What are the symptoms

A person suffering from information overload may stop pulling their weight at work. There is absenteeism and there is presenteeism where the person turns up but they are mentally absent, says Lewis. A sufferer may lose confidence in their judgement and be unwilling to take decisions. They may start to make mistakes, usually the kind of mistake they would not have made in the past, perhaps taking foolish decisions

They may be irritable and lose their sense of humour. Sleeping badly and mental fatigue can also be caused by information plague through a combination of over work and stress.

The behaviour of people suffering from stress tends to regress to more established patterns of behaviour says Dr. Lewis, a consultant psychologist specialising in business analysis. He believes the pilot of a British Midland plane which crashed after shutting down the wrong engine was suffering from information overload. There would have been huge amounts of information coming into the cockpit of that plane. In a situation of intense stress, the pilot was unable to deal with it and he reacted by making a flawed decision and shut down the wrong engine. This behaviour Lewis says is typical of an overloaded brain.