I read this article with great interest: Is Online Noise Really Bad for You? (from RWW). It’s actually a reprint (with updates) of a previous article, but I had missed it the first time. I’ve written about information glut before, and I regularly struggle with impending overload, but this article reminded me of a different perspective, equally important

This is the paragraph that made me sit up and take notice:

“The ability to recall passively collected information that was gathered purposelessly in the past and put it to use in the future is a particularly powerful form of intelligence. A person with a substantial reservoir of generally relevant information is a great person to have on any team.”

Because, in fact, I’ve known for a while that one of the ways I approach problem solving (if it can really be called an approach) is by somehow synthesizing ambient knowledge. The reason I’m hesitant to call this “an approach” is that you really can’t predict or control the process, but by this method I have, over the years, spontaneously solved a number of problems that I really had no business solving. Continue reading “Floating in the Information Stream” →