Overwhelmed with information? In the future, a globally-networked "extensible brain" could help us use it to manage our lives more effectively.

These days, it's a cliché to say that the Internet has utterly changed the way we deal with information. The resources it has made accessible to us through a few keystrokes seem infinite. While this power to access information offers enormous benefits, it also comes with inherent problems. Chief among those drawbacks is information overload.

"It's almost axiomatic to say we are on the verge of knowledge overload," says E. J. Grabert, program manager for the University of Illinois Technology Research, Education and Commercialization Center (TRECC). Grabert observes that, with the increase in volume of available information in recent decades the ways to put that information to practical use have also drastically increased.

Tim Wentling, who leads the Knowledge and Learning System Group (KLSG) at NCSA, agrees. "We have access to everything in the world, almost, but we can't read it all, we can't use it all," he says. "When we make decisions, we need help figuring out what information is useful to us, and the increase in knowledge is just making that process more complex all the time." And decision-making, says Wentling, isn't the only, or even the biggest, problem: The sheer amount of available information is overwhelming. "We have physical limits, and we can only read so much. We can only go to so many presentations. We can only sit in so many meetings."

Wentling and his group are thinking hard about how to help humans cope with knowledge overload. They envision a system they've dubbed the "extensible brain" that could help people to more efficiently absorb and process information using a variety of visualization, data-gathering, and other developing technologies. How this system might work depends on research and input from a broad range of disciplines, from cognitive psychology to data management to artificial intelligence to linguistics. "We need to get people from these fields together and pick their brains to find out what can be done," says Wentling.

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