TMI

I’m not sure I need to know the color of the hairs growing out of that mole, I think to myself.

I’m cognizant of the fact that this TV offers us considerably more detail than our TV at home. This is 4K UHD (Ultra High Definition, 4 times as many pixels as an HD TV), and it has an awful lot of information to give me.

Watching TV like this, where every individual detail washes across the screen and bombards you with knowledge of every nook and cranny, no matter how incidental to the story, is worlds apart from the 13 inch black and white TV I had in my room during my high school years (and I was lucky to have my own TV, too!).

A lot of shows were filmed before there was such a thing as HDTV, and if you play one of those shows on UHD TV, you’ll find these shows to be less effective. Directors and camera folks will often focus strongly on the thing they want you to look at or think about, and a lot of this magic and art is lost when everything is illuminated with intense reality.

This is a case of TMI (Too Much Information), and it can manifest in different forms.

In visual art, TMI can manifest in something called horror vacui—literally the fear of empty spaces. Many great artists are well known for leaving empty space in their work, and it’s often said that the true art is in leaving things out.

I appreciated empty space, but I also appreciated the horror vacui concept, too. You can see a good example of this in the TMI comic book art of Todd McFarlane, and here I was, learning how to draw by copying this style:

TMI can manifest itself in other areas, too. If you’re a writer, you probably like to have a particular environment that minimizes distractions as much as possible. The more information that creeps into your mind while you’re trying to create new words, the less clear your thoughts are likely to be.

That’s why I tend to prefer to listen to instrumental music while I’m writing, as I’m doing right now. It needs to be auditorily stimulating, but not distracting. I have a collection of songs I can listen to in the background and sort of tap my foot to. Songs with words would be way too much information.

Visual and auditory information can be overwhelming, but so can other types of info. We live in a fast-paced, rapidly changing world where important things change on a regular basis. New technological platforms arise at record speeds, job opportunities evolve virtually overnight, and being a citizen is difficult and important work.

This means it’s important to have an effective filter for news, or else you’ll be overwhelmed by it. It’s important to stay informed, but being plugged in 24/7 means that everything eventually seems incredibly important, and you lose the ability to zoom out in order to gain the right perspective.

Likewise, if you open up your email and have a thousand unread messages, all of them might seem equally important. This overwhelming amount of information can keep you from getting things done, and there’s even a term for when you have too many choices and can’t make a decision: analysis paralysis.

Back to our senses: we need not focus on our eyes and ears. Taste is another form of information, and there’s an easy way to see how you can get TMI from eating. Imagine a slice of pizza with exactly the right ingredients on it. Now, add five or six more toppings you don’t really want on there. Is the slice better or worse now?

Smell, too, gives us information. Our noses are like detectives with little chemistry labs, identifying molecules one at a time. Smelling cookies baking in the oven can be heavenly, but adding in the scent of some fresh garlic or a sliced onion and you have an overabundance of odors.

Taste, smell, sight, sound, and touch are all sources of information for our brains, and all can be overwhelming. Limiting the inputs means you can focus on less info at a time, so you can enjoy and appreciate the constant (but manageable) data stream coming in.

Does TMI creep into your life? Would a hypothetical series of articles about poop qualify as TMI? What other areas of TMI are out there?