Matt Hart

“The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin

Hardcover, 528 pages
Published August 19th 2014 by Dutton
ISBN: 052595418X (ISBN13: 9780525954187)

Finished On: March 11, 2016
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon

A deep dive into how to organize your brain. Since I go back to these notes often, I have upgraded it from a 7 to an 8. Well worth a read.

My Notes:

The first humans who figured out how to write things down around 5,000 years ago were in essence trying to increase the capacity of their hippocampus, part of the brain’s memory system. They effectively extended the natural limits of human memory by preserving some o their memories on clay tablets and cave walls, and later, papyrus and parchment.

Most of us have adapted a strategy called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. He wanted a word, not for he best option, but for good enough.

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

During our leisure time not counting work each of us processes 34 GB or 100,000 words every day. The worlds 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television each day, the equivalent of 20 GB of audio video images. That's not counting YouTube, which uploads 6000 hours of video every hour.

Neurons are living cells with metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they've been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

Even towering intellectuals such as can't and Wadsworth complained of information excess ensure mental exhaustion induced by too much sensory input or mental overload.

The Samarian city of Yurok 5000 B.C.E. was one of the worlds earliest large cities. It's active commercial trade created an unprecedented volume of business transactions, and Samarian merchants required in accounting system for keeping track of the days inventory and receipts; this was the birth of writing. All literature could be said to originate from sales receipts ( sorry).

The parents of writing some 5000 years ago was not met with unbridled enthusiasm; many sought as a technology going to far, demonic invention that would rock the mind and need to be stopped. Then, as now, printed words were promiscuous – it was impossible to control where they went or who would receive them, and they could circulate easily without the authors knowledge or control. Locking the opportunity to hear information directly from the speakers mouth, the anti-writing contingent complained that it would be impossible to verify the accuracy of the writers claims, or to ask follow-up questions. Even Plato voice these fears; his king Thamus decried that the dependence on written words would "we can men's characters and create forgetfulness in their soul." This externalize Asian of facts and stories meant people would no longer need to mentally retain large quantities of information themselves and would come to rely on stories and fax as conveyed, in written form, by others. Thamus, king of Egypt, argued that the written word would in fact the Egyptian people with fake knowledge.

Attention switching comes at a high cost. Multitasking is the enemy of the focused attention system.

Conflicting viewpoints are more readily available than ever, and in many cases they are disseminated by people who have no regard for facts or truth.

When our early human ancestors left the cover of living in trees and ventured out onto the open savanna in search of new sources of food, they made themselves more vulnerable to predators and to nuisances like rats and snakes. Those who were interested in acquiring knowledge—whole brains enjoyed learning new things—would have been at an advantage for survival, and so this love of learning would eventually become encoded in their genes through natural selection.

Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structures.

For our ancestors, staying on task typically meant hunting a large mammal, fleeing a predator, or flighting. A lapse of attention during these activities could spell disaster. Today, we are more likely to employ our central exactuaive mode for writing reports, interacting with people and computers, driving, navigating, solving problems in our heads, or pushing artistic projects such as painting and music.

Despite the similarity of names, noradrenaline and adrenaline are not the same chemical; noradrenaline is most chemically similar to dopamine, from which it is synthesized by the brain. To stay in the mind-wandering mode, a precise balance must be maintained between the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate and the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-Aminobutyric acid).

Drugs, such as guanfacine (brand names Tenex and Intuniv) and clonidine, that are prescribed for hypertension, ADHD, and anxiety disorders can block noradrenaline release, and in turn block your alerting to warning signals.

In other words the reason it can be difficult to remember what you had for breakfast two thursdays ago is that there was probably nothing special about that Thursday. Consequently, all your breakfast memories are merge together in a sort of generic impression of breakfast.

A key principle then is that memory is requires our brains to sift through multiple, competing instances to pick out just the one we are trying to recollect.

Evolutionarily, it makes sense for us to remember you need or distinct events because they represent a potential change in the world around us or a change in our understanding of it – we need to register these in order to maximize our chances for success in a changing environment.

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 the new freshwater spring, the smell of rancid food, and the friend who broke a promise.

We tend to remember best the first entry on the list.

