The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

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

• 
  SJ Loria

  This review will be three parts. First a quick paragraph about what this book is. Then, some of the practical tips and facts from the book itself and finally a why this book matters (and how it relates to The End of Absence) kind of rant. Also quotes at the end.
  
  1. What this book is.
  I'm not entirely sure if this book is supposed to address what it means to have an organized mind or how one can implement structure in order to achieve an organized mind. It's a bit of both, which services perhaps to clutter its overall purpose. It also addresses organization across so many different facets of life (the workplace, the home, teaching, thinking) that the scope perhaps dilutes the effectiveness. It tries to be something for everything, and maybe that's not possible. I appreciate the effort, but not all sections are equally strong and it takes on too much. It’s interesting to learn about the different types of memory and which parts of your brain are involved in thinking them though, that’s neat.
  
  2. Practical tips and facts
  Externalize (write things down, label drawers) and categorize (do now, delegate, do later, and check your lists to revise them)
  Guard your mind, create a schedule that maximizes your effectiveness that takes into account neurological science
  Have a junk drawer, but remember to organize that every once in a while
  Compartmentalize
  Take naps, day dream
  There is no such thing as multi-tasking, don’t kid yourself, it’s inefficient
  Thinking takes energy, neurons are living cells and require oxygen and glucose
  Sort things in to categories, and then sort these into categories with periodic checks
  Only check your email three times a day
  There is the central-decision making mode and the mind wandering mode, both are important for brain development and success so you should allow yourself to do both (and all the app noise doesn’t let mind wandering mode happen)
  Gay people are actually important for preserving family genes because they invest in the childcare of an infant but don’t produce any offspring (apparently he’s summarizing Richard Dawkins on this point, interesting)
  The serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4 has been found to correlate with artistic behaviors as well as spirituality, both of which appear to favor the mind-wandering mode. [This is the most scientific way one can possibly say “it’s ok to zone out and marvel at clouds.”] 47
  Value the long term goal, not the short term rush
  The process of learning yields better results than the googlization of facts style of learning - I call it the elbow grease approach. This means write things down on paper, say them outloud, learn the old fashioned way if you want to get the maximum effect. Typing on a screen is easy, not to mention the 48 other tabs that are distracting you and the glow of the screen that your brain isn't used to.
  
  3. Why this book matters.
  (I typed this up stream of consciousness style in an electronics store yesterday) So I'm at a store where they are currently looking at my phone because the headphone jack doesn't work properly. For the record, I love music. I spoil the sense of hearing because I cherish music. Excellence in sound. So during exercise this morning when the sound once again came out of only one ear (regardless of the headphone) yet again I said, OK, it's worth going into an electronic store to get this fixed.
  They're looking at it in the back room, as I'm in a room full of dazzling screens on every side. Literally, all sides. Today my goal was also to type up my review to The Organized Mind, and I had been zoning out and thinking about the point of the process of discovery as it relates to learning. How actually looking something up makes you learn it far better. I was reminiscing about riding my bike to the library, I’m watching two kids not facing each other staring at a screen and speaking to one another through the headsets.
  He handed me this tool and said, “Here you go, I don't want you to be bored while you wait” as he left. I wanted to tell him, but, it's not a bad thing to be bored. Neurological research is showing more and more the precious importance of the ability to be bored. It's more important in the development of children and adolescents, more than two hours of screen time is related with increased ADHD rates, aggressive behaviors and antisocial behaviors...and probably negative life outcomes once those kids live long enough to test that hypothesis. And probably very negative long term effects on the ability to connect with other people. Family, friends, romantic partners…yikes
  News flash, your 2,000 twitter followers don't actually give a shit about you, they just want to see sexy photos. And while the endorphin rush from seeing 295 updates does feel good, I’ll concur to that, but in the long run that shit is the loneliest way to live.
  The point of The Organized Mind and also The End of Absence and a lot of the scientific research I've read over the past few years is this. Guard your mind. Yes, it's cool to live in the dazzling array of electronics, but while it's convenient that you can instantly find out how much the Empire State Building weighs that doesn't mean you always should. The grey matter up there, and the process of evolving into how we put grey matter up there, took place over hundreds of thousands of years and the instantaneous pop up window way of learning isn't quite in sync with us as a mammal. Read books, daydream, take naps, create spaces where electronics are put away completely. It’s you who should be doing the becoming, not your damn fool computer.
  Oddly enough, it's essentially in line with Eastern philosophical thinking. If you want to get a summary of The Organized Mind go to a yoga class, or read Peace is Every Step. It's the same point, but one approaches from the western, empirical scientific process based thinking, the other from the more intuitive, collective, calm eastern way of thinking. The both point to the same truth.
  You must live a certain way, make certain choices that seem boring but in the long run are better for you and essential for your ability to maintain a relationship.
  Says the man who is typing this all up on a computer, and as we all know we're happy computers exist and I'm happy you're reading this but let's both go do ourselves a favor and turn these things off, go read a book or go have a conversation with a loved one.
  Last point, then we’ll get to the practical stuff. I saw a couple the other day probably in their 80s walk arm in arm to the car. He opened the door for her as she got in the car, they smiled at one another, and then he hurried around to his side of the car. There’s wisdom in that. Out with the old, in with the new and the shiny and the screens, but as we evolve we can retain the best of the old ways as we improve with the new electronic toys. At least I think that’s possible. At least I choose to live my life in a way that I maintain that hope, because it’s a simple choice in this situation, not a data driven empirical analysis, and I would rather chose the side of life here that results in a more fulfilling life. Be organized. Be your best organized self.
  
