Turn Off the Information Superhighway
Informing Psychology with Urban Planning
Here I am, On the Road Again[1]
I travel by road a lot, both at home and abroad, and one thing that always stands out to me is the width of the roads. Particularly when in the driver’s seat, I just know if a road is an older road or a newer one. Even if the painted lines tell me it’s a two-lane road, I swear they’re only wide enough for one and a half vehicles, maybe two if they’re small ones. The presence of these roads always seems to correlate to the oldest areas of a city – the places from before widespread transportation. This effect is exemplified in the videos below.
These videos are from Avila, Spain, continuously inhabited since at least the Roman period (around the 1st Century).
In this video, we see that old cities really aren’t built around cars and mass transportation. The cars both barely fit under the arch and sometimes have to share streets only wide enough for one – a terrible experience for both motorists and pedestrians, both having to stay alert to potential dangers coming up and down the street. Compare this to the wide streets of Barcelona, laid out under a grid plan that began with the 1859 Eixample, providing the city with wide streets ready to handle both vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
We can see here that the philosophy in design between the streets of Avila and Barcelona’s Passeig de Gracia are very different. Avila, settled during the time of the Romans, likely parceled out the land and cut out the streets when the traffic to be expected was almost entirely pedestrians, live animals, and carts. The historical population was far smaller, owing to the relative lack of water supplies and commerce in the Avila region. This contrasts heavily with Barcelona, whose population reached 850 per hectare in 1859 (for comparison, it is 160 per hectare today, though that includes annexation of neighboring areas).
Cities, over time, changed in purpose. Ancient and medieval cities functioned, as today, as homes for the wealthy and centralized areas for exchange, prayer, and specialized trades. With the concentration of wealth and population, however, came threats of violence, and so walls went up. Not having the benefits of gunpowder explosives or heavy cannon, walls prevented attackers from simply riding into the city, forcing them into long and costly sieges that could easily be interrupted by allied forces.
Ever-larger and denser poulations put strain on the city in peacetime, while the advent of cannon and gunpowder for digging under the walls crushed them in wartime. While walls were still an excellent deterrent, they started to become more costly, both by limiting the city’s development and being more expensive to build to stand up against cannon fire. Eventually caving to these two pressures, walls went away, being preserved today as historical sites and tourist destinations.
The modern city required new methods – knocking down the old walls that defended the city, putting in wide grid-patterned streets to fit the flows of people and vehicles, and segregating traffic to avoid accidents and allow each type of traveler to move at the fastest possible pace. The number of modes of travel also increased, with rail, automobiles, trams, bicycles, motorbikes, and many other types of transportaion lay claim to the road. Combining all of these leads to the Passeig de Gracia - a main thoroughfare of four road lanes, a service road on each side, and wide sidewalks shaded by trees that can comfortably accommodate travelers, be they walking, biking, driving, or taking the bus[2].
The Information Superhighway and the Neural City Center
The Internet has been famously likened to an information superhighway – a medium that can transmit massive quantities of information incredibly quickly and conveniently. This cornucopia of information was expected to bring about an information revolution that would see us harnessing data in ways never seen before. As we’ve seen with the advent of big data, machine learning, and my eventual replacement ChatGPT, we have found new ways to harness the raging tides of information that we can access.
Despite this, we as individuals feel more lost than ever. Writing skills are on the decline in many countries at the forefront of the data revolution, with many articles of this type highlighting the worsening ability to form clear, concise arguments with good use of grammar and logic. Critical thinking, once a proud pillar of education, has also allegedly seen declines – even this article from 2009, and this one referencing my future substitute ChatGPT. Somehow, even with all the information at our fingertips, we are unable to connect the dots.
We were not built to process this much information.
The brain has multiple areas, each dedicated to particular parts of running the body, as seen here. From my understanding (I am not a doctor or a neurologist by any stretch), the brain suffers from two deficiencies compared to a modern computer; first, that it is required to handle far more different types of data, and second, that it has particular regions devoted to particular tasks (the hippocampi of London cabbies, for example). Unlike a computer, which only has to process electronic data and can reallocate computing power as necessary, the human brain has no such control.
With its dense networks of narrow dendrites and axons resembling ancient streets barely wide enough for two abreast, and with particular regions for particular functions resembling the quarters of an old city dedicated to particular social classes or professions, I dare say that the brain is the informational equivalent of a city center – dense, chaotic, evolving ad hoc over eons to reach the state it has today.
