I was on a plane yesterday and catching up. It’s about having a global learning style – the ability to scan and patterns. It is about having really good pattern analysis skills. There are generational issues too – as the brain ages it becomes harder to take in as much.

There’s some interesting brain research on the impacts of information on us – and also some interesting research on how younger people are consuming information versus older people.

Have you read David Shenk?

@Cameron – great question to ponder. But maybe one doesn’t replace the other. There are times when fast matters, and times when learned, slow, staid matters?

Note report says that an average person has a short term memory of about two weeks before they forget about what they learn. And even if they recall what was taught, only 25-30% are left but not in the case if they do it regularly.

For example, will you forget how to surf the net?

And if you heard it on Twitter, chances are it’s relatively new!

There is a negative side to speed and immediacy, though; consider, for example, the ongoing debate about the US health care system. I’m not sure that the ability of social media to keep us all updated on the latest utterance by a political candidate, or even the latest study on some aspect of health care financing or management, is all that useful when most of the public is lacking basic information about how our health care dollars are spent, where the gaps in the current system are, or how alternatives have worked and not worked in other countries; so that’s a topic where it would be best to tune out the news and for every voter to go read some more in-depth material – even if it hasn’t got anything about the last few months’ discussion of the issue.

Faster is valuable for some things, and not for others. I try to filter my information by thinking about what’s actionable and what’s not. There are lots of topics that interest me that I don’t read many blogs about, or follow tweets about, simply because I’m not going to do anything with that information on a daily basis, and it’s much more efficient to see slower but more carefully organized information.

Thoughts?