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In making such distinctions, we are implicitly forming categories, something that is often overlooked.
The formation of categories in humans is guided by a cognitive principle of wanting to encode as much information as possible with the least possible effort.
The fact that we still do this today, with all our advanced scientific knowledge, underscores the utility and innateness of functional categories. “Bug” promotes cognitive economy by combining into a single category things that most of the time we don’t need to think about in great detail, apart from keeping them out of our food or from crawling on our skin. It is not the biology of these organisms that unites them, but their function in our lives
Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus distracting knowledge.
One thing HSPs do over and over every day is active sorting, what emergency room nurses call triage. Triage comes from the French word trier, meaning “to sort, sift, or classify.”
It simply means that you separate those things you need to deal with right now from those that you don’t.
it is an essential part of being organized, efficient, and productive.
1. Things that need to be dealt with right away. This might include correspondence from his office or business associates, bills, legal documents, and the like. He subsequently performed a fine sort of things to be dealt with today versus in the next few days. 2. Things that are important but can wait. We called this the abeyance pile. This might include investment reports that needed to be reviewed, articles he might want to read, reminders for periodic service on an automobile, invitations to parties or functions that were some time off in the future, and so on. 3. Things that are not
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away. Another HSP extends the system from correspondence to everything that comes across her desk, either electronically (such as e-mails and PDFs) or as paper copies. To the Littlefield categories one could add subcategories for the different things you are working on, for hobbies, home maintenance, and so on. Some of the material in these categories ends up in piles on one’s desk, some in folders in a filing cabinet or on a computer. Active
After you have prioritized and you start working, knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful. Other things can wait—this is what you can focus on without worrying that you’re forgetting something.
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. If we can remove some or all of the process from our brains and put it out into the physical world, we are less likely to make mistakes.
Active sorting is just one of many ways of using the physical world to organize your mind. The information you need is in the physical pile there, not crowded in your head up here. Successful people have devised dozens of ways to do this, physical reminders in their homes, cars, offices, and throughout their lives to shift the burden of remembering from their brains to their environment.
When the systems we’re trying to set up are in collision with the way our brain automatically categorizes things, we end up losing things, missing appointments, or forgetting to do things we needed to do.
You might have had a similar feeling the last time you sat by the ocean or a lake, letting your mind wander, and experiencing the relaxing feeling it induced. In this state, thoughts seem to move seamlessly from one to another, there’s a merging of ideas, visual images, and sounds, of past, present, and future. Thoughts turn inward—loosely connected, stream-of-consciousness thoughts so much like the nighttime dream state that we call them daydreams. This distinctive and special brain state is marked by the flow of connections among disparate ideas and thoughts, and a relative lack of barriers
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This network exerts a pull on consciousness; it eagerly shifts the brain into mind-wandering when you’re not engaged in a task, and it hijacks your consciousness if the task you’re doing gets boring.
Where is your brain when this happens?
If you’ve ever stopped what you were doing to picture the consequence of some future action or to imagine yourself in a particular future encounter, maybe your eyes turned up or down in your head from a normal straight-ahead gaze, and you became preoccupied with thought: That’s the daydreaming mode.
Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we now know, are a natural state of the brain.
default mode. This mode is a resting brain state, when your brain is not engaged in a purposeful task, when you’re sitting on a sandy beach or relaxing in your easy chair with a single malt Scotch, and your mind wanders fluidly from topic to topic. It’s not just that you can’t hold on to any one thought from the rolling stream, it’s that no single thought is demanding a response.
This stay-on-task mode is the other dominant mode of attention, and it is responsible for so many high-level things we do that researchers have named it “the central executive.”
These two brain states form a kind of yin-yang: When one is active, the other is not. During demanding tasks, the central executive kicks in. The more the mind-wandering network is suppressed, the greater the accuracy of performance on the task at hand.
The discovery of the mind-wandering mode also explains why paying attention to...
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We pay attention to one thing, either through conscious decision or because our attentional filter deemed it important enough to push it to the forefront of attentional focus.
The mind-wandering mode works in opposition to the central executive mode: When one is activated, the other one is deactivated; if we’re in one mode, we’re not in the other.
The job of the central executive network is to prevent you from being distracted when you’re engaged in a task, limiting what will enter your consciousness so that you can focus on what you’re doing uninterrupted.
In the mind-wandering mode, our thoughts are mostly directed inward to our goals, desires, feelings, plans, and also our relationship with other people—the mind-wandering mode is active when people are feeling empathy toward one another. In the central executive mode, thoughts are directed both inward and outward.
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, such as when you’re talking to a friend at a party and your attention is suddenly shifted to that other conversation about the fire in the kitchen.
the switch is controlled in a part of the brain called the insula, an important structure about an inch or so beneath the surface of where temporal lobes and frontal lobes join.
The relationship between the central executive system and the mind-wandering system is like a see-saw, and the insula—the attentional switch—is like an adult holding one side down so that the other stays up in the air.
if it is called upon to switch too much or too often, we feel tired and a bit dizzy, as though we were see-sawing too rapidly.
You’re sitting at your desk and there is a cacophony of sounds and visual distractions surrounding you: the fan of the ventilation unit, the hum of the fluorescent lights, traffic outside your window, the occasional glint of sunlight reflecting off a windshield outside and streaking across your face. Once you’ve settled into your work, you cease to notice these and can focus on your task. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, though, you find your mind wandering:
The inner dialogue is generated by the planning centers of your brain in the prefrontal cortex, and the questions are being answered by other parts of your brain that possess the information.
