The Organized Mind

Daniel J. Levitin “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload”, Dutton 2014, 396 pps.

I highly recommend this book: Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains how our brains organize all the input and how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of civilization.  It is also the story of how technology is changing many of our time-honored traditions for keeping an orderly mind.  The book begins by discussing current information overload and how, as individuals, we can organize what is needed; later in the book the author discusses how to raise children in an age of information overload so that they, and we, are not swamped by the vast amount available, a lot of the internet information is just plain erroneous.

I found validation for many of the habits I have picked up over the years.  For instance I normally keep a note book in my shirt pocket to write down thoughts, names, etc.  Also I keep many excel spreadsheets of information from when I put tires on the car, repairs to the house, and so on.  We keep a key rack next to the front door; my Ipod, kindle, and such items have a definite place when put down.  The author calls this off-loading or externalizing this information to relive yourself of the need to use your memory to keep track of all this.

Alert: see my notes for pg. 240 concerning prostate cancer.  This section of the book has convinced me to eliminate checking for prostate cancer during my yearly physical as I would not do anything about it anyway after reading the facts as presented in this book.

My Notes:

Pg. xiii:  One of the biggest advances in neural enhancement occurred only 5,000 years ago, when humans discovered a game-changing way to increase the capacity of the brain’s memory and indexing system: the invention of the written language.

Pg. 7:  The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.  That bandwidth is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time.  In order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.  What this means is that you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time.  Our brains evolved to help us deal with life during the hunter-gatherer phase of human history, a time when we might encounter no more than a thousand people across the entire span of our lifetime.   

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism.  It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness.  Millions of neurons act as an attentional filter working largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness.  This is why most of the perceptual detritus of our daily lives doesn’t register, or why, when you’ve been driving on the freeway for several hours at a stretch, you don’t remember much of the scenery.  Your attentional system protects you from registering it because it isn’t deemed important.  This attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements.

Pg. 16:  Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time.  The attentional filter evolved to help us to stay on task, letting through only information that was important enough to deserve disrupting our train of thought.  Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. 

Pg. 32:  Most of the naming and categorizing we do in the plant world might be considered strictly unnecessary.  Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. 

Pg. 41:  In addition to the mind-wandering mode, the central executive, and the attentional filter, there’s a fourth component of the attentional system that allows us to switch between the mind-wandering mode and the central executive mode.  This switch enables shifts from one task to another.  It’s a neural switchboard that directs your attention to that mosquito on your forehead and then allows you to go back to whatever task you are engaged in.

Pg. 45:  Consciousness itself is not a thing, and it is not localizable in the brain.  Rather, it’s simply the name we put to ideas and perceptions that enter the awareness of our central executive, a system of very limited capacity that can generally attend to a maximum of four or five things at a time. 

There are four components in the human attentional system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attentional filter, and the attentional switch, which directs neural and metabolic resources among the mind-wandering, stay on-task, or vigilance modes. 

Pg. 52:  If something made us incredibly frightened, elated, sad, or angry—four of the primary human emotions—we’re more likely to remember it.  This makes evolutionary sense—the emotionally important events are probably the ones that we need to remember in order to survive, things like the growl of a predator, the location of a new freshwater spring, the smell of rancid food, the friend who broke a promise.

Pg. 130:  The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships.  Half of these marriages began on dating sites, the rest via social media, chat rooms, instant messages and the like.

Pg. 164:  A few species don’t age at all and so are technically immortal.  These include some species of jellyfish, flatworms, and hydra; the only causes of death in them are from injury or disease.  This is in stark contrast to humans—of the roughly 150,000 people who die in the world each day, two-thirds die from age-related causes and this number can reach 90% in peaceful industrialized nations, where war or disease is less likely to shorten life. And, of course, natural selection has very limited or no opportunities to exert any direct influence on the aging process.  Natural selection will tend to favor genes that have good effects on the organism early in life, prior to reproductive age, even if they have bad effects at older ages. 

Pg. 166:  The prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop in humans until after age twenty, impulse control isn’t fully developed in adolescents.  It’s why adolescents are not especially good at planning or delaying gratification. 

