The Organized Mind

Daniel J. Levitin, “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In the Age of Information Overload” Random House, 2014, Kindle Edition, 396 pgs

To understand how best to organize our lives, we must first understand the organizational make-up of our minds.

There are four modes of attention:

Daydreaming – this is when we’re imagining future scenarios and our likely responses. Research shows that daydreaming is our default state when we’re not purposely engaged in a task.  (this is where you remember that name you were searching for).

Stay-on-task – when we’re occupied by high-level cognitive work like writing or solving a math problem. We’re in this mode whenever we’re awake and not daydreaming.

Attentional filter – there’s too much information in our environment to process so the brain cuts the irrelevant fluff to allow us to focus on essentials. It makes two exceptions – when something in your immediate environment changes [which could signal danger], and when something of personal importance is noticed [like someone calling your name]

Attentional switch – when something in your environment changes, you make the split-second decision to focus on the new piece of information. Good example: I was just in the zone writing when someone spoke to me, and I made the decision to switch attention from writing to listening.

The Organized Mind summary: 

Have a designated place for everything.  (keys in same place, glasses, checkbook, etc…)

Externalize as much information as you can to reduce cognitive load.  (Have a notepad to write thoughts in so you can get back on task without constantly worrying about that thought that intruded and if you will remember it.

Organization; being organized breeds spiritual composure and practices.  This liberates more mental energy to focus on your priorities and your current task.

My Notes:

Loc 89:  Author, Daniel J. Levitin, Ph.D., is the New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, and A Field Guide to Lies. His work has been translated into 21 languages.

Loc 170-191:  Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. For the first 99% of our history, we didn’t do much of anything but procreate and survive. This was largely due to harsh global climactic conditions, which stabilized sometime around 10,000 years ago. People soon thereafter discovered farming

One of the biggest advances in brain neural enhancement occurred only 5,000 years ago when humans invented writing, a game-changing way to increase the capacity of the brain’s memory and indexing system.  Humans then began preserving some of their memories on clay tablets and cave walls, and later, papyrus and parchment.  (Then around 3000 BCE our ancestors began to trade nomadic lifestyles for urban ones).

Loc 207:  Two of the most compelling properties of the human brain and its design are: richness and associative access. Richness refers to the theory that a large number of the things you’ve ever thought or experienced are still in there, somewhere.

Associative access means that your thoughts can be accessed in a number of different ways by semantic or perceptual associations—memories can be triggered by related words, by category names, by a smell, an old song or photograph, or even seemingly random neural firings that bring them up to consciousness.

Loc 287:  Some things are typically lost far more often than others: We tend to lose our car keys but not our car, we lose our wallet or cell phone more often than the stapler on our desk or soup spoons in the kitchen, we lose track of coats and sweaters and shoes more often than pants. Understanding how the brain’s attentional and memory systems interact can go a long way toward minimizing memory lapses. These simple facts about the kinds of things we tend to lose and those that we don’t can tell us a lot about how our brains work, and a lot about why things go wrong.

Loc 410-430:  satisficing:  “good enough.”   Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.

Loc 625-630:  mentioned earlier the two principles of the attentional filter: change and importance. A third principle of attention —not specific to the attentional filter—is relevant now more than ever. It has to do with the difficulty of attentional switching. Switching attention comes with a high cost. Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time.  Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.  (Carry a notepad to offload invasive thoughts).

Loc 733:  Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how humans (and animals and, in some cases, computers) process information.

Loc 762-771:  One of the earliest distinctions made was between now and not-now; these things are happening in the moment, these other things happened in the past and are now in my memory. No other species makes this self-conscious distinction among past, present, and future.  Human infants between four and nine months show object permanence, proving that this cognitive operation is innate.  This human capacity to distinguish the here-and-now from the here-and-not-now showed up at least 50,000 years ago in cave paintings.

Loc 948:  The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world (e.g. notepad).

