Marshall McLuhan Quotes

When information overload occurs, pattern recognition is how to determine truth.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge.

Here's the thing: If you're monitoring every single thing that goes on in a given culture, if you have all the information that is there to be had, then that is the equivalent of having none of it. How are you going to process that amount of information?

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

In politics, information is superabundant—what is needed is judgement and selectivity in dealing with that information.

Personally, I find visualisations great for helping me understand the world and for sifting the huge amounts of information that deluge me every day.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

When it comes to our perceptions, one is an event, two is a pattern, three is a trend, and four is fact.

I think it's true we look forward to enormous amounts of information, but I think we would be better off if we thought about the kinds of wisdom and thoughtfulness that we need in order to handle the amount of information ahead.

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

There is simply too much to think about.

[Women] tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers.

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

Remember that we can only in our forebrains handle 5-7 items. Our backbrains can handle massive amounts. So when you're given a problem, think about it before you go sleep, and chances are you can solve it by the next morning.

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

The Pentagon suffers from too much Intelligence. They can't use what they get because there is too much collected. It would almost be better if they didn't have it because it's difficult to find out what's important.

I think we are definitely suffering from an information overload, but I believe that there is going to be better and better ways of organizing that information and processing it so that it will enhance your daily life.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

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.