Cognitive Overwhelm Quotes

Man's great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head, all tempting and wanting to be worked out.

The thought of a limit to perceptual space and time staggers the mind.

Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else.

But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, that the impossible had been mysteriously achieved by man himself: this staggers the mind!

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.

Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise - of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema - of which the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.

There are moments when mental overload can render words impossible.

Gotta head full of ideas that are driving me insane.

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.