Loc 1059-1077:  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 four-circuit human attentional system evolved over tens of thousands of years—distinct brain networks that become more or less active depending on the situation—and it now lies at the center of our ability to organize information.

Loc 1114:  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.

Loc 1116:  To recap, 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. The system is so effective that we rarely know what we’re filtering out. In many cases, the attentional switch operates in the background of our awareness, carrying us between the mind-wandering mode and the central executive mode, while the attentional filter purrs along—we don’t realize what is in operation until we’re already in another mode. 

Loc 1208-1510:  Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting. The two most important rules are that the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or have a strong emotional component.  The second principle of memory concerns emotions. If something made us incredibly frightened, elated, sad, or angry—four of the primary human emotions—we’re more likely to remember it; also, the brain organizes similar memories into categorical bundles.

Loc 1518-1524:  Rehearsal Loop:  Cognitive psychologists actually refer to a network of brain regions that ties together the frontal cortex just behind your eyeballs and the hippocampus in the center of your brain as the rehearsal loop.  This loop evolved in a world that had no pens and paper, no smartphones or other physical extensions of the human brain; it was all we had for tens of thousands of years and during that time, it became quite effective at remembering things.  The problem is that it works too well, keeping items in rehearsal until we attend to them. That is why writing them down gives both implicit and explicit permission to the rehearsal loop to let them go, to relax its neural circuits so that we can focus on something else. Writing things down conserves the mental energy expended in worrying that you might forget something.  The neuroscience of it is that the mind-wandering network is competing with the central executive, and in such a battle, the mind-wandering default mode network usually wins.

Loc 1637- 1643:  Until 1600, the typical European home had a single room, and families would crowd around the fire most of the year to keep warm.  Now were more advanced: Three out of four Americans report their garages are too full to put a car into them.

Loc 1882:  Decades of research have shown that human learning is influenced by context and by the location where the learning takes place. Students who studied for an exam in the room they later took it in did better than students who studied somewhere else.

Loc 1905:  Microsoft engineer Malcolm Slaney (formerly of Yahoo!, IBM, and Apple) advocates scanning everything into PDFs and keeping them on your computer. Home scanners are relatively inexpensive, and there are strikingly good scanning apps available on cell phones. If it’s something you want to keep, Malcolm says, scan it and save it under a filename and folder that will help you find it later. Use OCR (optical character recognition) mode so that the PDF is readable as text characters rather than simply a photograph of the file, to allow your computer’s own search function to find specific keywords you’re looking for.

Loc 1977-2001:  When we are multi-tasking, we are actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time we do, there’s a cognitive cost.  Multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.  Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialized for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organized and categorized in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve it.

Loc 2082:  Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.

Loc 2123-2157:  System for developing memorable passwords:  For instance if your favorite TV show is Breaking Bad. Turning that into an actual password, taking the first letter of each word, would yield M f T V s i B B Now replace one of those letters with a special symbol, and add a number in the middle, just to make it particularly safe:

M f T V $ 6 i B B

Citibank checking account, you might take the three letters C c a and start your password with them to yield C c a M f T V $ 6 i B B. 

Your password list might look something like this: Aetna health insurance std formula w/o special char or number Citibank checking std formula (this is meaningful to you but not to anyone else).

Loc 2332-2334:  Crowdsourcing is perhaps most visible as a form of consumer ratings via Yelp, Zagat, and product ratings on sites such as Amazon.com.  Now, with TripAdvisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, and others of their ilk, ordinary people are empowered to write reviews about their own experiences.

Loc 2405:  Some of the largest changes we are facing as a society are cultural, changes to our social world and the way we interact with one another.

Location 2412-2581:  In 1850, the average family group in Europe had dropped from twenty people to ten living in close proximity, and by 1960 that number was just five. Today, 50% of Americans live alone.  For tens of thousands of years, human life revolved around the family. In most parts of the industrialized world, it no longer does. The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships,

Location 2945-2970:  Dozens of experiments have shown that things we first know but turn out to be false, continue to exert a lingering influence, it is impossible to hit the reset button.  Nicholas Epley says that we are unaware of the construction of our beliefs and the mental processes that lead to them, in most cases. Consequently, even when evidence to believe something is explicitly removed, the belief persist.

