This is not a contradiction, but a consequence.

It is popularly perceived about information overload, that the problem is quantity, that we have accumulated too much and that the solution should be to consume less. However, this assumption is wrong. It is not the problem of quantity, but what the quantity does to our cognitive environment in which the information lands. Each piece of news headline or social media post about a casualty figure, a crisis, a climate statistic, lands on top of each other accumulating, leaving a psychological trace. The traces are small in the beginning, but together they wash away our ability to reason, judge and even empathise. It is not ignorance but the mind's inability to do anything about all the information it holds.

To understand how this happens, not as a metaphor but as a mechanism, we need to borrow a principle from forensic science.

Traces of Contact

In 1910, forensic criminologist Edmond Locard proposed what turned out to be the foundational principle of forensic science: every contact leaves a trace (Locard, 1920). Whenever two objects interact, each leaves a trace of their presence on the other. No encounter is ever clean, or without consequence.

Every piece of news, opinion or information leaves behind a psychological trace. Gaza. Iran. Another anomaly in the climate report. AI replacing thousands of jobs. All resulting in emotions that do not lead to any action, but settle on top of the other. Each contact, each layer, each trace compressing the ones underneath it.

We cannot cognitively form our own beliefs, make judgements and decide what to care about anymore. Our own reasoning has been compromised by the sheer amount of evidence that we have been asked to process.

The mind, over time, becomes a contaminated crime scene. In forensic science, such a scene can never yield valuable, reliable evidence. Everything found there is suspicious, not because the evidence is not real, but because you don't know what was originally there and what was brought in by all the noise.

But contamination alone does not explain why the mind can't simply push through all the information. For that, we need to understand what evidence accumulation does to the investigator.

The Weight of Accumulation

Every forensic expert knows that too much evidence is a problem in itself. When traces accumulate faster than they can be catalogued, the truth does not become clearer but noisier. The same is true of the human mind.

Human working memory is limited to approximately seven (+/-) two units of information (Miller, 1956). And when the information exceeds this limit, information overload occurs. Research states that there are three types of cognitive load, extraneous (distractions and how information is designed), intrinsic (material complexity), and germane (the kind that leads to learning and schema-building) (Sweller et al., 1998).

The problem that exists today is that people overuse their extraneous and intrinsic loads and it has become so overwhelming that the germane load, wherein lies the actual thinking, never gets a chance. Our brains were not designed to sustain this volume. We process, but we don't understand. We see, but we don't think.

The volume of information is not filling us up. Instead, it is fostering distractions, slowing down the deep focus that is required for genuine understanding. And here is where the problem worsens, because when the mind realises that it can no longer process what it knows, it stops trying. It makes a different choice altogether.

The Cost of Knowing

In forensic terms, this is where the investigator contaminates the scene further, not by introducing more evidence but by leaving. Every step away from the crime scene, leaves the traces to grow cold, more impossible to read.

This is where Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance comes into play. Festinger suggested that human beings look for internal consistency. When we experience internal inconsistency, like knowing something is catastrophic but not caring about it, we become psychologically uncomfortable and wish to resolve that tension (Festinger, 1957). Most times people tend to avoid such situations. When the gap between what we know and what we feel becomes too painful to hold, we simply stop engaging with what we know.

The Reuters Institute's 2024 Digital News Report, based on a survey of 95,000 people across 47 countries, found that 39% of the respondents sometimes or often actively avoid the news. Around four in ten people globally say that they get overwhelmed by the amount and topic of news (Newman et al., 2024). This is not laziness or apathy in any way, it is simply the product of cognitive dissonance. When the "knowing, and not acting" becomes too difficult, the mind does the one thing it can, it looks away.

Deliberative Erosion

The consequences of this are not personal, but structural. They are structural, meaning that it does not affect one mind in isolation, but the collective capacity of societies to make decisions. The world's entire system relies on the cognitive functioning of human minds. At some point in the next few years, we will be asked, by an electoral ballot, by a policy, by a choice about future technology, to make a decision that requires genuine understanding. Not an opinion formed from news headlines or social media comments. Not an instinct shaped by outrage but an actual understanding. A cognitive environment that is not contaminated. And that is what we no longer have.

The problem is not misinformation, though that is real. The problem is not fake news, though that matters. The problem is that the sheer volume and velocity of true information has deposited so many traces on the surfaces of our reasoning that new information, no matter how crucial, cannot find its importance. It lands on sediment, becoming another trace. And the crime scene grows thicker, more impossible to read.

Epistemic Slowness

Locard's principle was designed to find the invisible in the visible. When all hope is lost, his principle suggested that we could find the evidence of what had occurred in the smallest trace of contact.

Forensic investigators don't abandon the scene of a contaminated crime scene, instead they become more diligent and precise and approach it with greater discipline. We need some of that discipline now. Not less information, but a more forensic relationship with the information. The ability to slow down, to distinguish between what is real and what is just noise, to ask about the origin of the trace and not just what the trace is, and finally to see underneath, what the accumulation has made impossible to see.

Every contact leaves a trace. The question is whether we are willing to read them, slowly, carefully, to find the truth beneath.

References

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503620766

Locard, E. (1920). L'enquête criminelle et les méthodes scientifiques [Criminal investigation and scientific methods]. Flammarion.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81-97. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158

Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Robertson, C. T., Eddy, K., & Nielsen, R. K. (2024). Reuters Institute digital news report 2024. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://www.digitalnewsreport.org

Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. (1998). Cognitive architecture and instructional design. Educational Psychology Review, 10(3), 251-296. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022193728205

Ananya Berani is an undergraduate student at FLAME University, Pune, and Moitrayee Das is an assistant professor of psychology at FLAME University, Pune.