The Organized Mind: The Science of Preventing Overload, Increasing Productivity and Restoring Your Focus

by Daniel J. Levitin

Wikipedia is an example of crowdsourcing: Anyone with information is encouraged to contribute, and through this, it has become the largest reference work in the world. What Wikipedia did for encyclopedias, Kickstarter did for venture capital: More than 4.5 million people have contributed over $750 million to fund roughly 50,000 creative projects by filmmakers, musicians, painters, designers, and other artists.

In its first nine years, Kiva has given out loans totaling $500 million to one million people in seventy different countries, with crowdsourced contributions from nearly one million lenders.

When the Waze app on your smartphone, or Google Maps, is telling you the best route to the airport based on current traffic patterns, how do they know where the traffic is? They’re tracking your cell phone and the cell phones of thousands of other users of the applications to see how quickly those cell phones move through traffic. If you’re stuck in a traffic jam, your cell phone reports the same GPS coordinates for several minutes; if traffic is moving swiftly, your cell phone moves as quickly as your car and these apps can recommend routes based on that.

The research finding was that people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not. The experiment required hundreds of participants and would have taken a great deal more time to accomplish using physical participants in the laboratory.

A tickler is a reminder, something that tickles your memory. It works best as a note in your paper or electronic calendar.

Although there are individual differences, being alone for too long causes neurochemical changes that can result in hallucinations, depression, suicidal thoughts, violent behaviors, and even psychosis. Social isolation is also a risk factor for cardiac arrest and death, even more so than smoking.

Apart from the minimum drive to be part of a group or social network, many of us seek something more—having friends to do things with, to spend leisure or work time with; a circle of people who understand difficulties we may be encountering and offer assistance when needed; a relationship providing practical help, praise, encouragement, confidences, and loyalty

During adolescence, when behavior is somewhat unpredictable and strongly influenced by interpersonal relations, we react and are guided by what our friends are doing to a much larger degree. Indeed, a sign of maturity is the ability to think independently and come to one’s own conclusions. It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults. And although being agreeable is important for social outcomes later in life, just having a friend who is agreeable also protects against social problems later in life, even if you yourself are not. Both girls and boys benefit from having an agreeable friend, although girls benefit more than boys.

The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships, compared to a fraction of that in the decade before

Asynchrony allows both parties to gather their thoughts in their own time before responding, and thus to present their best selves without all of the pressure and anxiety that occurs in synchronous real-time interactions. Have you ever left a conversation only to realize hours later the thing you wish you had said? Online dating solves that.

Social world organization gone awry or not, the current online dating world shows at least one somewhat promising trend: So far, there is a 22% lower risk of marriages that began online ending in divorce.

In another experiment, volunteers watched videos of people either lying or telling the truth about whether they were HIV positive. People believed that they were accurate in detecting liars 70% of the time, but in fact, they did no better than 50%. We are very bad at telling if someone is lying, even when our lives depend on it.

When doctors at the University of Michigan hospitals started disclosing their mistakes to patients openly, malpractice lawsuits were cut in half. The biggest impediment to resolution had been requiring patients to imagine what their doctors were thinking, and having to sue to find out, rather than just allowing doctors to explain how a mistake happened. When we’re confronted with the human element, the doctor’s constraints and what she is struggling with, we’re more likely to understand and forgive.

And yet humans have been living in cities containing tens of thousands of males for several millennia. How do we do it? One way of helping to keep large numbers of humans living in close proximity is through the use of nonconfrontational speech, or indirect speech acts. Indirect speech acts don’t say what we actually want, but they imply it. The philosopher Paul Grice called these implicatures.

Yet indirect speech acts are a powerful social glue that enables us to get along. In them, the speaker means exactly what she says but also something more.

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.

Oxytocin has additionally been implicated in feelings of trust.

To reconcile this paradox—is oxytocin the love drug or the without-love drug?—a more recent theory gaining traction is that oxytocin regulates the salience of social information and is capable of eliciting positive and negative social emotions, depending on the situation and individual. Its real role is to organize social behavior.

