Advances in information technology are changing the economics of information, and the pace of change is exponential. Computing power doubles every 18 months; storage capacity, every 12 months; bandwidth, which constrains the amount of information that can be transferred, every nine months.

A few years from now, we will hold the world in our hands -- every book and newspaper we have ever read, every television show and movie we have ever seen will be on our Palm handheld.

Can the human brain cope?

For much of human history, people have lived in groups -- including hunters and gatherers. They spent a lot of time gossiping with and about each other, face-to-face and behind each others' backs, talking about who is sleeping with whom and "Which part of the forest should I visit to gather shrubs for dinner?"

They were unaware of the rich variety of religious practices and cultural norms scattered across the inhabited parts of the globe (not that they knew about the globe in the first place). Economic relations and political structures were simple and transparent.

The modern world, with its mass communications and complex institutions, presents a radically different environment.

Information used to be a scarce resource; today, it is plentiful. Most communications are electronic rather than face-to-face. And even face-to-face communications occur mostly between people who do not know each other very well, if at all.

The content of communications is often abstract (statistics) and far removed from direct observation and experience -- How would one go about verifying that we should keep child molesters in prison for life because they have a high rate of recidivism?

People are well aware of the diversity of religious practices and cultural norms in general, but often grossly ill-informed about the details of local worlds other than their own.

Behavior is shaped by economic and political institutions of extraordinary complexity. But what is the role of higher education when information is plentiful?

We must move away from teaching substantive content that becomes obsolete in next to no time or can easily be accessed on a Palm.

There is an urgent need for us to develop the knowledge navigation skills of our students -- which means more (a lot more) than merely covering "effective search strategies for the Web."

We need to explain how information is produced, how it moves, how it is received.

We need to demonstrate how information can get mangled, manipulated and misinterpreted.

We need to talk about how information gets lost (there is a "thinning out" that occurs) as it moves upward in an organization or enters a political debate with the mass public looking on.

In sum, we need to trace out how the sense-making apparatus of a dinosaur brain copes with a flood of information.