Rands explains something about my brain that I wasn’t even conscious of:
The relevancy engine is the nerd’s ability to instantly and with little conscious effort parse all incoming information into one of two buckets: relevant or irrelevant. It’s a defensive information management strategy built as a reaction to the nerd’s innate passion for information—for understanding. See, a nerd can and will find out everything about anything, and left to their own devices, they’ll do this… endlessly.
Items placed in the irrelevant bucket are aggressively ignored, whereas the items in the relevant bucket are flagged as compelling and are, if possible, immediately investigated.