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Developing Multiple Talents

Information and inspiration to enhance personal growth and creative expression
- a section of
Talent Development Resources

Site author: Douglas Eby

Top images: Winona Ryder as Jo in Little Women; environmental art by Andy Goldsworthy; director/writer Jane Anderson.

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We are infovores – our brains crave new information

KnowItAll In his LA Times opinion article, USC professor Irving Biederman notes we are “infovores” and writes about the neurophysiology of that experience:

“The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it, and not at random. Our gaze is drawn to items we suspect have something new to tell us — posters, signs, windows, vistas, busy streets.

“Confined to a featureless physician’s examination room, we desperately seek a magazine, lest we be reduced to counting the holes in the ceiling tiles. Cornered at a party in a banal conversation, we seek to freshen our drink.

“Without new information to assimilate, we experience a highly unpleasant state. Boredom. Conversely, at one time or another, each of us has felt the joy of information-absorption — the conversation that lasts late into the night, the awe at a magnificent vista.

“Cognitive neuroscience — the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain — is beginning to unravel how this all works. At USC, my students and I use brain scanning to specifically investigate the neuroscience behind the infovore phenomenon.”

Continued in his article The 411 to avoid boredom.

[Image from book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World - by A. J. Jacobs]

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