Nassim Taleb points in his black swan book (p181 in the German edition 2008) towards the “toxicity” of continuously added information. He is citing experiments from the 1960ies where students were offered increasingly sharp pictures of water pipes. Students in the group with slightly inceasing sharp pictures had much more problems to recognize the pipe in constrast to the group being offered the same picture without any interim pictures. Together with the experiments of Stuart Oskamp it seems more difficult to discover real breakthroughs when being too deeply involved (and obsessed by getting the complete literature in a particular field). This even questions my daily Pubmed alerts; I will change them now to monthly update.