Stop the information flow

This appeared as a result of my contemplating a topic related to how we deal with knowledge and information in general nowadays. The problem is that it’s too easy to find information we’re interested in.

Ann and I were sitting on a beach and she found a shell. She didn’t know what type of shell it was and what it belonged to - a minor knowledge gap. And it struck me that I was thinking about sending a picture of it to an LLM immediately. I started to speculate on that, and the first thing that came to me is that we’re missing that long-forgotten feeling of not knowing something completely. The feeling where you stumble upon something and there is an understanding that there is no way you can find out what it is, and your only option is to let it be.

Then I went on and got to the idea that the harder it is to get information, the better you remember it. Before the LLM and Google era, to learn something you needed to decide it was something you genuinely wanted to know, then go to the library or buy a book, spend time reading it, learning other stuff along the way, and eventually find a picture of this shell to learn that it’s an ordinary species spread widely in this area. Commitment is what made information precious. And it’s what forced our brains to remember it and everything we met on the path to the goal. Now information is so close to us, it’s literally a couple of phone taps away, so it’s worth nothing. An interesting observation is that when companies are making money on information, it costs nothing for us. The difference is the type of data. But I am getting sidetracked. Back to my topic.

So from that, I moved to the idea of shutting down all incoming information flow for a week or two, or maybe a month. The idea is that it’s interesting to see what our brain will do when there is no such processed information coming into it. I bet it won’t just relax and do nothing. Maybe it will relax a bit in the beginning, but it can’t stay in that state for a long time. It has to start working again. And I wonder what it will be working on with a lack of incoming information? What ideas will it come up with?

I haven’t tested this theory yet as it feels scary to lose control. Currently, I feel like I’m in control of feeding my brain with information I deem interesting, and letting things flow naturally sounds daunting. I know it’s false thinking, but I’m still here.