Deep Consumption

There is so much information out there — both online (blogs, videos, articles, e-books, music) and offline (books, discussions, concerts). On the other hand, time is increasingly limited. So much information — so little time. How does one decide what to consume and what not to?

I have thought a bit about this question: Sometimes proactively (usually, to find ways in which I might spend my time more wisely); at other times reactively (often, after I have felt that I’ve “wasted time” watching, reading, or listening).

This note is a set of “guidelines to self” about what information to consume, and what not to. I am sharing with you either because I would like your feedback about it, or because I feel it might be useful to you.

Before I start, a couple of disclaimers. I propose some “models” on how our brain processes information. I am not a neuroscientist and many of these models are not scientifically conceived. They are mostly metaphors to aid understanding. Also, a lot of these ideas are not completely original. I have been influenced by conversations with friends, and books (most importantly, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr).

Goals

Let us start with the “why”. Before arguing about “what” information to consume, we need to clarify “why” we consume information.

For me, I feel I consume information for the following reasons:

1. To Understand. We consume information to understand the world better. This might be as simple as looking-up the definition of a word in a dictionary — or spending a couple of weeks “acquiring a specialization” on Coursera.
2. To Create. We might not do this consciously, but often we make connections between different pieces of information we have consumed to produce new and sometimes original information. Unlike “To Understand”, we do not consciously seek specific pieces of information because it makes us creative.
3. To Stimulate. Finally, we consume a lot of information, for no other reason, except because it is fun, enjoyable, or entertaining.

Models and Theories

Now that we have specified our goals, I am going to present some speculations on how these goals might be met, to set a foundation for the “guidelines” that might help with better achieving these goals.

On Understanding

Whenever we consume information (be it watching, listening, or reading), are brains are bombarded with ideas, concepts and images. Some of these we remember, others we do not. In fact, at the time of consumption, our brains have a sort of “buffer” which temporarily stores the pieces of information. Some forms of information need larger or deeper buffers, while others can do with smaller, shallow buffers.

Maintaining a deeper buffer needs more mental effort. Often, our buffers “run out” and we need to re-consume information, to make use of it (e.g. Re-reading a section of a book which is profound, or otherwise difficult to understand).

Our brains also store information with significant redundancy — meaning that the same information is stored multiple times in many places. Hence, repetitive consumption of the same information often results, not just in easier recall, but also a better understanding of that information. In fact, in many disciplines (e.g. music) memorization (acquired through repeated consumption) has been considered essential for a more complete understanding.

On Creating

As implied above, by “creativity” I’m specifically referring to the “creation of ideas”. My mental model for describing “how creativity happens” goes something like this: two or more ideas or pieces of information join or combine to form a new (sometimes original) piece of information. Matt Ridley describes creativity as what happens “when ideas have sex”.

Creativity is intricately connected to the process of understanding. The more ideas and concepts we deeply understand, the larger opportunity for ideas to combine and recombine to form novel ideas.

On Stimulation

What makes an idea stimulating? For me, the process is akin to resonance. Just as a glass shatters when subject to a loud voice that exactly matches its natural frequency, we find ideas stimulating when we feel some familiarity with the idea. However, its not familiarity alone — but a combination of familiarity and variety. We are stimulated the most when we consume information which is familiar, but also novel and imaginative in some way. If information is familiar alone, it is boring. However, if it is pure variety, with no familiarity, we are confused.

Deep Consumption vs. Shallow Consumption

There are many ways to “classify” information. But for the purpose of this note, I’d like to present to idea of “deep” and “shallow” information. One can think of the “depth” of a piece of information as how much mental effort is needed to process it. A good intuition of depth is how deep a “buffer” (as presented above) is needed to consume the information, and how much time is needed to consume the information. Deep information needs a deep buffer, and more time to consume.

Let me try and add more colour to this spectrum by comparing its extremes: Deep information and Shallow information. I’m going to refer to the consumption of deep and shallow information as “deep consumption” and “shallow consumption” respectively.

