The Organized Mind

by Daniel J. Levitin

Every day, we are confronted with dozens of decisions, most of which we would characterize as insignificant or unimportant

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing,

For things that don’t matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient.

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. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.

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.

It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.

Neurons are living cells with a 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

What does this bandwidth restriction—this information speed limit—mean in terms of our interactions with others? In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Under most circumstances, you will not be able to understand three people talking at the same time.

With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life.

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.

Our success owes in large part to our cognitive capacity, the ability of our brains to flexibly handle information. But our brains evolved in a much simpler world with far less information coming at us. Today, our attentional filters easily become overwhelmed. Successful people—or people who can afford it—employ layers of people whose job it is to narrow the attentional filter.

These highly successful persons—let’s call them HSPs—have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, allowing them to devote all of their attention to whatever is immediately before them. They seem to live completely in the moment. Their staff handle correspondence, make appointments, interrupt those appointments when a more important one is waiting, and help to plan their days for maximum efficiency (including naps!).

not to have to worry about whether there is someplace else they need to be, or someone else they need to be talking to. They take their time, make eye contact, relax, and are really there with whomever they’re talking to. They don’t have to worry if there is someone more important they should be talking to at that moment because their staff—their external attentional filters—have already determined for them that this is the best way they should be using their time.

Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance. The brain is an exquisite change detector:

The brain’s change detector is at work all the time, whether you know it or not.

When your brain detects the change, this information is sent to your consciousness, but your brain doesn’t explicitly send a message when there is no change.

The second principle, importance, can also let information through. Here, importance is not just something that is objectively important but something that is personally important to you.

Due to the attentional filter, we end up experiencing a great deal of the world on autopilot, not registering the complexities, nuances, and often the beauty of what is right in front of us. A great number of failures of attention occur because we are not using these two principles to our advantage.

The limits show up whenever we try to do too many things at once.

The human brain has evolved to hide from us those things we are not paying attention to. In other words, we often have a cognitive blind spot: We don’t know what we’re missing because our brain can completely ignore things that are not its priority at the moment—even if they are right in front of our eyes.

Cognitive psychologists have called this blind spot various names, including inattentional blindness.

A lot of instances of losing things like car keys, passports, money, receipts, and so on occur because our attentional systems are overloaded and they simply can’t keep track of everything.

Productivity and efficiency depend on systems that help us organize through categorization.

Fundamentally, categorization reduces mental effort and streamlines the flow of information.

This information explosion is taxing all of us, every day, as we struggle to come to grips with what we really need to know and what we don’t. We take notes, make To Do lists, leave reminders for ourselves in e-mail and on cell phones, and we still end up feeling overwhelmed.

I mentioned earlier the two principles of the attentional filter: change and importance. There is a third principle of attention—not specific to the attentional filter—that is relevant now more than ever. It has to do with the difficulty of attentional switching.

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. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

To pay attention to one thing means that we don’t pay attention to something else. Attention is a limited-capacity resource.

Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine.

But what causes that initial release of dopamine? Typically, one of two different triggers:

Something can grab your attention automatically, usually something that is salient to your survival, with evolutionary origins.

You effectively will yourself to focus only on that which is relevant to a search or scan of the environment.

If only you could send instructions to these different neuron populations, telling some of them when you need them to stand up straight and do your bidding, while telling the others to sit back and relax. Well, you can

When we willfully retune sensory neurons in this way, our brains engage in top-down processing, originating in a higher, more advanced part of the brain than sensory processing.

If we have such an effective attentional filter, why can’t we filter out distractions better than we can? Why is information overload such a serious problem now? For one thing, we’re doing more work than ever before.

shadow work—it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the customer.

we are just getting so much more information shot at us. The global economy means we are exposed to large amounts of information that our grandparents weren’t.

So it’s not that we need to take in less information but that we need to have systems for organizing it.

Information has always been the key resource in our lives. It has allowed us to improve society, medical care, and decision-making, to enjoy personal and economic growth, and to better choose our elected officials. It is also a fairly costly resource to acquire and handle.

We are easily swayed by first-person stories and vivid accounts of a single experience. Although this is statistically wrong and we should learn to overcome the bias, most of us don’t.

We say that our eyes are playing tricks on us, but in fact, our eyes aren’t playing tricks on us, our brain is. The visual system uses heuristics or shortcuts to piece together an understanding of the world, and it sometimes gets things wrong. By analogy to visual illusions, we are prone to cognitive illusions when we try to make decisions, and our brains take decision-making shortcuts.

Many believe that attention and memory are closely related, that you can’t remember things that you didn’t pay attention to in the first place. There has been relatively less attention paid to the important interrelationship among categorization, attention, and memory. The act of categorizing helps us to organize the physical world-out-there but also organizes the mental world, the world-in-here, in our heads and thus what we can pay attention to and remember.

Early humans organized their minds and thoughts around basic distinctions that we still make and find useful. 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. No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

Simultaneous with an understanding of now versus before is one of object permanence: Something may not be in my immediate view, but that does not mean it has ceased to exist. Human infants between four and nine months show object permanence, proving that this cognitive operation is innate.

In other words, those early cave-dwelling Picassos, through the very act of painting, were making a distinction about time and place and objects, an advanced cognitive operation we now call mental representation.

He is not there now, but he was there before.

This prehistoric step in the organization of our minds mattered a great deal.