Everything, everywhere, requires knowledge in increasing quantities. There are topics for everyone’s taste: biology, chemistry, medicine, aeronautics, space exploration, the environment and a whole lot more.

Before this incredible era we had the automatic mechanisms of nature to guide and to keep us in the right path. For example, we would know when to stop eating and when strenuous exercise was enough. Now-a-days, though, we need to understand issues such as T-cells, cloning, nutrition, the fission of the atom or the greenhouse effect to achieve even the most ridiculous effects such as eating a can of tuna.

What this means to me is that, being the world increasingly knowledge based, our kids will have to drag to school greater and heavier bags of books to study, as if they aren’t already stretched to the limit of their capacities.

One day, truly, we will not be able to pass through our door frames because our cortex will have grown so greater that our heads won’t fit in them, just like in some cartoons.

And everything we do will require so much knowledge and thinking that our nerve fuses will burn up before we can come up with any solution, decision or action.

I even wonder where it all will end up.

That is, unless we become smarter at being successful thinkers.

When we deal with masses of complex information the way to go about it is by stereotyping. That is, we create groups with general characteristics and attribute to them any pieces of information that match their profile. Just like saying that some people are all the same, so some information, say on the red colour, is also all the same.

This way we can reduce complexity to a more simple state, a more manageable one. I think that this is exactly what we have been doing for millennia: always that we know too much of something we simplify it. We reduce it to laws, to summaries, to traditions and then progress from there.

If we re-work our legacy information, we will then not have to incorporate it all in our minds, but can keep only the important points and the learnt lessons.

The other interesting thing we do when we have to deal with masses of information is that we establish hypothesis and then try to prove or disprove them. This way we go after the information that matters, not all of it, and so save our heads from growing too much.

Another interesting thing we do with regards to complexity is we specialise in one discipline of thought and become either physicists or economists or medical doctors and so on. This way we save ourselves from having to know everything about everything. But then, interdisciplinary becomes also very important because nature is a continuum.

Anyway, we are doomed: we will be increasingly brain and decreasingly body. As it stands, our brains and heads are already so much greater than those of any other animals in this planet. What will be the future of it?