In the Internet age, people are exposed to more and more information, and more and more complicated. Scientific research shows that this information overload can have a detrimental effect on our brain health and mental health.

If we all take care to reduce the information burden on our brains - for example, by giving our brains more time to wander or mentally wander - there are significant benefits to our cognitive, psychological, and civic health. This article is translated from Medium, The author Markham Heid, the original title is The Neuroscience of News Overload, hope to enlighten you.

Two hundred years ago (yesterday in evolutionary terms), most people were not exposed to news unrelated to their local community for days or even weeks.

Today, the average person receives information from all over the world and is bombarded with all kinds of novel information.

The authors of a 2014 study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior wrote: "Perhaps the most striking feature of today's news consumption is the sheer volume of information that consumers are exposed to. The Sunday edition of the New York Times today contains more information than the average citizen faced in a lifetime in the 19th century."

It's not just the information that's exploding. "The second feature is the growing number of sources providing news through print, broadcast, and interactive means, with text, pictures, and video available to people anywhere, anytime," the study's authors wrote. As a result, we have to deal with a plethora of additional information that is often irrelevant to our interests and needs."

To some, this information glut may seem like a good thing. They imagined the brain processing information as pleasurable as a gold digger panning for gold: the more mud passes through the sieve, the more nuggets can be found.

But that's not exactly how the brain works. Beyond a certain point, the brain's ability to classify and understand new information becomes problematic or breaks down. "When more than the optimal amount of information is available, the usefulness of the information and the human ability to process it declines," explains Iryna Pentina, PhD, professor of marketing at the University of Toledo and first author of the study on computers and human behavior.

The brain, it turns out, is less like a gold digger and more like an assembly line worker. If the conveyor belt of information starts racing, the brain can't keep up.

The condition appears to lead to a number of unexpected and potentially harmful consequences, including some that neuroscientists believe are related to the emotional centers of the brain.

"Working memory" is a limited memory system that temporarily processes and stores information, and plays an important role in many complex cognitive activities. This term sounds simple, but it is the name of a complex network of brain systems. This network holds and processes new information and is associated with many important cognitive tasks, including reasoning, understanding, and learning.

Many researchers have studied the effects of information overload on working memory performance. They associate overload with reduced attention, problem solving, and decision-making skills.

In 2010, researchers at Yale University conducted a brain-scanning study that found some surprising relationships between working memory and the amygdala. The amygdala is an area of the brain closely associated with emotions.

They found increased amygdala involvement during working memory overload, and they speculate that this involvement may indicate a link between overload and psychological stress - a link that has also been proposed by other researchers. They also found that working memory overload was associated with reduced activity in multiple brain regions that control negative emotions and negative self-concept. In other words, when the brain's working memory is overburdened, the brain's ability to suppress negative thoughts and self-evaluations may decline.