How much Information is too much Information?

We are living in the world of Information Technology. In India this word has a lot of significance. It is the information technology boom that started creating many jobs (with earning potential that was well beyond the expectation) and made a lot of people very rich. It is the need for information and stay up-to-date that has spawned some of the most successful companies of recent times. Information about correct websites -spawned Google. Sharing information about ourselves and getting to know about friends spawned Facebook. Information sharing spawned telecommunication, which is the big reason for Apple to be the number one company by revenue in the world. One morning I could not stop myself from wondering whether I actually need all the information that I am getting. It just seems wherever I can focus my eyes on, I am bombarded with information. I sit at work and just train my eyes towards any pillar and there is information about the company’s vision, mission statement etc, When I am driving I just turn left, right, or raise my heads and there are hoardings everywhere with information about some product, TV show etc. I switch on the TV and there are 100 products advertisements with information. I was just discussing with my friend on a New sprite ad where the guy drinks Sprite to become smarter and get to take a girl on his bike while making another guy take an old lady in his car (I find this advertisement offensive to all old people- indirectly it wants to say nobody would like to take the old lady). My friend thought this is one “Dimaag ki Batti jalao” ad (this is Mentos territory). This made me wonder, with so much information have we become passive information junkees? If I am being bombarded by so much information then how much information is too much information? It is known, the part of the brain that is responsible for fact based memory has 1 billion neurons (there are over 100 billion neurons in the brain) and each of these neurons can make a thousand connections resulting in 1 trillion connections. Each of this connection is capable of storing data. (Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-is-the-memory-capacity ). If one has to define this as a finite state machine it takes 30 bits to define a neuron and 40 bits to define a connection. For a synapse to form, there are 2 neurons and a connection, which means it can be explained by 100 bits. The definition of entropy says the information in a system cannot be more than the amount to describe it fully. In this case we can define this system by 10^14 bits (1 trillion connections * 100 bits).This is around 12.5 terabytes. But no one is sure how the brain stores information, so according to various sources our capacity varies from 10 terabytes to 1000 terabytes. In a 500GB hard disk we can store over 500 full length movies. So this means the capacity to store 10000 to 1 crore movies. Very impressive, isn’t it? It appears as though my memory capacity is limitless. If each movie can be equated to 2 hrs of content then I can store a minimum of 20000 hrs of data to a maximum of 2 crore hrs of data. Assuming I would store all information that my eye records in a day as a video and this video is actually stored like a summary and not second by second I can say I will record 1 hr of summary of things I see every day, 2 hr of television data (one can generally recall much of a cricket match and TV show so a higher storage for this), 1 hr worth of images (Online reading, social networking images, magazines and news papers etc). So I can assume to store 4 hrs of content each day. This means I can have a memory of at least 14 yrs at any given point in time. But I have to remember a lot theories, maps, academic content etc. Taking the entropy of a system as the basis, if I keep taking in random amount of data my memory does run out of capacity. If somebody says aren’t you reading 10 different newspapers I should be proud to say ‘No’. I don’t have to be an avid reader just to show that I appreciate great novels. I don’t have to watch all Finance news that keeps coming to feel like I am updated (let’s face most of the stock market prediction are good only in hindsight, nobody has been able to correctly predicted most of the downturns anyway). I can refuse to be on social network except when I am truly bored. I don’t have to like and see each and every photograph posted by friends just to please them. After all I want my storage place to be available to store some really important events, sports highlights, academic content, and contents of interest etc. As Sherlock Holmes once said “Mind is like an attic with limited capacity and I want to store only those tools I want to use”. With so much information being bombarded (majority of them by advertisers) on everything we lay our eyes on most of us have become passive information receivers, who would least bother to remember the brands (which in turn has resulted in advertisers trying to put more effort into it- In this year’s IPL every other event is named after a brand). Please pour in your thoughts on how you are planning to curtail too much information getting into your system. There is too much focus on information quantity these days rather than quality. I would like papers to be only of 2 pages (for everything else give an online link, for people to delve into it or additional sheets of expanded summary, news to be only 60 mins a day, and advertising to be done in permitted zones. Why can’t people write things as though they are writing a summary? Why is there focus on trying to elaborate everything?