MY HEAD’S GOING TO EXPLODE!

Human Nature 63 comments

Each day our brains have a limited capacity to absorb info.

Like any vessel or container — a glass, a swimming pool, a gas tank, or a suitcase — there is a certain amount of space, and after that, it’s all full. This isn’t a bunch of bs, the latest fMRI and Artificial Intelligence analysis indicate we aren’t infinite thinkers.

We usually associate this burnout notion with work. After diligently pressing your nose against the office grindstone, you come home from your place of bidness and are pretty much braindead. Your spouse talks to you and it might as well be in another language. You are listening, but you aren’t really making much sense of what’s being said. And in order to completely turn off the static, you self-medicate — start drinking heavily or maybe smoke some tasty weed. You just want to turn the ol’ noggin completely off.

But it’s not just work that can fill your head to the brim. I was leading an epic tour last June around Colorado and Utah for about a month. Every day, I had to plan where we were going, how we’d get there, what the weather was going to be like, the trails we’d hike, where we would eat and camp, where to buy supplies, and a million other little details. I was with my good friend Jimmy Martin. I wasn’t getting paid. It wasn’t a job. But by sunset each day, my brain was usually fried and I just wanted to sit in my lawn chair, stair off into red red horizon, and get buzzed.

I’m not talking about being tired or stressed out. I’m talking about comprehension. I was incapable of balancing multiple thoughts. Multi-tasking was completely out of the question. My brain was all full and running on autopilot.

We humans are essentially mobile electrical machines. We are really just unpredictably complex processors. And, unfortunately, we don’t come with fuel gauges, so it’s hard to know how many gigs of storage we can hold at any given time. Maybe a future Fidbit will come with such a feature, measuring brain waves burned. And then we can ration our daily thoughts and have time at the end of each day to remember the dream.

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