Do you have information overload? Would you know it if you saw it?

In a famous study, French economist Georges Anderla broke humanity's knowledge into units. He estimated that by AD 1500, humanity had amassed two units of knowledge. Within 250 years, total knowledge had doubled; the next doubling took only 150 years, and the next, only 50 years. The one after that took only ten years, so that by 1960 humanity had gathered 32 units of knowledge. The next doublings took seven and then six years, taking us to 128 units in 1973, the year of Anderla's study. Since then, the rate of doubling has continued to increase ever more rapidly so that today, with the advent of the information revolution, human knowledge is estimated to be doubling every eighteen months and it is predicted that it will double every four months by the year 2010.