The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

by Daniel J. Levitin

Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain; the hard part is finding it and pulling it out again. Sometimes the information that comes out is incomplete, distorted, or misleading. Vivid stories that address a very limited and unlikely set of circumstances often pop to mind and overwhelm statistical information based on a large number of observations that would be far more accurate in helping us to make sound decisions about medical treatments, investments, or the trustworthiness of people in our social world. This fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.

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.

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have.

satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.

Our brains do have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired.

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.

A critical point that bears repeating is that attention is a limited-capacity resource—there are definite limits to the number of things we can attend to at once.

Three out of four Americans report their garages are too full to put a car into them. Women’s cortisol levels (the stress hormone) spike when confronted with such clutter (men’s, not so much). Elevated cortisol levels can lead to chronic cognitive impairment, fatigue, and suppression of the body’s immune system.

Grice and Searle take as a premise that virtually all conversations are a cooperative undertaking and that they require both literal and implied meanings to be processed. Grice systematized and categorized the various rules by which ordinary, cooperative speech is conducted, helping to illuminate the mechanisms by which indirect speech acts work. The four Gricean maxims are: Quantity. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as required. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Quality. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Manner. Avoid obscurity of expression (don’t use words that your intended hearer doesn’t know). Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. Relation. Make your contribution relevant.

Social media / communication guidelines!

The Biological Reality of Time 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; as Newton said, the light waves themselves are colorless.

When we say that someone is focused, we usually mean they’re attending to what is right in front of them and avoiding distraction, either internal or external. On the other hand, creativity often implies being able to make connections between disparate things. We consider a discovery to be creative if it explores new ideas through analogy, metaphor, or tying together things that we didn’t realize were connected. This requires a delicate balance between focus and a more expansive view. Some individuals who take dopamine-enhancing drugs such as methylphenidate report that it helps them to stay motivated to work, to stay focused, and to avoid distractions, and that it facilitates staying engaged with repetitious tasks. The downside, they report, is that it can destroy their ability to make connections and associations, and to engage in expansive, creative thinking—underscoring the see-saw relationship between focus and creativity.

Focus vs creativity

a strict policy of “do it now.” If Jake had a number of calls to make or things to attend to piling up, he’d dive right in, even if it cut into leisure or socializing time. And he’d do the most unpleasant task—firing someone, haggling with an investor, paying bills—the first thing in the morning to get it out of the way. Following Mark Twain, Jake called it eating the frog: Do the most unpleasant task first thing in the morning when gumption is highest, because willpower depletes as the day moves on.

two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.

how comfortable we are in allowing ourselves to enter the daydreaming mode under pressure of time. Most people say that when they’re in that mode, time seems to stop, or it feels that they have stepped outside of time. Creativity involves the skillful integration of this time-stopping daydreaming mode and the time-monitoring central executive mode.

Abraham Maslow called these peak experiences in the 1950s, and more recently the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced MEE-high, CHEECH-sent-mee-high) has famously called this the flow state. It feels like a completely different state of being, a state of heightened awareness coupled with feelings of well-being and contentment. It’s a neurochemically and neuroanatomically distinct state as well. Across individuals, flow states appear to activate the same regions of the brain, including the left prefrontal cortex (specifically, areas 44, 45, and 47) and the basal ganglia. During flow, two key regions of the brain deactivate: the portion of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-criticism, and the amygdala, the brain’s fear center. This is why creative artists often report feeling fearless and as though they are taking creative risks they hadn’t taken before—it’s

Flow occurs when you are not explicitly thinking about what you’re doing; rather, your brain is in a special mode of activity in which procedures and operations are performed automatically without your having to exert conscious control. This is why practice and expertise are prerequisites for flow. Musicians who have learned their scales can play them without explicitly concentrating on them, based on motor memory. Indeed, they report that it feels as if their fingers “just know where to go” without their having to think about it. Basketball players, airplane pilots, computer programmers, gymnasts, and others who are highly skilled and highly practiced report similar phenomena, that they have reached such a high level of ability that thinking seems not to be involved at all.

after the age of thirty, our reaction time, cognitive processing speed, and metabolic rate slow down—the actual speed of neural transmission slows. This leaves the impression that the world is racing by, relative to our slowed-down thought processes.

Amos Tversky taught that risk aversion is driven by regret, a powerful psychological force. We tend to make decisions to avoid the regret that may come from having made the wrong decision, even if the choices were starkly contrasted in terms of expected value.

locus of control, a fancy name for how people view their autonomy and agency in the world. People with an internal locus of control believe that they are responsible for (or at least can influence) their own fates and life outcomes. They may or may not feel they are leaders, but they feel that they are essentially in charge of their lives. 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 the most influence on their lives.

workers who are self-motivated, proactive, and creative may find jobs with a lack of autonomy to be stifling, frustrating, and boring, and this may dramatically reduce their motivation to perform at a high level.

a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.