To make matters worse, the active recalling a memory thrusts it into a labile state where buy new distortions can be introduced; then, when the memory is put back or restored, the incorrect information is graft to it as though it were there all along. For example, if you recall a happy memory while you're feeling blue, your mood at the time of retrieval can color the memory to the point that when you re-– store it in your memory banks, the event gets recoded as slightly sad. Psychiatrist Bruce Parry of the Feinberg school of medicine sums it up: "we know today that, just like when you open up Microsoft Word file on your computer, when you retrieve a memory from where it is stored in the brain, you automatically open to edit. You may not be aware of your current mood and environment can influence the emotional tone of your recall, your interpretation of events, and even your beliefs about which events actually took place. But when you "" save the memory again and place it back into storage, you can inadvertently modify it… This kid by us how and what you recall the next time you pull up that "file". Over time, incremental changes can even lead to The creation of memories of events that never took place.

Alan suggests the two minute rule: if you can attend to one of the things on your list in less than two minutes, do it now. He recommends setting aside a block of time every day, 30 minutes for example just to deal with these little tasks.

Cards as to do list: on the morning scan of your cards, you find you are ready to do it. Take two minutes now to think about what you need in order to make the decision Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky said that the problem with making decisions is that we are often making them under conditions of uncertainty.

Cards: the central point here is that during your daily sweep through the cards, you have to do something with the index card you do something about it now, you put it in your abeyance pile, are you generate a new task that will help to move the project forward.

Things that we take for granted — something as basic as the kitchen – didn't exist in European homes until a few hundred years ago. Until 1600, the typical European home had a single room and families would crowd around the fire most of the year to keep warm. The number of possessions the average person has now is far greater than we had for most of our evolutionary history, easily by factor of 1000, and so organizing them is a distinctly modern problem. One American household studied had more than 2260 visible objects in just the living room and two bedrooms.

The neurological foundation of this is no well understood. We evolve a specialized brain structure called the hippocampus just for remembering the spatial location of things.

Did neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: if you're working on two completely separate projects dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each just stepping into a different space it's the reset button on your brain and allows for more productive and creative thinking.

Although we think we're doing several things at once multitasking, this has been shown to be a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multitask well… When people think you're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there's a cognitive cost in doing so."

We answer the phone, look up something on the Internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty seeking, reward – seeking centers of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids ( no wonder it feel so good! , All to the detriment of our staying on task.

Russ Poldrack, A neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wron part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time for example, the information from their homework goes into the striatum, A region specialized for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas.

Asking to bring to ship the tension from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and the stratum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in the brain.

But we are sacrificing efficiency in deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.

Each time we checked a Twitter feed or Facebook update we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially, and the kind of weird and personal cyber way, and get another dollop of reward hormones. It is the dumb novelty seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure. Email Facebook and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.

Put them in individual Ziploc bag along with a piece of notepaper stating what the object is for keeping all these bags in the shoe box labeled things I need. Or taping them to the piece of furniture.

We are barely better than 50/50 in assessing how our friends and coworkers feel about us, or whether they even like us.

Although primates in general are among the most social species, there are a few examples of primate living groups that support more than 18 males within a group – the interpersonal tensions and dominance hierarchies just become too much for them and they split apart.

Our fear of rejection is understandably very strong; in fact, social rejection causes activation own the same part of the brain as physical pain does, and—perhaps surprisingly and accordingly—Tylenol can reduce peoples’s experience of social pain.

When a person has an orgasm, oxytocin is released, and one of the effects of oxytocin is to make us feel bonded to others. Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that this was nature’s way of causing couples to want to stay together after sex to raise any children that might results from that sex.

LSD’s action in the brain includes stimulating dopamine and certain serotonin receptors while attenuating sensory input from the visual cortex (which is partially responsible for visual hallucinations). Yet the reason LSD causes feelings of social connection is not yet known.

Nicholas Epley says hat we are unaware of the construction of our beliefs and the mental processes that lead to them, in most cases. Consequently, even when evidence is explicitly removed, the beliefs persist.

Appears that the partitioning of people and mutually exclusive categories activates the perception that "we" are better than "they" even when there is no rational basis for. That's just the way we are.

What Ruth, Ernie, and Peter have in common is that shortly before these episodes all three suffered damage to their prefrontal cortex. This is the part of the brain I wrote about before which along with anterior cingulate, basal ganglia, and in Sula, helps us to organize time and engaged and planning.

As far as we know, the Samarian's were the first to divide the day and time periods. Their division were 1/6 of the days sunlight roughly equivalent to two of our current hours.

