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Through the sheer force of human ingenuity, we have devised systems to free our brains of clutter, to help us keep track of details that we can’t trust ourselves to remember. All of these and other innovations are designed either to improve the brain we have, or to off-load some of its functions to external sources.
The invention of written language has long been celebrated as a breakthrough, but relatively little has been made of what exactly were the first things humans wrote—simple recipes, sales receipts, and business inventories mostly.
Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.
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.
It’s also the story of how the most successful members of society—from successful artists, athletes, and warriors, to business executives and highly credentialed professionals—have learned to maximize their creativity, and efficiency, by organizing their lives so that they spend less time on the mundane, and more time on the inspiring, comforting, and rewarding things in life.
But immediately with those first written words came the problems of storage, indexing, and accessing: Where should the writing be stored so that it (and the information it contains) won’t get lost?
Here we come upon two of the most compelling properties of the human brain and its design: richness and associative access.
Our ability to randomly access our memory from multiple cues is especially powerful.
We can categorize objects in many, and often seemingly infinite, ways. And any one of those cues has its own route to the neural node that represents fire truck in your brain.
The ancient Greeks sought to improve memory through brain training methods such as memory palaces and the method of loci.
It comes preconfigured, and although it has enormous flexibility, it is built on a system that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to deal with different kinds and different amounts of information than we have today.
The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own (so to speak).
There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.
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.
We’ll review the history of organizational systems that humans have tried over many centuries, so that we can see which systems succeeded and which failed, and why.
I’m also going to talk about business organizations, which are called organizations for a reason.
Businesses typically do better than individuals at day-to-day tasks because of distributed processing.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that as societies become more Westernized and complex, conscientiousness becomes more and more important.
The average American is sleep-deprived, overstressed, and not making enough time for things she wants to do.
Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon,
It is this cost-benefits analysis that is at the heart of satisficing (Simon was also a respected economist).
All this ignoring and deciding comes with a cost. Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.
Recent research shows that people who were asked to make a series of meaningless decisions of just this type—for example, whether to write with a ballpoint pen or a felt-tip pen—showed poorer impulse control and lack of judgment about subsequent decisions.
In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 175 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day.
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. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on. These neurons are collectively the attentional filter.
If we organize our minds and our lives following the new neuroscience of attention and memory, we can all deal with the world in ways that provide the sense of freedom that these HSPs enjoy. How can we actually leverage this science in everyday life?
The brain’s change detector is at work all the time, whether you know it or not. If a close friend or relative calls on the phone, you might detect that her voice sounds different and ask if she’s congested or sick with the flu. 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.
Cognitive psychologists have called this blind spot various names, including inattentional blindness.
Fundamentally, categorization reduces mental effort and streamlines the flow of information.
Leibniz complained about “that horrible mass of books that keeps on growing” and that would ultimately end in nothing less than a “return to barbarism.”
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
Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine. When dopamine is released, it unlocks them, like a key in your front door, and they start firing tiny electrical impulses that stimulate other neurons in their network. But what causes that initial release of dopamine? Typically, one of two different triggers:
Inside the occipital lobe, a region called the visual cortex contains populations of neurons that respond only to certain colors—one population fires an electrical signal in response to red objects, another to green, and so on.
It represents a stable summary of the average experience, and the most likely best guess as to what your own experience will be (if you’ve got nothing else to go on, your best guess is that your experience will be most like the average).
From a strictly logical point of view, the colleague is being irrational. The brother-in-law’s bad Volvo experience is a single data point swamped by tens of thousands of good experiences—it’s an unusual outlier. But we are social creatures. We are easily swayed by first-person stories and vivid accounts of a single experience.
“Ponzo illusion,”
Ebbinghaus illusion
Junk drawers reveal a great deal about category formation, and they serve an important and useful purpose by functioning as an escape valve when we encounter objects that just don’t fit neatly anywhere else.
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,
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. These constitute the first evidence of any species on earth being able to explicitly represent the distinction between what is here and what was here. 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
Although theoretically, many billions of kinship systems are possible, research has shown that actual systems in existence in disparate parts of the world have formed to minimize complexity and maximize ease of communication.
A natural consequence of this chart is that first cousins who have children together increase the number of genes they pass on. In fact, many cultures promote marriage between first cousins as a way to increase family unity, retain familial wealth, or to ensure similar cultural and religious views within the union.
The caring for one’s nephews and nieces is not limited to humans. Mole rats will care for nieces and nephews but not for unrelated young, and Japanese quails show a clear preference for mating with first cousins—a way to increase the amount of their own genetic material that gets passed on (the offspring of first cousins will have 56.25% of their DNA in common with each parent rather than 50%—that is, the “family” genes have an edge of 6.25% in the offspring of first cousins than in the offspring of unrelated individuals).
Now here’s the most interesting part: When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red. Various theories have been proposed, the dominant one being that red is important because it is the color of blood. When a language adds a fourth term, it is either yellow or green. The fifth term is either green or yellow, and the sixth term is blue.
The UC Berkeley cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch argued that human categorization is not the product of historical accident or arbitrary factors, but the result of psychological or innate principles of categorization.
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 structure.
We are hardwired to impose structure on the world. A further piece of evidence for the innateness of this structure is the extraordinary consistency of naming conventions for biological classification (plants and animals) across widely disparate cultures.
For example, every language contains primary and secondary plant and animal names. In English we have fir trees (in general) and Douglas fir (in particular). There are apples and then there are Granny Smiths, golden delicious, and pippins. There are salmon and then sockeye salmon, woodpeckers and acorn woodpeckers. We look at the world and can perceive that there exists a category that includes a set of things more alike than they are unalike, and yet we recognize minor variations. This extends to man-made artifacts as well. We have chairs and easy chairs, knives and hunting knives, shoes and
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A Gibsonian affordance describes an object whose design features tell you something about how to use it.