A related chemical in the brain, a protein called arginine vasopressin, has also been found to regulate affiliation, sociability, and courtship. If you think your social behaviors are largely under your conscious control, you’re underestimating the role of neurochemicals in shaping your thoughts, feelings, and actions. To wit: There are two species of prairie voles; one is monogamous, the other is not. Inject vasopressin in the philandering voles and they become monogamous; block vasopressin in the monogamous ones and they become as randy as Gene Simmons in a John Holmes movie. Injecting vasopressin also causes innate, aggressive behaviors to become more selective, protecting the mate from emotional (and physical) outbursts.

Most people rate their friend in terms of traits (the first two columns)but rate themselves in terms of situations (the third column).

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls this the “invisibility” problem—the inner thoughts of others are invisible to us.

What did the experimenters find? The students who were in a hurry were six times more likely to keep on walking and pass by the visibly injured person without helping than the students who had plenty of time. The amount of time the students had was the situational factor that predicted how they would behave, and the paragraph they read had no significant effect.

This cognitive illusion is so powerful it has a name: the fundamental attribution error. An additional part of the fundamental attribution error is that we fail to appreciate that the roles people are forced to play in certain situations constrain their behavior.

Or you could attribute his behavior to a situational factor—perhaps he was lost in thought or was late for a meeting or is angry at you.

Daniel Gilbert has gone on to show that this fundamental attribution error is produced by information overload.

Here’s the twist. It’s because most of the time, the outcome has predictive value and operates as a simple inferential cue when we’re making judgments. Reliance on such primal unconscious cues is efficient, typically yielding accurate judgments with much less effort and cognitive load.

Dozens of experiments have shown that the original knowledge—now known to be false—exerts a lingering influence on your judgments; it is impossible to hit the reset button. Lawyers know this well, and often plant the seeds of a false idea in the minds of jurors and judges. After opposing counsel objects, the judge’s admonition, “The jury will disregard that last exchange,” comes too late to affect impression formation and judgment.

People invest a significant amount of cognitive effort generating a belief that is consistent with the physiological state they are experiencing. Having done so, the results of this process are relatively persistent and resistant to change, but they do represent an insidious error of judgment.

Nicholas Epley says that 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.

But this hypothesis is contradicted by the striking fact that what constitutes an in-group or out-group can be defined on the flimsiest of premises, such as which of two randomly defined groups won a coin toss. One criterion for having a sense of group belongingness is interdependence of fate

For a number of historical and cognitive reasons, humans evolved an unfortunate tendency to do this, and in some instances it is adaptive. I eat a piece of fruit I’ve never eaten before, I get sick, I then assume (inductive reasoning) that all pieces of this particular fruit are potentially inedible. We make generalizations about entire classes of people or things because the brain is a giant inferencing machine, and it uses whatever data it has in its attempt to ensure our survival.

In the late 1970s, social psychologist Mick Rothbart taught a class on race relations that had approximately equal numbers of black and white students. A white student would often begin a question with the preface, “Don’t black people feel …” and Mick would think to himself, “That’s a good question.” But if a black student started a question with “Don’t white people feel …” Mick found himself thinking, “What do they mean, ‘white people’? There are all kinds of white people, some conservative, some liberal, some Jewish, some gentile, some sensitive to the problems of minorities, and some not. ‘White people’ is too broad and meaningless a category to use, and there is no way I can respond to … the question … in its existing form.”

In cases of in-group/out-group bias, each group thinks of the other as homogeneous and monolithic, and each group views itself as variegated and complex.

Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, “When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world … Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.”

As the social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané say, “‘I didn’t want to get involved’ is a familiar comment, and behind it lies fears of physical harm, public embarrassment, involvement with police procedures, lost work days and jobs, and other unknown dangers.”