Location 2971-3037:  Belief perseverance shows up in everyday life with gossip.  We tend—erroneously of course—to think of people who are members of our group, whatever that group may be, as individuals, while we think of members of out-groups as a less well differentiated collective.  In cases of in-group/out-group bias, each group thinks of the other as homogeneous and monolithic, and each group views itself as variegated and complex.

Location 3104:  Bystanders were nearly three times as likely to seek rapid help for a victim having a seizure when they thought they were the only witnesses than when they thought four other people were also there.

Location 3156:  Both mystics and physicists tell us that time is an illusion, simply a creation of our minds. In this respect, time is like color—there is no color in the physical world, just light of different wavelengths reflecting off of objects;

Location 3198:  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.

Location 3275:  The entire brain weighs three pounds (1.4 kg) and so is only a small percentage of an adult’s total body weight, typically 2%. But it consumes 20% of all the energy the body uses.

Location 3309:  Perhaps most important, multitasking by definition disrupts the kind of sustained thought usually necessary for problem-solving and for creativity.  Further complicating things is that the brain’s arousal system has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be hijacked easily by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and cats.  Humans will work just as hard to obtain a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate.

Location 3538-3594:  Passive learning through textbooks and lectures is not nearly as effective a way to learn new material as is figuring it out for yourself, a method called peer instruction that is being introduced into classrooms with great success.  For instance, if you are only dimly engaged in your French language tapes, it is unlikely your sleep will help you to learn grammar and vocabulary. But if you struggle with the language for an hour or more during the day, investing your focus, energy, and emotions in it, then it will be ripe for replay and elaboration during your sleep. This is why language immersion works so well—you’re emotionally invested and interpersonally engaged with the language as you attempt to survive in the new linguistic environment. 

Location 3624-3893:  A normal human sleep cycle lasts about 90–100 minutes. Around 20 of those minutes on average are spent dreaming in REM sleep.  Most of the memory consolidation occurs in the first two hours of slow-wave, NREM sleep, and during the last 90 minutes of REM sleep in the morning.  You can’t make up for lost sleep time. Sleep deprivation after a day of learning prevents sleep-related improvement, even three days later following two nights of good sleep. This is because recovery sleep or rebound sleep is characterized by abnormal brain waves as the dream cycle attempts to resynchronize with the body’s circadian rhythm.  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 two rounds 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.

Loc: 3676:  AVERAGE SLEEP NEEDS

Age	Needed Sleep
Newborns (0-2 months)	12-18 hours
Infants (3-11 months)	14-15 hours
Toddlers (1-3 years)	12-14 hours
Preschoolers (3-5 years)	11-13 hours
Children (5-10 years)	10-11 hours
Preteens & Teens (10-17 years)	8.5-9.25 hours
Adults	6-10 hours

One of the most powerful cues our body uses to regulate the sleep-wake cycle is light.  It’s been only in the past 150 years that we’ve been able to jump across time zones, and we haven’t evolved a way to adapt yet. Eastward travel is more difficult than westward because our body clock prefers a twenty-five hour day.

Location 4044-4049:  Difficult tasks benefit from a sustained period of concentration of fifty minutes or more, due to the amount of time it takes your brain to settle into and maintain a focused state.  Experts recommend getting up to walk around at least once every ninety minutes,

Location 4223:  Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available.

Location 4544:  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.

Location 4744:  it is hard to argue with the overwhelming successes of medicine over the past hundred years. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta reports nearly complete eradication—a 99% decrease in morbidity—between 1900 and 1998 for nine diseases that formerly killed hundreds of thousands of Americans:  smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, rubella, Haemophilus, influenzae, pertussis, and polio.