Pg. 189:  Most of us follow a sleep-waking pattern of sleeping for 6-8 hours followed by staying awake for approximately 16-18.  This is a relatively recent invention.  For most of human history our ancestors engaged in tow sounds of sleep, called segmented sleep or bimodal sleep, in addition to an afternoon nap.  The first round of sleep would occur for four or five hours after dinner, followed by an awake period of one or more hours in the middle of the night, followed by a second period of four or five hours of sleep.  That middle-of-the-night waking might have evolved to help ward off nocturnal predators.  Bimodal sleep appears to be a biological norm that was subverted by the invention of artificial light, and there is scientific evidence that the bimodal sleep-plus-nap regime is healthier and promotes greater life satisfaction, efficiency, and performance.

Pg. 239:  Cardiac bypass surgery—there are 500,000 performed in the U.S. every year yet randomized clinical trials show no survival benefit in most patients who had undergone the surgery.    Angioplasty went from zero to 100,000 procedures a year with no clinical trials—like bypass surgery, its popularity was based simply on the logic of the procedure, but clinical trials show no survival benefit. 

Pg. 240:  A potent example of the pitfalls in medical decision-making comes from the current state of prostate cancer treatments.  An estimated 2.5 million men in the U.S. have prostate cancer, and 3% of men will die from it.  That doesn’t rank it in the top ten causes of death, but it is the second leading cause of cancer death for men, after lung cancer.  Nearly every urologist who delivers the news will recommend radical surgery to remove the prostate.  And on first blush, it sounds reasonable—we see cancer, we cut it out.

Several things make thinking about prostate cancer complicated.  For one, it is a particularly slow-progressing cancer—most men die with it rather than of it.  Also, there is a fairly high incidence of recurrence following surgery.  And what about the side effects?  The incident rate—how often side effects occur among patients after surgery—are in parentheses:

*inability to maintain an erection sufficient for intercourse (80%)

*shortening of the penis by one inch (50%)

*urinary incontinence (35%)

*fecal incontinence (25%)

*Hernia (17%)

*Severing of urethra (6%)

The side effects are awful and implying that the alternative is death is not correct.  First, because prostate cancer is slow moving and doesn’t even cause symptoms in most of the people who have it, it can safely be left untreated in some men.  How many men?  Forty-seven out of 48.  Put another way, for every 48 prostate surgeries performed, only one life is extended—the other 47 patients would have lived just as long anyway and not had to suffer the side effects.  Thus, the number needed to treat to get one cure is 48.  Now, as to the side effects, there’s over a 97% chance a patient will experience at least one of those listed above.  If we ignore the sexual side effects—the first two—and look only at the others, there is still more than a 50% chance that the patient will experience at least one of them, and a pretty big chance hell experience two.  So, of the 47 people who were not helped by the surgery, roughly 24 are going to have at least one side effect.  You are 24 times more likely to be harmed by the side effect than helped by the cure.  Clearly, it is important to factor quality of life into the decision. 

Pg. 250:  Although there are things that medicine is not particularly good at, it is hard to argue with the overwhelming successes of medicine over the past hundred years reflected in a 99% decrease in morbidity for nine diseases that formerly killed hundreds of thousands of Americans: smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, Haemophilus influenza, pertussis, and polio.  Diphtheria fell from 175,000 cases to one, measles from 300,000 to about 90.  For most of human history from around 10,000 BCE to 1820, our life expectancy was capped at about twenty-five years; it is now seventy-nine in the U.S.

Pg. 251:  Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness.  Once a treatment has been scientifically shown to be effective, it is no longer called alternative—it is simply called medicine.  To be fair, saying that there is no evidence does not mean that the treatment is ineffective; it simply means its effectiveness has not yet been determined.

Pg. 371:  Numbering of interstate highways follows a set of simple rules:

*One- and two-digit highway numbers less than 100 identify major routes (e.g., 1, 5, 70, 93) that cross state lines

*Even numbers are east-west routes, odd are north-south

*Even numbers increase as they move south to north; odd numbers increase as they move west to east.

*Three-digit numbers identify loops, or auxiliary, supplementary routes in or around a city.  If the first digit is even, it is a route through or around a city that breaks off of and eventually rejoins the main route.  If the first digit is odd, it is a spur into or out of a city and does not rejoin the main route