How long do we have to take in information?
A human only has a set amount of time to acquire information from their environment and use it to build a world-view.
This amount of time is ultimately constrained by an individual’s lifetime, but the effective amount of time will always be less than this, as it takes some years to gather the faculties to become a functioning human in society. Of course a part of this time is shaped by your environment and the cultural norms you’re taught by your family group. This dependent world-view shaping by others can both be a catalyst or hindrance to the effective amount of time someone is able to form their own opinions and grow.
Take the effects of abuse or trauma for instance. Such occurrences tend to have lasting effects on the psyche of an individual, and drastically shape their ability to navigate society around them, most often to the detriment.
A decent analogy to this might be that all experiences shape the lens we see the world through, and traumatic events drastically alter that viewpoint, often in a way that makes it extremely difficult or impossible to unshape. Taking both the explanation and analogy further, if your lens to the world has multiple filters for color, a traumatic incidence may remove a specific ability to see a color, thus rendering them incapable of understanding what others perceive.
All that to say that humans have only a part of their life to “make sense of the world” and take in information around them to facilitate the shaping of that worldview.
Tim Urban wrote a great article that visualizes “your life in weeks” where he attempts to show you an average human’s lifespan, broken up into chunks of time. Here is an interesting quote from the beginning of that article:
If you multiply the volume of a .05 carat diamond by the number of weeks in 90 years (4,680), it adds up to just under a tablespoon.
That’s it, you get a tablespoon of diamonds to spend for your whole life, and a good portion of those you are not in a physical condition to coherently spend them, so it’s actually less.
The purpose of the above mentioned article is to elucidate how precious each week of your life is in order to motivate you to use them more wisely. While this is a wonderful goal and always something someone should consider, it is not he purpose of this writing.
The main point here (for this section at least) is to show that there is a small window of time that a human even has the capability of taking in information from the world around them, analyzing it, and then forming and altering a worldview from it. If we are to then think about the amount of time one has to broadcast that worldview in a way that alter’s another (writing, speech, mentoring, art, etc), then that timeline is even more reduced.
This analysis can continue to go even further to discuss the available waking hours in a given day, and then further to discuss the available “effective mental hours” a human has to process complex information and incorporate it, and then even further to discuss the amount of repetition that is needed in order for a given amount of information to be retained in memory. There is certainly a evidence based, scientific argument for all of this, but it suffices to say that we all have experienced it in our lives personally. That’s good enough.