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Can The Brain Take The Strain
There was an intriguing article in The Times recently, called: “Warning: brain overload”. This outlines scientists’ fears that the 24 hour flood of digital information and entertainment that is now available could put our brains under so much stress that we’re no longer able to make wise decisions or to empathise with other people.
The article suggests that our evolution might have reached a key point at which our brains can no longer keep pace with the digital world we’ve created. As a result, we increasingly tend to say “whatever” to the world’s troubles. We see trauma and tragedy so often on our screens that we eventually start to become numbed by it – and no longer react with indignation or compassion.
These concerns were raised by two new studies which suggest that streaming digital news may now run more rapidly than our ability to make moral judgments.
Brain drain
There are two points arising from this debate that are particularly relevant to insight professionals:
Firstly, in the world of insight, it’s fairly common knowledge that customers make decisions that tend to be based primarily on emotional rather than rational grounds. It’s one of the pitfalls of research that when you interview someone, you get them to think rationally - but then they often fail to do what they say they would. Instead, they follow their friends or act on impulse etc.
Therefore, if you really want to understand your customers, you have to engage with their emotional side (i.e. empathise with them). The article reports that a data overload could cause the brain to shut down some of its higher functions, such as empathy. So, if you overload your audience with data, you may end up switching off their empathy. They will then be less likely to be able to see things from a customer’s point of view.
Brain strain
The second issue is that if insight people are spending all of their day working with high volumes of data, what effect is it having upon them? Perhaps we need to think more about this issue, and to learn to recognise when we are starting to get overloaded. If we don’t, it may make us less likely to empathise not just with our customers but also with our colleagues.
