Why geniuses wear the same clothes?
"Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle," says neuroscientist and psychologist Daniel Levitin, CNN reports. "We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time," he added. "We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower." Information overload also leads to something called "decision fatigue." It's why Albert Einstein is nearly always pictured wearing a gray suit, why Steve Jobs usually wore a black turtleneck and why Mark Zuckerberg is almost always sporting his signature gray T-shirt. They didn't want to waste valuable energy making inconsequential decisions about their clothes. To find out more, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta spoke to Levitin, who is professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, and the author of "The Organized Mind." Dr. Sanjay Gupta: What does it mean to have information overload? How do we know if we're overloaded? Daniel Levitin: If you're making a bunch of little decisions, like do I read this email now or later? Do I file it? Do I forward it? Do I have to get more information? Do I put it in the Spam folder? That's a handful of decisions right there, and you haven't done anything meaningful. It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue. Turns out, the neurons that are doing the business of helping us make decisions, they're living cells with metabolism, they require glucose to function, and they don't distinguish between making important decisions and unimportant ones. It takes up almost as much energy and nutrients to process trivial decisions or important ones. Read full interview here
