It's physically impossible for us to pay attention to everything in our environment. We have access to hundreds of TV channels, thousands of movies and shows on streaming sites, and 300 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. We see about one million marketing messages each year (around 3,000 a day), and spend, on average, 13 hours each week on email. There's simply not enough time in the day for it all. George Markowsky, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maine, makes the case that our brains receive about 11 million bits of data per second, but we're only able to process roughly 50 bits per second. There's a huge discrepancy between the amount of information being transmitted and the amount of information our brains have the capacity to process. And the number of websites, apps, articles, and advertisements trying to get our attention are accelerating. Which means that whether you're launching a new product, growing an existing business, or trying to spread a message on the web, it's harder than ever to get noticed in a noisy world.