The Hidden Danger Of Information

According to Clay Johnson in his work “The information Diet”, it is necessary to reduce the consumption of information to be able to alleviate the “harmful effects” that this activity has, even if it is passive. And it is not the only one that invites this change.

Rolf Dobelli is another of those who advises reducing the amount of news that reaches us daily, and instead, maintain a “healthy diet” of data and information that really matter to us. Also, it compares the news and the mind with what happens between sugar and the body. This ingredient is easy to digest and causes us a feeling of “not satiety”, that is, we always want more and more.

The mass media provide small portions of various topics and most of them are not of interest to our daily lives, since they do not require too elaborate thinking. Going back to the food example, it’s like eating cookies all day, and never having a homemade dinner. You will not experience saturation or being satisfied, as the stomach (brain) never realizes when it is full, plus it will always ask for more.

The consumption of news has secondary effects on our mental health, because it does not allow us to understand the world, what happens around us. It is better, according to the aforementioned authors, to adopt an information-free or information-reduced diet. Some of the conclusions are:

-The news systematically misleads us : we pay more attention to the scandalous, the striking, the shocking (the tabloid press as it is known). We do not usually pay attention to the most subtle, complex data that requires analysis. The media know how to attract you to their networks, that’s how their business model is based.

-The news is irrelevant: pay attention the next time you are in front of the news or reading the newspaper. How much of all the news that is reported is really important? It is true that the term “relevance” is very subjective, however, the general concept is for them, what you sell.

-The news limits understanding: They do not have explanatory power by themselves, they do not indicate what the backgrounds are, they only focus on showing the “main” thing. They are easy to produce because they are light, light, easy to digest, like a small cookie.

-The news is toxic to the body: They can cause various reactions in the limbic system. For example, watching highly violent content before bed will cause you to have nightmares. A news item where the emotional is “touched” will make you feel a knot in your chest for several hours. Everything you see on television releases cortisol, which in the long run causes chronic stress, digestive problems, nervousness, susceptibility to infection, poor growth, insomnia, etc.

-The news increases the risk of making cognitive errors: This is because it exacerbates the “information bias”, that is, the tendency to ignore contradictory data. They allow us to have an “armed” theory on a subject even if it is not correct or, without knowing that there are other variables. The news in turn can activate other biases such as stories, which makes us believe what seems coherent.

-The news inhibits thought: Since the mind needs concentration and free time without interruptions, quite the opposite of what happens on the news. In addition, watching a lot of television and news channels affects memory, decreases our ability to pay attention to work or study, interruptions, problems with retaining data or understanding certain teachings, etc.

-The news keeps changing the structure of the brain: the mind works in a certain way and what we practice more frequently reinforces certain neural connections. The opposite occurs in reverse, the less we do an activity, the less strong are those routes responsible for carrying them out. Superficial and multitasking thinking is what develops when watching the news.

-The news manipulates us: Each communication medium will report the same event in a different way. This is because they have diverse interests and ideologies. The owners of the channels or newspapers are the ones who indicate what can and cannot be broadcast and how to explain each news item, this is how the same event will be narrated in hundreds of different ways, depending on who is telling it.