Abundance and the Wish to be Spoon-Fed

Abundance of information may not always be good for the brain. For mine, at any rate. It seems to encourage a wish to be spoon-fed.

Letting others think for you has always been a seductive pastime, and its allure hasn’t diminished. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a German scientist and satirist, suffered from the same problem, and joked

I love to lose myself in other men’s mind’s.
When I am not walking, I am reading;
I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

[Source]

Recently I spent a couple of days searching for previous thoughts on a little problem I’m working on.

I searched online, in library catalogues, and spoke to various people to see whether they knew anything that could help. Nothing turned up (or at least nothing of which I was conscious). So on Day 3, I spent half an hour in Cafe Nero with pen and paper and a so-much-nicer-than-Starbuckscoffee, doodling and thinking. I may not have solved the problem, but I made substantially more progress than I had done on the previous two days.

I had, I still think rightly, assumed that the truth was “out there”. But I’d forgotten that there were ideas in (tap tap sound of hollow knocking) here. There are probably several reasons for my forgetfulness, laziness among them, but one – and the one I want to stress – was the quantity of possible ideas I thought I might have access to. Abundance stopped me thinking.

The moral?
A) As a much better man than me said:

Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge;
it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

– John Locke

B) Maybe I should have tried to say that in my own words.