The Noise We No Longer Notice
Cognitive Toll — Article 1 of 5
By Henry O. A. Atang
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You haven't finished your first cup of tea, and the selling has already started. The alarm goes off. You reach for your phone. The weather app loads — and before you can check whether you need a jacket, a banner ad for insurance appears. You scroll through the headlines — three of the ten are sponsored. You open a video to listen to while you dress, and a fifteen-second ad plays first. You step outside. The bus shelter has a poster (even the bus is wrapped in an ad). The radio in the café is running a spot for a furniture sale.
By 8:30 in the morning, dozens of commercial messages have passed through your field of attention, and you chose none of them. Not one.
This is the backdrop of modern life. It is so constant that most of us have stopped seeing it — which, as it turns out, may be precisely the problem.
The Numbers (and Why They Disagree)
Nobody agrees on how many advertisements the average person sees in a day. The numbers you will find range from a few hundred to ten thousand, depending on who is counting and what they choose to include. It may also depend on where we are: some countries and cities are more commercially saturated than others.
In 2007, the market research firm Yankelovich estimated that consumers were exposed to about 5,000 ads a day.¹ The same research surveyed 4,110 people and found that 61 per cent said advertising was "out of control." That was before the smartphone became the main screen in most people's lives. By 2025, industry estimates had raised the exposure figure to between 6,000 and 10,000. But a more conservative analysis by Media Dynamics analyst Ed Papazian put actual ad exposures at 362 per day, of which only 153 were consciously noticed by participants.²
Question:
Are we not still influenced by the ads we never consciously notice? Do those unregistered exposures vanish — or do they keep adding to the noise in our minds?
The disagreement on the actual numbers and impact tells a story. It tells you that the noise is so woven into daily experience that even the people whose job it is to measure it can't agree on the level of exposure or what each person retains from it.
What isn't in dispute is the trend. In the 1970s, the average person saw a small fraction of today's number, whichever estimate you believe. Whether the current figure is Papazian's modest 362 or the industry's headline 10,000, the direction is the same: far more commercial messages are competing for your attention than at any other point in human history, and the infrastructure that delivers them — your phone, your apps, your feeds, your commute — isn't slowing down.
What People Say When You Ask Them
When researchers ask people how they feel about this, the answers are not subtle.
According to figures widely reported across the marketing industry, 91 per cent of people say ads are more intrusive today than they were just two years ago. Nearly two-thirds of ad blocker users — 62.9 per cent — say they installed the software simply because there are too many ads.³
And the noise extends beyond advertising itself. The American Psychological Association's 2025 Stress in America report found that 69 per cent of U.S. adults now cite the spread of inaccurate or misleading information as a major source of stress — a figure that has been climbing year on year.⁴ Even if all the information in each advert is accurate, are we built to handle this amount of unsolicited information? Are we meant to evolve to manage this threat? If we are to evolve to meet this challenge, how do we build the mechanisms to ensure we do so without losing relevant information?
The data is consistent: people feel the weight even when they cannot name it.
But here is where it gets more interesting — and more unsettling.
The Normalisation Problem
A Pew Research Centre survey found that concerns about information overload aren't as widespread as you might expect. In no major demographic group did more than a third of respondents report feeling overwhelmed.⁵
At first glance, this looks like good news. People are coping. The system is manageable.
But think about it another way. If the noise has grown several-fold over fifty years and most people say they are fine, one possibility is that they really are fine. The other is that they have adapted to a lower baseline. They have normalised the clutter. They no longer notice what it is costing them because they have forgotten what it felt like to think without it.
Nearly half of the Americans Pew surveyed (46 per cent) said that institutions expect them to gather too much information just to do ordinary tasks. Those who felt this way were much more likely to find keeping track of information stressful.⁵
But what happens when the situations never stop? When every app, every feed, every commute, every waiting room is another situation? At what point does situational become structural?
That is the question cognitive science forces you to sit with. And it is the question the next article in this series will explore — because the reason you may have stopped noticing the noise is that your mind has stopped fighting back to claim its space. Your mind may have surrendered to being bombarded — and the rest of this series is about what it takes to get it back.
This is the first article in the Cognitive Toll series, exploring how the volume of noise in our environment shapes our ability to think, reason, and develop original thought. The next article examines what the science says this noise is doing to your cognition — whether you feel it or not.
If you are interested in building the kind of intentional thinking this series explores, What the Future Knows About the Past was written for exactly that work.
Citations
Louise Story, "Anywhere the Eye Can See, It's Likely to See an Ad," New York Times, January 15, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html. Reporting on data from a proprietary 2006 consumer survey of 4,110 respondents conducted by Yankelovich, Inc.
Ed Papazian, America's Media Usage Trends & Ad Exposure: 1945–2014 (Nutley, NJ: Media Dynamics, Inc., 2014), quoted in "How Many Ads Do We Really See in a Day?," The Drum, November 2025.
HubSpot Research, consumer advertising sentiment survey data, quoted in "How Many Ads Do We See a Day in 2025?," Lunio (blog), and "How Many Ads Do We See a Day: Top Trends & Statistics," Digital Silk, March 2026. Primary dataset not publicly available; figures widely cited across industry sources.
American Psychological Association, "Stress in America 2025: A Crisis of Connection," 2025, https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2025.
Pew Research Centre, "Information Overload," December 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/12/07/information-overload/.
