dose

Nora Young and Cathi Bond, dynamic duo formerly of CBC’s once-wonderful DNTO, have a great podcast about technology and trends, called The Sniffer. In their latest episode, they talk about total recall & memory, and mention a conversation we had at PCAB about many of the techno junkies I know who are starting to unplug: ditching their RSS aggregators, cleaning their desktops, writing & reading blogs less or not at all, and junking their at-home internet acces. I am trying to be among that group. I just don’t want all this info, and what’s more I am finding so much of it I am searching out for the sake/thrill of finding new info (i think our brains have little “new info” receptors that make us happy, and the internet feeds those receptors, always more info at your fingertips. It’s a kind of addiction … channel surfing is a similar). But for all that info I consume, very little of it contributes to any deeper understanding of the world. Very little is of great value to me. Ditto, I bet, with total recal.

All this reminded me of Mike’s provocative posts on memory and forgetting, here and here.

These things are all important, not just for health, but for proper thinking: forgetting, silence, time, lonliness, boredom.

We cannot spend all our time consuming consuming consuming information. The mind needs time to process, and that means shutting off the inputs (the phone, the podcasts, the RSS feeds, the email, the skype & IM, the blogs, the DVDs and even the books), and just taking time to let things simmer, percolate, and settle into thoughts that are genuinely worthwhile.