• Size and Time: Deep consumption involves consuming large pieces of information, which might take hours or days. Shallow consumption involves smaller pieces of information consumer over a short time.
• “Buffer Size” and Mental Effort: Shallow consumption requires a smaller mental buffer; deep consumption requires a deeper buffer. A deeper buffer also implies more mental effort. It might also involve false starts and repetition.
• Knowledge and Understanding: Deep consumption results in more ideas being consumed, and results in more understanding and more knowledge. Shallow consumption on the other hand results in a few new ideas being gained.
• Connections and Creativity: Deep consumption results in the opportunity for more new connections — and hence more creativity.
• Redundancy and Recall: Deep consumption results in the same information being stored in many parts of the brain. As a result, memory is more persistent and recall is easier.
• Time to stimulation. Shallow consumption usually exploits simple familiarities, and hence results in quick stimulation (“instant gratification”). Deep consumption requires some time before familiarity can be established.
• Initial consumption cost: Given the mental effort and delayed stimulation associated with deep information, Deep consumption has a much higher “initial cost”. Shallow consumption has very low cost.
• Depth of stimulation. On the other hand, deep consumption results in connections being established with many familiar concepts as well as contrasting new ideas in a wider variety of ways. Hence, when stimulation happens it is deeper and more satisfying.
• Complexity. Deep consumption involves consuming many different ideas. In contrast shallow consumption involves consuming a small number of ideas.
• Similar information. As a result of lower complexity, it is easier to find other pieces of information similar to a given piece of shallow information — and justify why it is similar. This is much harder with complex deep information.
• Suggestion and Chaining. Given that it is easier to find other similar pieces information to piece of shallow information, it is easier to “suggest” other pieces of information similar to shallow information. Hence, consumption of shallow information often involves the “chaining” of many pieces of similar information. For example, you might watch one short Cat-Video on YouTube, and end up watching 13 in succession. This type of “chaining” is hard with deep information.
• Push vs. Pull. In contrast, since it is hard to “push” deep information to a consumer, consumption usually follows a “pull” model — with the consumer actively specifying what information he/she wants to consume.
• Finite vs. Infinite. Another consequence of “chaining” is that shallow consumption is often unbounded. There is no limit of how many similar pieces of information you can consume. For example, “cute cat videos” returns nearly 800,000 results on Google. On the other hand, “a deep consumption session” actively chosen by the consumer is finite.

Credo

If the goal of information consumption is knowledge, creativity, and stimulation, then I believe that deep consumption is clearly preferable to shallow consumption. The “guidelines” I am going to propose hinge on accepting this belief.

Guidelines to Self

All that was “theory”. What does this all mean in practice? I have distilled these thoughts into the following guidelines:

1. Do Long Duration. Have a “minimum duration limit” on consumption. For example, a video should be at least 30min. Avoid short, click-baity articles. Instead, read articles that are long enough to build a reasonable an argument.
2. Do Make Time. If we consciously make time to do something, we are more likely to make better use of that time. Conversely, if we sneak in some actively into time which we were supposed to be doing something else, we are more likely to spend it unwisely. Most shallow consumption happens on this “stolen time”. On the other hand, if we consciously make time, we are likely to choose to spend it on deep consumption.
3. Do Finite. Limit consumption to information which is finite. Hence, I avoid infinite feeds of information, and apply some “bounds” that make the information finite. With news, I’ve restricted myself to the print version of papers — even when reading it online or in different formats (e.g. I “consume the Economist print edition”, in audio form using the Economist App).
4. Don’t follow suggestions. I watch a lot of videos on YouTube, but don’t follow YouTube suggestions. Instead, I search for the content that I want to watch. Most of the suggestions by YouTube belong to a small subset of topics that I’ve watched in the past, and, were I to solely follow suggestions, would result in me getting passively “siloed” into consuming solely these topics.
5. Do Active. More generally, I try to actively pick what information I consume, as opposed to follow passive suggestions.
6. Do Repeat. Often when I like a book, I read it again. Often, I find that I learn many new things on the second read. Sometimes, I also consume the same information in different ways. For example, I might first listen to an audio book, and then “manually” read it off a hard copy.
7. Don’t Chain. I’ve shifted to consuming Newsfeeds more like “News-papers”, where I will look at my feed (say) once a day, and consume a limited number of articles. This applies to Facebook, Quora, Twitter and LinkedIn. To limit passive chaining, I’ve uninstalled feeds from my phone.
8. Do add friction. One reason it is easier to shallow consume, is because it has a lower initial cost. We can get around this by artificially adding friction to shallow consumption tasks (e.g. block sides on your browser),
9. Do remove friction. Conversely, we can reduce friction to deep consumption tasks (e.g. keep a book where you can see it, buy a ticket to a concert or movie — forcing you to go).
10. Do Offline. Sometimes, deep consumption can only happen offline. This is particularly true with the information transmission that happens (or should happen) with human relationships. The internet simply has insufficient bandwidth to transmit all the nuances that must be sent and received.