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Besides the stock-related web sites and the intimidating task of searching the Web itself, other sources contributing to information overload include TVs, car radios, cell phones, newspapers, magazines, pagers, gossip, and the ongoing chatter bubbling up inside our own minds. |
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Would you ever think of your own mind as contributing to the problem? Maybe not when you think of information overload as only arising from outside of you in the world. |
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But the psychological reality is, what is going on inside in the form of doubting, rumination, planning, rehearsing, fantasizing, and second-guessing is actually far more captivating and potentially overwhelming than anything coming from the onslaught outside. |
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And we have not even begun to talk about how the unconscious mind affects our decision making and contributes to the conflict. One of the reasons we need to understand how our personality affects our trading is because if we don't, certain decisions are going to be made from the unconscious mind whether we like it or not. Another way to state the issue is to say that the whole reason we are so interested in mental and emotional discipline when we are trading is because unconscious motivation that, by definition, we are not even aware of, can be strong enough to counter rational thought and the best laid plans of the disciplined mind. |
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Returning to the conscious level, the mind has its own mechanism for selectively attending to only the number of bits of information it can take in and process from the outside world at one time. When it reaches the point of having more than it can handle, it simply blocks out whatever else is bombarding it. But this is in no way a rigid process and some people can take in and remember much more data at one time than can others. |
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For example, on CNBC recently, they were doing segments of the show from the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. They had a memory expert, David Markoff, look at 50 digits for 15 minutes and then say them out loud. He was able to remember all 50 of them in the exact sequence. If nothing else, this feat demonstrates that memory is elastic, that it can be expanded to include a greater number of bits of data than we usually believe. |
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Signs and Symptoms of Information Overload |
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Some of the indications of information overload include the following: |
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