One of the unfulfilled promises of information and communication technologies has been that they will make our lives easier. Instead, computers, the Internet and mobile communication have increased our cognitive load, causing sometimes symptoms like infostress and attention deficit trait. No wonder, as our brains have not very much evolved since the stone age. Is it now time to consider updating our wetware in order to cope with the demands of soft- and hardware? Recent research results promise that this might be possible, up to a certain extent. 

Swedish neuro-scientist Torkel Klingberg believes that we can improve our working memory, the critical bottleneck in an age of information overload, through systematic training. Paradoxically, information and communication technologies (ICT) might be provide the tools to exercise our brain cells in order to better cope with the overloading effects of ICT-induced complexity. In his new book "The Overflowing Brain", he claims that through computer-based training the working memory performance of children suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHS) can be sustainably improved by 18 per cent. This is based on a study with 50 children, who trained their working memory for five weeks with a serious game called RoboMemo that Dr. Klingberg had developed together with game designers. 

Even plain Internet-surfing could have a beneficial impact on our brain performance. At least this is what a recent study from the University of California suggests. According to this study, the decrease of elderly people’s memory has been slowed down through Web-surfing. 

However, even Dr. Klingberg admits that there are limits to the working memory's capacity to cope with information overload caused by a plethora of digital technologies. The effects can be disorientation and info-stress. Particularly e-mail seems to be a source of info-stress. In a study quoted by Dr. Klingberg, people who only received 20 e-mails per day had the same feeling of being overloaded as people who received 100 e-mails. 

Particularly the pressure for multitasking at the workplace, enhanced by ICT, contributes to info-stress. Already in 1956 psychologist George A. Miller had found out in an empirical study that capacity for processing information is limited to a maximum of seven items. 

Apart from this limitation it is also very doubtful to what extent humans are capable of multitasking, if at all. Neuroscientist Earl Miller from the MIT is convinced that "people can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves." The reason is that the tasks to be performed simultaneously compete for the same resource in our brain, and thus interfere with each. "Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time," Mr. Miller explains. 

So, if we are driving and seemingly focusing at the same time on the traffic, a phone conversation, and the speedometer, we are rather switching very quickly between these tasks, but not really doing them in parallel. 

Trying to do multi-tasking can sometimes be even quite dangerous, as researchers from the British Transport Research Laboratory recently found out. According to their study, texting while driving impairs motorists more than being under the influence of drink or drugs. 

Daniel Weissman, a neuroscientist from the University of Michigan, has found out in his research that there is a part of the brain in the frontal lobe which serves as an executive system for deciding, which of the competing tasks we should perform first. 

In human evolution this might have been an important factor for survival. When our ancestors hunted in groups, they were able to quickly switch between communicating with their fellow hunters, observing the terrain, and focusing on the mammooth. 

However, it seems that today's ICT is overwhelming our executive system's capacity to prioritise the right tasks. If the choice is between focusing your attention on berries you want to collect and a tiger suddenly crashing through the Underwood, the decision is easy. But what should be the priority, if your choice is between a ringing phone, an e-mail popping up, and a blinking website?  

So, expanding the capacities of our wetware might not be sufficient to cope with the demands of our information society. If we don't want to wait for human evolution to take  care of this, we should rather adapt our information and communication technologies to the limits of our limited brains, and particularly our stone-age working memory. 

Intelligent user interfaces based on advanced knowledge-management systems may some day reduce our cognitive load caused by interruptions and too much information. However, we may than become dependent on the quality of the system's selection mechanism. In view of the risks of the purely technological, improving our cognitive ability to cope with information is still an option worthwhile pursuing.