Is it Fresh Information?

How often do we revisit that bookmarked Medium article or watch saved YouTube videos?

Typically, we rush to find new content rather than diving deeper into what we’ve already encountered. If the title of this article piqued your interest, it has already alleviated one instance of that uncertainty.

Did I Mention Dopamine?

Indeed. The same neurotransmitter released when we desire food, money, or other pleasures is involved here too. Dopamine neurons are part of a broader brain system responsible for reward learning, firing when we receive an unexpected reward. This neurotransmitter influences both learning and decision-making. Neurons associated with reward expectations also play a role in anticipating information. To ensure we repeat behaviors, these pathways are linked to areas of the brain that govern memory and actions.

Swedish neuroscientist Arvid Carlsson was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his research on dopamine.

Why Does Uncertainty Matter?

Access to information and certainty has been essential for our evolutionary survival. For many species, understanding food sources, shelter locations, and predator territories is crucial for daily survival.

Our conscious mind processes about 40 environmental stimuli every second, while our subconscious mind handles an astonishing 20 million.

“Yet the subconscious mind, which processes some 20 million environmental stimuli per second versus forty environmental stimuli interpreted by the conscious mind in the same second, will cause the eye to blink.”

(Norretranders 1998)

Research led by Archy De Berker (PhD in Computational & Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL) highlights that uncertainty can induce stress.

In their study, participants viewed images of rocks and were tasked with determining if a snake was hidden behind them. If a snake was present, they would receive a mild electric shock. Interestingly, participants reported lower stress levels if they were certain a snake was behind the rock, even after receiving shocks. The primary source of their stress stemmed from the uncertainty of whether a snake was present.

Can We Leverage Uncertainty?

Many industries exploit uncertainty as a selling point, from large insurance firms to street palm readers.

For example, FaceApp employs advanced neural portrait editing technology to simulate aging, capturing the public's curiosity about their future appearance, even though it has no bearing on the aging process. The app has achieved over 100 million downloads on Google Play, boasting a rating of 4.5 from more than 2 million users.

Similarly, Amazon's tracking system alleviates uncertainty, even when orders are expected to arrive in 2-3 days.

Forecasting apps, whether for weather or sports, utilize the same principle.

Life insurance also aims to transform uncertainty into certainty.

“The ultimate or primary purpose of life insurance is to create certainty out of the greatest uncertainty confronting an individual.”

Mongenix.com/basic principles of life insurance

It’s clear that our aversion to uncertainty drives our need for information.

If Information is Beneficial, Why Might It Be Detrimental?

While seeking information is beneficial, the transition to actual knowledge can be challenging. Our conscious mind processes approximately 120 bits per second.

“When a person talks, you need to process about 60 bits of information per second to understand what that person is saying… So even though on this planet we are surrounded by over six billion other human beings, we cannot understand more than one of them at a time.”

From Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We should be mindful of the information we absorb, as what we focus on gets processed, and our neurons can become fatigued. Neurons require oxygen and glucose to function, leading to feelings of exhaustion.

We navigate through numerous articles, consume countless videos, and scroll through various posts. This behavior can yield a false sense of competence and satisfaction, activating our reward systems. However, the knowledge we retain may differ significantly from what exists in the real world. Our perceived competence can often be misleading due to a lack of time spent fully understanding the information.

To ensure we properly digest information, we can implement several strategies:

• Recall: Take a moment to recall what you’ve learned before moving on to new content.
• Feynman Technique: Simplifying concepts to understand them better.
• Spaced Repetition: Reviewing information at spaced intervals.

How Does Information-Seeking Behavior Impact Designers?

This tendency often manifests during the design research phase. While it's essential to be informed about what we're creating, it can lead to excessive research and browsing through countless articles and designs for inspiration. This can result in analysis paralysis, leaving us indecisive about our direction. Dopamine, which influences reward learning, also impacts our decision-making processes. We may jump from one design to another, adopting trends without considering our original context.

Starting from scratch can be daunting, but sifting through countless resources only to arrive at a suboptimal solution due to decision fatigue is even worse.

Barbara Oakley discusses this issue in detail in her course, "Learning How to Learn."

When feeling stuck, it's often more productive to shift your focus entirely. Engaging in a different activity, such as running or walking, allows your subconscious to process the information in the background, potentially sparking new ideas when you return to focused work.

Salvador Dali and Thomas Edison were known to utilize this technique to generate innovative solutions.

Before diving into new topics to satisfy our information cravings, let’s remind ourselves that our reward systems can wait. Understanding and converting information into knowledge takes time.