The cognitive era: Whither the human brain?

Only human: The human brain can hold vast amounts of the stuff, but just how much can it absorb on an ongoing basis?

Floods, deluges, vast oceans of data, pour in remorselessly from the computer systems that hum behind the scenes of modern life, everything from banking to travel to any form of commerce, to data generated by all of us texting away on our smartphones, to the embarrassing excesses of e-mail flooding every inbox with spam, to videos and photographs posted on social media of special meals and holidays to devices themselves sending signals all the time. Your car, your smartphone, airplanes in the air, any connected device, is generating data all the time. 

(Technology geeks call these Big Data and the Internet of Things, among other things. Analysts talk about ‘billions’ of connected devices and by some estimates, sometime in the first decade of the 21^st century, the number of connected devices exceeded the human population.  IBM says that some 40% of all data generated by 2020 will come from devices and machines.)