Diphtheria fell from 175,000 cases to one, measles from 500,000 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. World life expectancy since then has increased to more than sixty years, and since 1979, U.S. life expectancy has risen from seventy-one to seventy-nine.

Location 4752:  Infant, neonatal, and postneonatal mortality rates have all been reduced. In 1915, for every 1,000 births, 100 infants would die before their first birthday; in 2011, that number had dropped to 15.

Location 4767-4800:  Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness.  Homeopathy is pseudoscience because (a) it doesn’t stand up to controlled experiments, (b) it uses the language of science such as dilution and molecule, and (c) it makes no sense within a scientific understanding of cause and effect.  After extensive clinical trials spanning decades and many different research labs and protocols, it’s been found that multivitamins are not effective for anything at all.

Location 5033:  As the CEO of your own health care, you need to understand how to take the information the doctors give you and analyze it in these fourfold tables, applying Bayesian reasoning,

Location 5384:  Locus of control, how people view their autonomy. People with an internal locus of control believe that they are responsible (or at least can influence) their own fates and outcomes.  On the other hand, those with an external locus of control see themselves as relatively powerless pawns in some game played by others; they believe that other people, environmental forces, the weather, malevolent gods, the alignment of celestial bodies—basically any and all external events—exert more influence on their lives than they themselves do. (This latter view is artistically conveyed in existential novels by Kafka and Camus, not to mention Greek and Roman mythology.) Of course these are extremes, and most people fall somewhere along a continuum between them.

Location 5394-5395:  Individuals with an internal locus of control will attribute success to their own efforts. Individuals with an external locus of control will praise or blame the external world (“It was pure luck” or “The competition was rigged”). In school settings, students with a high internal locus of control believe that hard work and focus will result in positive outcomes, and indeed, as a group they perform better academically. Locus of control also affects purchasing decisions. For example, women who believe they can control their weight respond most favorably to slender advertising models, and women who believe they can’t, respond better to larger-size models.

Location 5404:  Locus of control appears to be a stable internal trait that is not significantly affected by experiences. That is, you might expect that people who experience a great deal of hardship would give up any notions of their own agency in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and become externals. And you might expect that those who experience a great deal of success would become internals, self-confident believers that they were the agents of that success all along. But the research doesn’t bear this out.

Location 5423-5433:  Internals tend to be higher achievers, and externals tend to experience more stress and are prone to depression. “Externals make more compliant followers or subordinates than do internals, who are likely to be independent and resist control by superiors and other individuals.

Location 5462-5464:  Shakespere is deemed the most productive person of all time.  He was immensely productive. Before dying at the age of fifty-two, he composed thirty-eight plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. Most of his works were produced in a twenty-four-year period.

Location 5538:  Vertical files function best when alphabetized. One factor that prevented their earlier invention was that, up through the eighteenth century, the alphabet was not universally known. The historian James Gleick notes, “A literate, book-buying Englishman at the turn of the seventeenth century could live a lifetime without ever encountering a set of data ordered alphabetically.”

Location 6191-6198:  It no longer makes sense for teachers to consider their primary function to be the transmission of information. As the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik put it, nowadays, by the time a professor explains the difference between elegy and eulogy, everyone in the class has already Googled it.  In short, the primary mission of teachers must shift from the dissemination of raw information to training a cluster of mental skills that revolve around critical thinking. And one of the first and most important lessons that should accompany this shift is an understanding that there exists in the world experts in many domains who know more than we do.

Location 6904:  Western culture overvalues the central executive mode, and undervalues the daydreaming mode. The central executive approach to problem-solving is often diagnostic, analytic, and impatient, whereas the daydreaming approach is playful, intuitive, and relaxed.

Location 7160:  For many retailers, the real profits are not in selling you the initial item but in selling you the warranty to protect it. (I once bought a refrigerator and the warranty, a WEEK later the company filed for Chapter 11—the last warranty I ever bought).