Scott Adams Quotes

Don't you find that the more you know, the more you don't know and can't ever learn because there's too much stuff out there?

Sometimes my mind boggles. It's so deep my mind actually boggles.

We don't have a public that really understands the world anymore, and in the age of complexity, that problem becomes much more difficult.

I feel like the world is getting dumber. I don't necessarily think people are stupid, but I think we're getting dumber.

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

For the price of intelligence as we now know it is chronic anxiety, anxiety which appears to increase—oddly enough—to the very degree that human life is subjected to intelligent organization.

There is so much more information about the scientific world than there was a generation ago that we have all increased our opportunities for ignorance. There are more things not to know. ... The machinery that we deal with is so much more complex that it is possible to become dysfunctional at a much higher level of performance.

Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.

Our live set's become increasingly complex recently; we've been doing stuff that's been vastly too much information for most people to deal with and I think it's quite interesting watching how people behave in those situations, under those circumstances.

Greed probably figures in my intellectual life as well, as I attempt to absorb a massive amount of information with consequent mental indigestion.

I don't really like filling my brain with a lot of stuff.

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, and indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

Attention for children is so much about input, and the brain can only filter so much - I don't know how many millions of messages that come through the brain, and we can only filter so much through it.

I've actually become much, much dumber through being married and having these children. I find that I'm not half as sharp that I once was. I can't even help them with their 4th and 5th grade vocabulary and math work at this point.

I have the attention span of a mosquito from multitasking and all the things that have affected my poor little brain.

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers— conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. 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.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

Twitch has been very hard for me. It makes me feel so stupid. I don't understand it at all... It's very complicated.