The analogy is certainly compelling.
Psych-Urban Planning-ology
Pavlovian conditioning is a psychological procedure that deals in stimuli and responses. There are two types of stimuli (conditioned and unconditioned), with the same types for responses – conditioned and unconditioned. The unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response are something biological, in the classic example, a dog salivating (unconditioned response) after smelling red meat (unconditioned stimulus). The conditioned stimulus is something you teach the subject to associate with the unconditioned stimulus – in the classic example, the mere presence of Pavlov’s assistant, the designated dog feeder, was enough to cause the subject dogs to salivate (the unconditioned stimulus).
In the same way, we have the unconditioned habits of a time before the information superhighway. We scroll endlessly through social media feeds and clear out our notifications, wanting to keep up everything our friends and family are doing even to our own detriment. This extends to our decisions as well, where we collect massive amounts of information, comparing the QS rankings of the universities we want to get into, the Glassdoor reviews of the jobs we send in resumes for, or simply subscribing to more Substacks and following more Tweeters than we have time to ever actually read. Even food is not immune – while on the road, we check the Google reviews of every place we stumble on, to make sure we don’t have even a single bad meal.
While this constant prospecting is useful, it prevents the best kind of thought.
The flow state is a psychological phenomenon that involves full immersion, enjoyment, and involvement in an activity, characterized by complete absorption and a match between one’s skill and one’s task. In defiance of the constant stimulus-response of our tech-enabled lives, constantly battling with notifications and e-mails from senders unknown, or the constant push notifications that blow up our phones, the flow state involves intense and focused concentration on the present, a loss of reflective self-consciousness, and losing track of time, among other phenomenon we today would call “spacing out”.
In studying the flow state, researchers have shown that the brain can only process about 110 bits of information per second, with decoding speech taking up to 40-60 bits of it. In the flow state, however, all 110 of those bits are harnessed towards a particular goal. Flow is a highly personal and intrinsically motivated state, found in tasks with clear goals, clear and immediate feedback, and a conviction that the task is difficult, but possible – a challenge worthy of your skill.
This directly contrasts with the constant informational bombardment from all sides characteristic of today – be it messages, e-mails, voice calls, video calls, YouTube videos, TikToks, and who knows what else – that we have to deal with every day. The question we now intera
Below is my own experience.
The Publishing Schedule
If you look at the publishing dates of my pieces for the months of March, April, and May, there appears to be no obvious pattern. I show you the dates below (in my home timezone), with commentary:
March 19 – 3 pieces
March 26 – 1 piece
At the time, I just joined the site and dumped my three-piece archive on the 19th, with the next piece quickly following on the 26th. As the Stack was a new project, I quickly hopped into it with gusto, and it shows in April.
April 1 – 1 piece
April 4 – 1 piece
April 6 – 1 piece
April 18 – 1 piece
Enjoying myself thoroughly with being able to write, I put out three pieces in quick succession and then one more twelve days later, as I became busy with work. I was hoping to put out the next piece soon.
May 16 – 1 piece
May 23 – 1 piece
May 25 – 1 piece
May 30 – 1 piece
Well, that didn’t happen.
I was distracted and constantly taking in information, endlessly scrolling on my Substack Inbox and Explore feed, reading whatever I could find. This was partially motivated by a silent dread; Paul D’Anieri’s Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War, the book that formed the subject of the next article, was incredibly unappealing to me. Happily filling my mind with thoughts of anything but writing the review, I bit the bullet on the 14th of May and just wrote it to be done with it.
After that, the dam broke, and I wrote consistently every day afterwards, on occasion neglecting work or other obligations to write, edit, and publish. While this helped me meet my productivity goals, it was not a sustainable solution. I needed to limit the flow of information.
So for June, I planned on a weekly schedule.
June 2 – 1 piece
June 9 – 1 piece
June 16 – 1 piece
June 23 – 1 piece
June 30 – 1 piece
The weekly schedule was planned to give me some leeway on when and how I write. Though I still write first drafts in a white heat, vomiting out thousands of words that I scratch my head about later, it allows me to give each piece a lot more planning and forethought, allowing me to simply dump the whole idea out on Word when the time comes. By giving myself those few hours to just throw out a piece in one long go, I efficiently slot my flow state in time unoccupied by work hours.
