Occasional visual essays stemming from research, personal experiences and introspection.
Hypothesis. The quality brain time originally available to most humans, time to observe, think, rest and be with others, has been eroded: slowly at first by basic technologies such as writing, print and the telegraph, and exponentially with the digital era.
For most of human history, the mind received a modest flow of information and stimuli, mostly from the landscape and from people standing in front of us. Today it receives a constant stream from dozens of information and stimulation channels: messages, feeds, alerts, video and news from every corner of the world, all arriving instantly.
The brain did not evolve for this load. Researchers who track how people use screens report that the average time spent on one screen before switching fell from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to around 47 seconds in recent years. Over-stimulation, fragmented attention and less time for quiet thought or face-to-face company are becoming part of everyday life.
This visual exploration traces how we got here, from hunter-gatherers to today, in three views: where information and stimuli come from, how many channels carry them, and how much quality brain time is left in a day.
A personal note. I initiated this exploration of ideas inspired by years of battling (to no avail) against constant distractions stemming from my phone, context switching and daily life situations.
Each person sits at the centre of the world that stimulates them. Rings show how far a piece of information travels, colour shows how fast it arrives. Over time, more channels arrive from farther away, and faster.
One block per information or stimulation channel, stacked from slow at the bottom to live at the top. Time runs on a logarithmic scale so that 50,000 years and the last century both fit on one axis.
An estimated typical day, clockwise from midnight. Green is time with no communication at all, yellow is time with people in person, red is time fed by impersonal external channels. The centre shows the hours of quality brain time left.
How the routine day is shared between no communication, in-person time and impersonal external channels. Quality brain time holds steady for millennia, then gives way as impersonal external channels expand.
The same days as single bars. Quiet and in-person time shrink as time on impersonal external channels grows to fill most of the routine day.
We have exponentially increased our exposure to information and the continuous stimulation of the brain, and consequently have lost and ceded control of our brain’s inputs to artificial external stimuli. We have lost contact with nature, and we have reduced our time spent with family and friends.
I am Gonzalo Cortés, a Civil Engineer by training, with a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UCLA, focusing on Hydrologic Sciences. My work centres on the mathematics of estimating what cannot be measured directly: combining imperfect models with sparse, noisy observations to recover the most likely state of a system and its uncertainty.
I apply these methods to snow water resources forecasting with Snowdata and NILUS. I occasionally teach at the University of Chile. I am also an e-commerce entrepreneur, a fly fisherman, a surfer and a skateboarder.
My research has been published in:
My publications on Google Scholar →
Attention figures: Gloria Mark, University of California, Irvine, as reported by UC Newsroom.