Maybe you’ve had experiences like mine. I go to the grocery store with instructions to get cottage cheese, or yogurt or bread. I get to the shelf and find a dozen varieties of bread, half that many of cottage cheese or yogurt. Should I get low-fat, nonfat, small curd, large curd?

Or I go to a coffee counter and come face to face with dozens of various kinds. My gaze gets blurry. “I just want coffee,” I tell the clerk. Fortunately, she’s encountered a dullard like me before and simply asks, “What size?” I say, “Small.” Oops, small is really “tall.” Go figure.

Do I sound like an old fogey, longing for simpler times when you were lucky to have a choice other than white bread, and no one had heard of decaf coffee (other than Sanka)? At last I have some science on the side of my complaint about too many choices.

In the article “How Mental Meltdown Comes from Information Overload” (Spirituality & Health, May-June), Stephen Kiesling refers to Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, who noted several years ago that having more choices does not make us happier. In fact, “increasing the number of possible choices not only makes decisions more difficult, it makes us less happy with whatever we finally choose.”

Schwartz’s article, “Can You Say No to Too Many Choices?” (Spirituality & Health, May 2007), made the following observations (among others):

• As the number of potential partners people encounter in an evening of “speed dating” increases, the number of matches they make decreases.

• As the number of retirement plans available increases, the chance that people will choose any plan declines.

• As the number of job possibilities available to college seniors increases, their satisfaction with the job search decreases. Job seekers who want the “best possible” job, although they get more and better offers than seekers aiming for “good enough” jobs, are less satisfied nonetheless. They are more stressed, anxious, pessimistic, regretful, disappointed, frustrated and depressed.

Since this article was published, Kiesling reports, neuroscientists doing brain research have raised another serious alarm. Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, says, “With too much information, people’s decision making makes less and less sense.”

Dimoka had volunteers take part in an experiment that involved trying to get the best price, given “a dizzying array of possible options.” She found that as the information load increased, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region responsible both for decision making and controlling emotions.

Sharon Begley of Newsweek interviewed Dimoka and reports: “As the bidders were given more and more information, at some point the activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker popped. … They start making stupid choices because the brain region responsible for smart decisions has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar.”

Kiesling draws lessons from such research. One is empathy for those who have to handle large-scale disasters and face an onslaught of information. Another is how we face the onslaught of information we encounter each day. “The closer we stay plugged in,” he writes, “the closer we stay to that moment when the dorsolateral PFC shuts down, and all our decisions become bad ones.”