“Simplicity is the peak of civilization.” – Jessie Sampter

To be alive in America today is to be bombarded by messages and information.  Nearly every surface, from the newspaper to the sides of downtown buses carry messages and information entitled “must see”!  If you don’t believe me, take conscious notice of the room you sit in right now—look around at the book titles, the magazine covers, the sticky notes and the television.  All vie for a limited commodity: your attention.

Is it a wonder that we all feel as if we have some degree of Attention Deficit Disorder?  After a certain age, we begin to think it is the onset of dementia when names escape us, or words will not come to mind, but it is likely this is the effect of over-stimulation.  The brain is wired up to pay conscious attention to only one or two things at a time.  At a lowered level of consciousness, we can also monitor a number of other things (the song now playing on a radio in the background, the increasing noise from our neighbor’s back yard), but we cannot give conscious attention to all that is happening in our environment at any moment, unless of course we’re in a windowless room alone, with no distractions.  I haven’t had that experience, so I shouldn’t really say that it would be possible to pay attention more closely in that environment!

We have learned to “screen out” many of the messages being thrown at us by the television, the radio, and the buzz of conversation from the next cubicle at work, but the brain is not that easily turned off.  The screening process that keeps TV commercials in the background as you chat with family members between segments of the show, takes energy and it is incomplete at best.  Advertisers especially, count on this incomplete screening to get their messages into our heads, and they use words like NEW! and FREE! and SEXY! to decrease your screening ability, too.

Being saturated with incoming messages and images that must be screened for importance is hard mental work.  Our brains do a great job of it—for a while—but just like any of our muscles would grow tired after a day of heavy lifting, mental fatigue sets in after a day of sorting through the onslaught of incoming stimuli to figure out which pieces YOU need to pay attention to.  Mostly, you’re unaware of this process, and it goes on without any need for participation from you.  Occasionally, you become aware of demands that divide your attention: you are on an important phone call, and a crying child comes into the room.  In the next second, three other children storm through the back door all yelling that the neighbor’s cat is caught in a tree, and that the neighbor has fallen trying to rescue it!  The phone, the crying child, the yelling children, the neighbor’s cat, the neighbor himself—they are all stimuli screaming for your attention, and you are quite aware that you must make decisions about what needs your attention first.  Now, if you’ve had a good night’s sleep, you’re well-nourished and not experiencing emotional overload from something that occurred moments or hours before this scenario unfolded, you may do just fine with your triage of need.  You’ll excuse yourself from the phone; sweep up the crying child and dash out to see if an ambulance is needed for the neighbor.

Mental saturation leaves us less able to respond to life, whether life is bringing emergencies or simple pleasures.  That is why it is so vital that we make a conscious effort to reduce the “input pollution” from time to time by turning off the media (TV, radio, stereo, computer and phones) and learning to meditate and re-focus on the life that we really want.   If you would like to know more about mental saturation, you might enjoy the following articles on this website: “Meditation”, and “Burnout”.