay abandon from one post to the next, everything you’ve seen is classified as salient (the algorithm knew it would be). Its lingering, being worked on in the background, like a tab that hasn’t closed. Your brain wants to consider it, absorb it, and build it into your working model of the universe, but it doesn’t have a connection to the present moment so to your conscious mind it’s effectively gone.
Computers store memory as sequences of bits, human memory is stored as stories. Stories are sequences of characters, places, times of day, and the relationships between them. One thing leads to another. The smell of a place connects to the person you were with, which connects to what was said, which connects to how you felt driving home. Memory in humans is not a filing cabinet. It is a web of causally and emotionally connected events, and we remember things by following the threads.
But so much of the salient and relevant content we give our attention to, is not part of any thread or timeline of our day. If your brain is a computer, your desktop may be clear and you may have no apps open, but the 100 background tasks you created with the last 72 hours of scrolling, are hogging resources.
We cannot see it and we aren’t biologically set up for it. We are gorging on hundreds of atomised units of stimulation every day. Each of them pushing our buttons, seen as relevant and worthy of memorisation, but none of it fitting into our lives in a coherent way.
Your brain is amazing at sorting, classifying and assimilating information. The Zeigarnik effect describes how unfinished or interrupted thoughts and ideas remain in subconscious memory, and tasks that are classified as complete are allowed to be forgotten. The example is a waiter who can remembers all his table’s orders but will completely forget the details of orders once the customer has paid. What we read and watch online may not really be our business, but the fact that we don’t immediately forget it like a paid bill, shows us that we value it enough to let it hang around. We know this and we actively use this as a tool. When faced with gritty issues, it is often better to leave it alone and return later or ‘sleep on it’.
I’m really talking about the backrooms of our mind, the parts we aren’t allowed to enter but ultimately make us who we are. We can put anything we want in there, and we think and feel what comes out, but what’s really going on down there.
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