Three of the most familiar divisions of time we make today continue to be based on the motion but heavenly bodies, so now we call these astrophysics. The length of the year is determined by the time it takes the earth to circle the sun; the length of the month is more or less the time it takes the moon to circle the earth; the length of a day is the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis, and observed by us as the span between two successive sunrises and sunsets.

As a series of River Road collisions in the early 1840s investigator sought ways to improve communication and reduce the risk of accidents. prior to that timekeeping was considered a local matter for each city or town.

We have a more highly developed prefrontal cortex than any other species. It's the seat of many behaviors that we consider distinctly human: logic, analysis, problem-solving, exercising good judgment, planning for the future, and decision-making. For these reasons it is often called the central executive or CEO of the brain.

One of the great achievements of the human prefrontal cortex is that it provides us with impulse control and, consistently, the ability to delay gratification, something that most animals lack. Try dangling a string in front of a cat or throwing a ball in front of retriever and see if they can sit still.

This is the region of the brain that is most active when creative artists are functioning at their peak. [prefrontal cortex]

Entire brain weighs 3 pounds and so is only a small percentage of an adults total body weight, typically 2%. But it consumes 20% of all the energy in the body uses.

Manufacturing these chemicals, and disbursing them to regulate and modulate brain activity, requires energy – neurons are living cells with metabolism, and they get the energy from glucose. No other tissue in the body rely solely on glucose for energy except the testes.

That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus on not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.

Creative solutions often arise from allowing a sequence of altercations between dedicated focus and daydreaming.

Don't forget that the awareness of an unread email sitting in your inbox can effectively reduce your IQ by 10 points, and that multitasking causes information you want to learn to be directed to the wrong part of the brain.

Sleep experts Matthew Walker (from UC Berkley) and Robert Stickgold (from Harvard Medical School) note the three distinct kinds of information processing that occur during sleep. The first is unionization, the combining of discrete elements or chunks of an experience into a unified concept. Musicians and actors who are learning a new piece or scene might practice one phrase at a time; unionization during sleep binds these together into a seamless whole. The second kind of information processing we accomplish during sleep is assimilation. Here, the brain integrates new information into the existing network structure of other things you already knew.

All sleep isn’t created equal when it comes to improving memory and learning. The two main categories of sleep are REM (rapid eye movement and NREM non-REM), with NREM sleep being further divided into four stages, each with a distinct pattern of brain waves. REM sleep is when your most vivid and detailed dreams occur. Its most obvious feature is temporary selective muscle suppression . REM is also characterized by low-voltage brain wave patterns (EEG), and the rapid, flickering eyelid movements for which it is named.

REM sleep is believed to be the stage during which the brain performs the deepest processing of events—unionization, assimilation, and abstraction mentioned above.

Most of the memory consolidation occurs in the first two hours of slow wave, and NREM sleep, and during the last 90 minutes of REM sleep in the morning.

Sunlight impinging on photoreceptors in the retina triggers a chain reaction of processes resulting in stimulation of the suprachiasmatic nucleus and the pineal gland, a small gland near the base of the brain, about the size of a grain of rice.

At one time or another, you've probably thought that if you only could sleep Les, you get so much more done. Or that you could just borrow time by sleeping one hour last night and one hour more tomorrow night. As enticing as these seem, they're not born out by research. Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, mute function, and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep reduction or a departure from a set sleep routine (for example going to bed late one night, sleeping in the next morning) can produce detrimental effects on cognitive performance for many days afterward. One professional basketball players got 10 hours of sleep a night, their performance improved dramatically: free throws and three-point shooting each improved by 9%.

Most of us follow asleep wake pattern of sleeping for 6 to 8 hours followed by staying awake for approximately 16 to 18 hours. 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 Whitaker for four or five hours after dinner followed by an awake. Of one or more hours in the middle of the night, followed by second period of four or five hours of sleep. That middle-of-the-night waking might have evolved to help ward off nocturnal predators.

Thomas Wehr, respected scientist at the US national Institute of mental health. .. He enlisted research participants to live for a month and a room that was dark for 14 hours a day mimicking conditions before the invention of the lightbulb. They ended up sleeping eight hours a night but into separate blocks.

