Have you ever seen a medical TV drama? When there’s a heart rate monitor on screen, short beeps indicate the heartbeat, and a long beep indicates that the heart has stopped. This helps to build tension and allows actors to cry — it’s even ominous. But in the real world, with hundreds of machines, does it make sense to have them all beeping at the same time?

Having a constant sound in the background does not convey meaningful information as it lacks variation, context, and priority. That’s why, in hospitals, the volume is usually low or muted, and there’s a good reason for this: alarm fatigue.

Alarm fatigue happens when repeated exposure to frequent alarms makes people ignore emergencies. Humans don’t read absolute values well in real time; they read differences. The brain quickly learns what to ignore. Constant stimuli fades into the background, even when it’s loud or alarming, a phenomenon known as sensory adaptation.

Medical monitoring is one of the clearest examples of how humans actually respond to alerts, but the same principles apply to the systems we build. When designing systems, we have to account for contrast instead of intensity. Whatever state we’re exposed to repeatedly becomes the baseline, even if it would have seemed chaotic at first.

That is to say, it’s far easier to make a sound stand out in silence than to make it stand out in chaos, like trying to shout during a loud music concert. For example, if you’re getting a hundred all-caps emails a day, anything truly important will get buried in the noise.

In complex systems, having a clear view of the system as a whole is essential to make decisions. Alerts are great when the action is clear, urgent and delay causes harm — but that is a very narrow slice of problems. Most defects in complex systems require interpretation and evaluation of impact, not only quick resolution.

Dashboards are a great way of conveying information about complex systems. Brains love patterns, visuals and contrast. By externalizing system state and trends of problems, we reduce cognitive load and overreaction. Notifications force you to imagine the system. Dashboards let you see it.

That’s not to say alerts do not serve a purpose, they’re often necessary. But we need to be smart about them. On modern hospital equipment, monitors are typically connected to a central station that allows targeted alerts to be sent to the right people. Notification systems need to account for the right kind of priority and audience to be effective. For everything else, dashboards provide a great way to convey state of the system for triage, interpretation and priority resolution of issues.