Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

The web and physical world is plagued with abundance - people need help sorting through all the good and bad stuff out there. The tyranny of choice is causing major psychic pain and frustration for people.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

The world intrudes in my brain daily. Since my brain is dripping with all kinds of stuff that's out there in the world, that I can't seem to be able to shut out, it has to end up being in my work as well.

My problem is not that there are too few ideas out there. It's that there are too many.

I'm really not aware of much press. I could drive myself mental if I went on the internet. I'd probably overanalyse it anyway. There's so much media that I'd feel bombarded, so I don't pay it much attention.

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Once again I stopped listening to the news this week.

It is now such a complex society in terms of media. It just comes at us from every direction. You kind of have to push it all away.

Our society, where we are right now, our minds are junkyards. We watch TV and sit on the computer all day and barely have an original thought.

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

Now we have to contend with overstimulation and too many opportunities all the time, and too many decisions all the time.

Too much knowledge and analysis can be paralysis.

When I'm tired, I see industrial pictures. But I'll see one every two months. If I see one every day, I'll become an idiot.

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.

One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.

Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it's always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn't mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.

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

Most of us feel overburdened by information, although I would say the overloaded feeling comes more from coordinating all of the information and responding to it.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

There's so much information and journalism on television. We have too much to absorb.

I honestly think I'm going to rot my brain with all the news. I'm a news junkie.

I'm the type of guy where, if I see, like, 20 songs, I don't even wanna listen to one of 'em 'cause it's too much.