Unless you live under a rock with no cell signal, your brain processes an extraordinary amount of information every day.
Americans consume five times as much information as they did in 1986 — the daily equivalent of about 174 newspapers — a 2011 study found. Outside of work alone our daily intake is 34 gigabytes of information, or 100,000 words, according to a University of California, San Diego report. That’s roughly the size of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Our brains aren’t equipped to handle such a deluge. This makes it difficult to decipher fact from fiction, or what is relevant to you and what is not — an important distinction when your money is at stake.