This tendency to not get involved is driven by three powerful, interrelated psychological principles. One is the strong desire to conform to others’ behavior in the hope that it will allow us to gain acceptance within our social group, to be seen as cooperative and agreeable. The second is social comparison—we tend to examine our behavior in terms of others. The third force pushing us toward inaction is diffusion of responsibility.

Geese will come to the aid of one another at great personal risk; vervet monkeys broadcast alarm calls when predators are near, greatly increasing their own visibility to those predators, and meerkats stand guard for predators while the rest of their pack are eating. What is the neurochemical mechanism that supports this altruistic sentinel behavior? Oxytocin—the same social-affiliative hormone that increases trust and social cooperation among humans.

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 the anterior cingulate, basal ganglia, and insula, helps us to organize time and engage in planning, to maintain attention and stick with a task once we’ve started it. The networked brain is not a mass of undifferentiated tissue—damage to discrete regions of it often results in very specific impairments.

These include some species of jellyfish, flatworms (planaria), and hydra; the only causes of death in them are from injury or disease.

Natural selection will tend to favor genes that have good effects on the organism early in life, prior to reproductive age, even if they have bad effects at older ages

There is also the Hayflick limit, which states that cells can divide only a maximum number of times due to errors that accumulate during successive cell divisions.

It’s natural to think that because the prefrontal cortex is orchestrating all this activity and thought, it must have massive neural tracts for back-and-forth communication with other brain regions so that it can excite them and bring them on line. In fact, most of the prefrontal cortex’s connections to other brain regions are not excitatory; they’re the opposite: inhibitory. That’s because one of the great achievements of the human prefrontal cortex is that it provides us with impulse control and, consequently, the ability to delay gratification, something that most animals lack

The condition is recognized by the kinds of planning and time coordination deficits that Ruth the homemaker, Ernie the accountant, and Peter the architect suffered from. It is also often accompanied by an utter lack of inhibition across a range of behaviors, particularly in social settings. Patients may blurt out inappropriate remarks, or go on binges of gambling, drinking, or sex with inappropriate partners. And they tend to act on what is right in front of them. If they see someone moving, they have difficulty inhibiting the urge to imitate them; if they see an object, they pick it up and use it.

Neural communication is very rapid—it has to be—reaching speeds of over 300 miles per hour, and with neurons communicating with one another hundreds of times per second. The voltage output of a single resting neuron is 70 millivolts, about the same as the line output of an iPod. If you could hook up a neuron to a pair of earbuds, you could actually hear its rhythmic output as a series of clicks. My colleague Petr Janata did this many years ago with neurons in the owl’s brain. He attached small thin wires to neurons in the owl’s brain and connected the other end of the wires to an amplifier and a loudspeaker. Playing music to the owl, Petr could hear in the neural firing pattern the same pattern of beats and pitches that were in the original music.

No other tissue in the body relies solely on glucose for energy except the testes. (This is why men occasionally experience a battle for resources between their brains and their glands.)

Using the central executive for reading for an hour takes about forty-two calories. Sitting in class, by comparison, takes sixty-five calories—not from fidgeting in your seat (that’s not factored in) but from the additional mental energy of absorbing new information. Most brain energy is used in synaptic transmission, that is, in connecting neurons to one another and, in turn, connecting thoughts and ideas to one another.

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

Further complicating things is that the brain’s arousal system has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be hijacked easily by something new—the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and cats. And this novelty bias is more powerful than some of our deepest survival drives: Humans will work just as hard to obtain a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate.

There is an interesting gene known as COMT that appears to modulate the ease with which people can switch tasks, by regulating the amount of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex. COMT carries instructions to the brain for how to make an enzyme (in this case, catechol-O-methyltransferase, hence the abbreviation COMT) that helps the prefrontal cortex to maintain optimal levels of dopamine and noradrenaline, the neurochemicals critical to paying attention.

Individuals with a particular version of the COMT gene (called Val158Met) have low dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex and, at the same time, show greater cognitive flexibility, easier task switching, and more creativity than average.