  Quotes
  From the many thousands of ways that individuals differ from one another, a mathematical model can be constructed that accounts for a great deal of variation, organizing human differences into five categories: extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness to new experience, conscientiousness….conscientiousness is the best predictor of many important human outcomes.
  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 of 100,000 words every day…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…with a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. 7
  The amount of scientific information we’ve discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language [ed note, in terms of quantity, not quality or importance to human knowledge]. Five exabites (5 x 10 to the 18th) of new data were produced in January 2012 alone – that’s 50,000 times the number of words in the entire Library of Congress. 15
  The serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4 has been found to correlate with artistic behaviors as well as spirituality, both of which appear to favor the mind-wandering mode. [This is the most scientific way one can possibly say “it’s ok to zone out and marvel at clouds.”] 47
  People who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions. 119
  By 1859, the average family group in Europe had dropped from twenty people to ten living in close proximity, and by 1960 that number was just five. Today, 50% of Americans live alone. 121
  Online interaction works best as a supplement, not a replacement for inperson contact. The cost of all our electronic connectedness appears to be that it limits our biological capacity to connect with other people. 127
  Studies have shown a dramatic decline in empathy among college students, who apparently are far less likely to say that it is valuable to put oneself in the place of others or to try and understand their feelings. It is not just because they’re reading less literary fiction, it’s because they’re spending more time alone under the illusion that they’re being social. 131
  “It takes time to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less nurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming also takes less energy than multitasking. And the natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate the brain. Multitasking does not.
  Perhaps most important, multitasking by definition disrupts the kind of sustained thought usually necessary for problem solving and for creativity…in multitasking we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the reward of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one. Don’t forget the awareness of an unread email sitting in your inbox can effectively reduce your IQ by 10 points, and that multitasking causes information you want to learn to be directed to the wrong part of the brain.” 170
  Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function, and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep reduction or departure from a set sleep routine can produce detrimental effects on cognitive performance for many days afterwards. 189
  Even give or ten minute “power naps” can turn around negative emotions and increase happiness. 193
  Most students today do not know the pleasure of serendipity that comes from browsing through stacks of old academic journals, turning past “irrelevant” articles on the way to the one they’re looking for, finding their brains attracted to a particularly interesting graph or title. Instead, they insert the name of the journal article they want and the computer delivers it to them with surgical precision, effortlessly. Efficient, yes. Inspiring, and capable of unlocking creative potential, not so much. 378
  
• 
  Claudia Putnam

  Who came up with this title, anyway? The marketing dept missed it on this one. It's more about why we're NOT organized than about how to organize. You could say it's about how brains try to organize info, and the barriers to organization in this day and age. There's very little actionable advice. A lot of digression into everything the author has ever learned about how brains function. Whether it's sleep phases, flow states, rational decision-making--most of this stuff has been published elsewhere. So, I guess you'd call this a synthetic work. Nothing wrong with it, except that very little of it seemed new to me. For example, the sleep phases stuff has been passed around on FB for ages now, and the REAL question is, what to do about it? If humans are more naturally oriented to a lunar cycle (which makes sense given that for most of our evolutionary history we were hunter-gatherers and not farmers), how to we get society to function on a 25-hour daily schedule? If people naturally sleep about 4 hours, wake up for about 2, and then return to sleep for another 4, again, how is that supposed to fit in today's world? (Also, what should they do in the 2 hours? Get up and do stuff? Lie there in the dark?) Since most of us don't have personal assistants, pretty much all that was useful was the index cards thing, using calendars more comprehensively (man, do I miss Palm Pilots... we're still not back to where we were 10 years ago regarding calendaring), and blocking off no-internet time for uninterrupted work, which I already do. (I highly recommend the Chrome extension stayfocusd (the name is not a typo) for blocking/limiting social media and other selected websites, including Goodreads. Unfortunately, Android does not enable browser extensions, so you can still run apps on phones, which is a nasty sneakaround for the addicted.)
  
  Lots of info on raising children, some really shallow discussion of complementary & alternative medicine, a long discussion on medical decision-making, and a lot about rational decisionmaking, which has been covered by lots of other people in full-length books. In short, the book wasn't very well organized, and you kind of have to have an organized mind in the first place to pick out the relevant details about organizing your mind.
  
  
• 
  KVG

  This book is a dangerous combination of mildly compelling and vastly overwritten. I'd be reading and getting frustrated by the repetitive use of examples, the divergence from the main theme, the pointless asides, and then OCCASIONALLY an interesting tidbit would crop up.
  