Doing this requires sacrifices, however. I must forgo replying to comments, forgo scrolling through my Facebook feed or Substack Explore feed, looking for the next inspiring essay. I must forgo my Discord and Messenger messages, letting them pile up and only looking at those that are important to my job. I find myself missing out on hours of my life, the only signs of time having passed being darkness outside the windows, an ache in my fingers, and having forgotten to blink[3]. For a few hours, I go almost completely dark.[4]
By simply ignoring incoming information and focusing my limited mental capacity solely on writing, I can take the time to hammer out an article in a few hours, with the details to be decided later. Setting aside time to focus and truly work on the article allows for much better work.
Information Control Interventions
Many, many words ago, I proposed that the brain resembled a city center, and the Internet and modern methods of communication an information superhighway that allows us to take in far more data-cars than we are able to handle. While in real life there are arguments to simply widen the road, extending the analogy to the brain is not helpful. That would involve growing some neurons in a vat and plugging them into your brain. Though that would make for an excellent piece of cyberpunk or futurist fiction, the present is not so accommodating.
Instead, we can look at ways cities use when they cannot widen the roads in their dense city centers - redirecting the traffic or stopping it from entering the narrow streets, letting only the most essential or efficient traffic through and allowing the city to function despite its limitations.
Ring roads are roads that ring the city. By having multiple exits strategically located along the city perimeter, they alleviate traffic by creating direct paths explicitly designed for heavy traffic, shortening journey times and thereby taking pressure off the older and narrower streets. They also allow travelers merely passing through to other cities to efficiently bypass the older city roads, decreasing pass-through traffic. The equivalent for your mind would be quickly and efficiently filtering for information that is important to you and that you have to deal with versus information that someone else should deal with. Gas prices going up? Remember that and fill up while you can. Coupons to your favorite restaurant? Forward to the wife or girlfriend, she’ll remember for you. An offer for a new credit card? Delete that, you don’t need more debt.
Parking garages allow you to store cars off the roads when they’re parked (street parking narrows the roads and makes everyone slower), but they work best when paired with mass transit like a local bus or train line. They allow commuters from outside the city heading into the city to park their cars at the garages and use the city’s mass transit from there, which allows for higher density of people per kilometer of road. By allowing people to continue to come from afar before switching them to denser methods of transport inside the city via mass transportation, you get the best of both worlds, all while taking up less land than a ring road would, as parking garages can go up multiple stories, while ring roads must physically encircle the city. The equivalent for your mind would be external storage - from the humble journal, planner, or desk calendar, to the Gmail account linked to Google Calendar that automatically keeps tracks of appointments for you, parking garages store information for you for mass download or access when needed.
To be clear. The point of these ideas is not to replace true deep reading, spending time with a book or an article with a cup of tea in the morning by the light, staring into the clouds as you contemplate questions of truth, the meaning of life, and the nature of the universe. The point is avoiding information overload – taking into account so much information that you can no longer make heads or tails of it. Our brains are built to focus, and while information does need to reach us, we also need time to simply focus. Finding out how to fit this into normal life is the challenge.
Conclusion
The goal, of course, is to engage with the Information Superhighway on our own terms, taking what you need and discarding what you don’t. The only way to do that is to build a strong framework of what information you need and what you don’t need, what you trust and what you doubt. It comes with reflection, experience, and a firm set of priorities - all things I consider paramount to a life well-lived. Like the urban planner, who must plan for present problems and future forecasts, the planning person must balance surviving today with thriving tomorrow, staying on top of today’s needs and planning for tomorrow’s problems.
I take tips if you’re feeling generous. I’d turn on subscriptions, but Stripe doesn’t work in my country.
[1] There I am, up on the stage.
[2] My fellow motorists would likely disagree and complain about congestion, but navigating a narrow street is a lot less comfortable than the defined lanes and relative elbow room of highway, no matter how you slice it.
[3] Blinking is involuntary, but my eyes feel dry enough while writing that I suspect I’ve forgotten to blink, or at least blinked less than normal.
[4] I would estimate about three and a half hours for this article’s first draft, before time spent editing.
Brilliant analogy!
I like this a lot and I find it very relatable.
Realistically, there's a lot more information coming out than what a person can reasonably process. Prioritization has been really helpful but not sufficient so far.