Editorial: Know your limits

If by intelligence you mean knowing a lot of facts and things, then I’m not a very intelligent person. But with the little that I know, I’m getting by, thank you very much.

The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine- Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder

My secret (it’s no secret at all – it’s just a life system) is to acknowledge and be humble about my brain power (conundrum alert: does admitting to humility make me less humble?).

You know how we’re always reading about people pushing themselves to their limits, and then beyond to become heroes? Well, I’ll never be one of them because I know where my eyesight stops and where chaos begins.

For instance, I don’t know anything about the moon. Until five minutes ago, I always thought it was a big, floating cheese. Now I know that it’s the second brightest object in the sky after the sun, and that it is thought to have formed more than 4.5 billion years ago. Now where did that get me? Nowhere. I’ll never walk on the moon, so I don’t really need to know anything about it.

The same goes for cars, electricity and computers. I know how to fill up my car with petrol, that I should never touch an electricity switch with wet hands, and how to install things on my tablet. But I’ll never be able to change a carburettor, fix a washing machine or speak fluent HTML – there are people who get paid to do that for me.

Knowing just enough is the trick to survival. I wouldn’t know how to cook snail porridge but I know a couple of basic recipes which provide me with basic nourishment.

But in the data-rich world we’re tweeting in, knowing too much is a Medusa of a temptation. Just consider that we are currently generating something like 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. That’s a good thing, you might reason. Not at all, because this information growth has greatly surpassed the speed with which we can process it – our brain cannot process all the data that we are creating.

Which is why you need to be selective about what you need to remember and give your brain just enough information so that it can find and make patterns. Because knowledge is nothing without a pattern.

So skim over all those status updates, scientific data and research papers because the human brain can only, at a stretch, store around 3,000GB of information.

Yes, you have the equivalent of a dozen iPods for a brain, so play the right music.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com