The prevailing view until the 1990s was that people could adapt to chronic sleep loss without adverse cognitive effects, but do a research clearly says otherwise. Sleeplessness was responsible for 250,000 traffic accidents into thousand nine, and is one of the leading causes of friendly fire — soldiers mistakenly shooting people on their own side. Sleep deprivation was real to be a contributing factor in some of the most well-known global disasters: the nuclear power plant disasters at Chernobyl, 3 mile Island in Pennsylvania, Davis best in Ohio, and rancho Seco California; the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez; the grounding of the cruise ship star princess; and the fatal decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle.

In addition to the loss of life there is the economic impact. Sleep deprivation is estimated to cost US businesses more than 150 million a year in absences, accidents, and lost productivity — for comparison, that's roughly the same as the annual revenue of Apple Corporation.

more relevant, the quality of sleep with sleeping pills is poor, disrupting the normal brain waves of sleep, and there is usually a sleeping pill hangover of the old alertness the next morning.

One of the most powerful cues are body uses to regulate the sleep wake cycle is light. Bright light in the morning signals the hypothalamus to release chemicals that help us wake up, such as Orexin, cortisol, and Adrenalin). For this reason, if you're having trouble sleeping, it's important to avoid bright lights right before bedtime such as those from TV or computer screen.

Naps longer than about 40 minutes can be counterproductive, though, causing sleep inertia. For many people five or 10 minutes is enough.

Even five or 10 minute "power naps" you'll significant cognitive enhancement, improvement in memory, and increased productivity. And the more intellectual the work, the greater the pay off. That's also allow for the recalibration of your emotional equilibrium — after being exposed to angry and frightening stimuli, napkin turn around negative emotions and increase happiness.

One study of 19 major league baseball teams found a significant effect: teams that are just traveling eastward gave up more than one run on average in every game. Olympians of shown significant deficits after traveling across time zones in either direction, including reductions and muscle strength and coordination.

Before traveling west avoid sunlight early by keeping the curtains drawn and instead expose yourself to bright light in the evening to stimulate what would be late afternoon sun in your destination.

To combat it, Jake adopted a strict policy of "do it now." if Jake had a number of calls to make or things to attend to piling up, he died right in, even if it cut into leisure or socializing time. And heat do the most unpleasant tasks — firing someone, haggling with an investor, paying bills — the first thing in the morning to get it out-of-the-way. Mark twain call this evening the frog. Do the most unpleasant task first thing in the morning when gumption his highest, because willpower depletes as the day moves on.

… we tend to evaluate our self-worth in terms of achievements. Where the relaxed self-confidence in general – or confidence that this to get a project will turn out well – we procrastinate because that allows us to delay putting our reputations on the line until later. What psychologist call Iñigo protective maneuver.

Steel identifies what he calls to faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.

The writer and polymath George Pluto noted that successful people have paradoxically had many more failures than people whom most of us would consider to be, well, failures.

The social networking addiction loop, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, vine, Instagram, Snapchat, email, texting, or whatever the new thing will be adopted in the coming years, since chemicals to the brains pleasure center that are genuinely, physiologically addicting.

For external distractions, the strategies already mentioned apply. Set aside particular time of day to work, but the phone turned off and your email and Braz are shut down. Set aside a particular place to work that allows you to focus. Make it a policy to not respond to Mrs. that come in during your productivity time. Adopt a mental set that this thing you're doing now is the most important thing you could be doing.

Difficult tasks benefit from a sustained period of concentration of 50 minutes or more, due to the amount of time it takes your brain to settle into and maintain a focused state. Take the time to write down anything that captures your attention to deal with later.

The solution is to fall the five-minute rule. If there is something you can get done in five minutes or less, do it now. If you have 20 things that would take only five minutes each, but you could spare only 30 minutes now, prioritize them to do the others later or tomorrow or delegate them. Set aside some time each day to deal with such things.

Cognitive scientists have suggested that we tend to learn more from negative information then from positive – one obvious case is that positive information often simply confirms what we already know, where as negative information reveals to us areas of ignorance

Retaining lots of social interaction is really important," at Arthur toga, a neuroscientist at the university of southern California. "It involves so much of the brain. You have to interpret facial expressions and understanding concepts." In addition, there is pressure to react in real time, and to assimilate new information.

The coin has no memory, knowledge, willpower, or volition. There is not some overlord of the theory of probability making sure that everything works out just the way you would expect if you get heads 10 times in a row the probability of the coin coming up tails on the next toss is still 50%.

Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. What's the treatment has been significant scientifically shown to be effective, it is no longer called alternative – it is simply called medicine.

The point is that in standard, retail homeopathic dilutions, there is nothing remaining of the original substance. But that's supposed to be good because, remember, the more diluted the homeopathic medicine is, the stronger it is.

**

How often do you think of people who don't call you, how often do you not think of people who do call you, and finally, how often do you not think of someone and then they don't call. If you work all this out for full table, it is likely you'll find that the occasionally vivid coincidences are swamped by events of the other three kinds, making the point that these correlations are illusory.

Paul Slavic, dubbed is the denominator neglect. Slavic says we imagine the numerator – the tragic story you saw on the news about a car crash – and don't think about the denominator – the overwhelming number of automobile trips that end safely.

"The plural of anecdote is not data."

The important point is that these are not scientific studies, they are just stories. There are uplifting quizzical mysterious challenging stories but just stories. The The plural of anecdote is not data.

One of Kanaman enter skis many great insights that both games and losses are nonlinear, meeting at the same amount of gain or loss does not cause equal happiness or sadness — their relative to your current state.

50 companies in the world have more then a quarter million employees and seven companies in the world have more than one millionth

All warfare challenges the morals and ethics of soldiers. An enemy might not respect international conventions and may commit atrocities with the name of provoking retaliation in kind… All leaders shoulder the responsibility that their subordinates return from a campaign not only as good soldiers but is good citizens.

Making ethical or moral decisions involve distinct structures within the frontal lobe's: the orbital frontal cortex located just behind the ees and the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex just above it.

Does this mean that even monkeys have a moral sense? A recent study by one of the leading scientists of animal behavior Franz the wall, ask just this question. He found that monkeys have a highly developed sense of what is and what is not equitable. Monkeys given the option to record themselves selfishly or share with bot The Monkees consistently chose to reward their partner. The caption monkeys performed moral calculation. When the experimenter accidentally overpaid the partner monkey with a better treat, the deciding monkey withhold the reward to the partner, evening out the payoffs.

What one could argue that William Shakespeare was immensely productive. Before dying at the age of 52, he composed 38 please, 154 sonnets, and too long poems. Most of his works were produced in a 24 hour period of intense productivity.

Other factors contribute to productivity, such as being an early riser: studies of shown in early birds to be happier, more conscientious and productive, the night owls. Sticking to a schedule helps as does making time for exercise.

Consumption has increased 50% since 1980, and to Dave United States uses 70,000,000 tons of paper a year.

The ability to do this resides in the hippo campus – remember, it's the place-memory System that increases in size in London taxi cab drivers.

You think people would realize that they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by dopamine adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they're doing great. Part of the problem is that workplaces are misguidedly encouraging workers to multitask.

Many managers impose rules such as "you must answer email within 15 minutes" or "you must keep a chat window open," but this means you're stopping what you're doing, fragmenting concentration, Belkin eyes in the vast resources of your prefrontal cortex, which has been holdover tens of thousands of years of evolution to stay on task.

You can also enter or exit list.com into Alexa.com, a free data mining of analysis service

You can remember the three aspects of webs literacy by an English word used to express good wishes on meeting or party Ave. Authenticate, Valatie, and evaluate.

More than 400 people have tried to claim the prize of the psychic powers mysteriously fill them. Stanford psychologist Lee Roth says, "if psychic powers exist, they are a bitch, and do not want to be discovered in the presence of the scientist."

Other studies of shown that so I doesn't reduce prostate cancer recurrence, and that it can be associated with loss of mental acuity an older men.

Scientist talk about order of magnitude estimates. An order of magnitude is a power of 10. In other words, as a first rough estimate, we try to decide how many zeros there are in the answer. Suppose you were asked how many tablespoons of water there are in a cup of coffee here are some power of 10 possibilities:

A: 2

B: 20

C: 200

D: 2000

E: 20,000

Cubic foot of airways 0.08 pounds.

Periodic table proceeds from left to right the elements are present it in increasing order of their atomic number, the number of protons in the nucleus.

In the seesaw of attention, Western culture overvalues the central executive mode, and undervalues the daydreaming load. The central executive approach to problem-solving is often diagnostic, analytic, and inpatient, whereas the daydreaming approach is playful, intuitive, and relaxed.