  In the end, it wasn't enough to hold me, and I ended up skipping/speeding through massive portions of it (audiobook). The first chapter about the mind's states of attention, and the challenges of/resources lost when switching through those modes, was interesting. But then it devolved into overwrought chapters about the history of categorization, chapters on how to take pills and handle social media, and more I can't recall because it just wasn't worth it.
  
  This could be summed up by an Inc. or Fast Company productivity listicle. Here's my shot at it. Save yourself a LOT of time:
  * use external systems to aid your memory
  * use affordances to create cues for what to do (a key hook by the door, for example)
  * the brain is great at noticing change, so arrange things differently when you want to remember/notice them
  * attention takes resources, so give yourself breaks to rest
  * shut down external distractions (email/chat/text/etc) when you need to get stuff done.
• 
  David Rubenstein

  This is a wonderful book about the modern mind. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has written a comprehensive, yet engaging book about brain science, organization techniques, office clutter, memory, and the ever-present kitchen junk drawer! Levitin has interesting things to say about the curse of e-mail, and the curse of passwords in the computer era.
  
  So, what is the greatest organizational component of the mind? It is attention--the "most essential mental resource for any organism ... The attentional filter is one of evolution's greatest achievements." It allows us to take in all these details in real-time, non-stop, yet not get bogged down and distracted by irrelevant details.
  
  There is a more than a little bit of a self-help attitude in this book. Levitin recommends making use of 3x5 index cards to jot down notes and "to do" lists all the time. The cards can be reordered and re-prioritized whenever desired. By writing things down, it gives your mind permission to go off and focus on other things. Levitin makes numerous references to executives who have assistants whose job it is to keep the day's agenda straight, and to keep the big shot's activities rolling along. This allows the executive to focus on the task at hand, and keeps irrelevant distractions at bay.
  
  Levitin has nothing but bad things to say about multitasking. He writes that multitasking can increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol and the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline. These chemicals can overstimulate the brain and cause scrambled thinking. Multitasking put the brain into a feedback loop that rewards it for losing focus, and causes one to constantly search for external stimulation.
  
  Levitin describes how sleep is not an all-or-nothing state. Parts of the brain can be awake while other parts sleep. I personally can think of times, when driving along a featureless highway, when I suddenly realized that I didn't remember being conscious for the last minute or so. Part of my conscious brain may have fallen asleep, while my subconscious brain took over the driving. Oh, and while we are on the subject of highway driving, Levitin reviews the logic behind the numbering system for interstate highways. I never realized just how much information is packed into the numbers that are used for interstate highways!
  
  So much, so very very much of this book really hit home for me. For example, Levitin writes about how couples in a close relationship implicitly share responsibility for things that need to be remembered. Neither member of the couple knows everything--both members have unique expertise. And, to the point,

  after a very long relationship, if one partner dies, the other partner can be left stuck not knowing how vast swaths of day-to-day life are navigated.

  I personally know just how true this is.
  
  Then, Levitin talks about matchmaking or "romantic partner assistance", a job that is actually thousands of years old. However, in the past decade, one-third of all marriages in America began with an online relationship. Half of these relationships were via social media, while the other half began on dating sites.
  
  I thought that the book was excellent until I came up to the very last paragraph of the book. At that point, I realized that Levitin had read my mind, and shouted out the very best for last:

  Every so often, the universe has a way of [cleaning up] for us. We unexpectedly lose a friend, a beloved pet, a business deal, or an entire global economy collapses. The best way to improve upon the brains that nature gave us is to learn to adjust agreeably to new circumstances. My own experience is that when I've lost something I thought was irreplaceable, it's usually replaced with something much better. The key to change is having faith that when we get rid of the old, something or someone even more magnificent will take its place.

  
  
• 
  Amanda

  Can I just say that I found it incredibly ironic that a book on organization in an age of INFORMATION OVERLOAD was so very long? It would have been well-serviced by a developmental editor, one capable of trimming the often protracted prose and tightening the book's overall focus. This book is slightly misleading as it's not really a "how to get organized" manifesto. It takes lengthy detours into the inner workings of the mind, including how the brain organizes information as well as the ways in which the twenty-first century interfere with that biological system. I dearly love cognitive science, though, so I found those parts quite enthralling.
  
  For anyone interested in learning more about memory, this book provides a wonderful dip into the proverbial pool of cognitive science. It's less helpful when it comes to providing ways to better organize information, time, and our world. The first section, with its exploration of cognitive science, sets the stage well, but the following sections often didn't follow through on the promise of organization. The section on the social world especially seemed to detour in ways that only grew more frustrating with the section's end, when the author admits that everyone has their own way of organizing their social world and he can't quite help.
  
  There's no denying Levitin is a strong writer. Like his past books, the prose in The Organized Mind is immensely readable, but the author's rather annoying tendency to outline in extremely meticulous detail example after example after example can muddle his overall point and slow the reader's pace. This is a good one to skim (especially the first section!), but I wouldn't recommend sludging through the whole thing.
• 
  Gretchen Rubin

  This is a very wide-ranging book that covers a lot of ground about how the mind works. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of the default mode (also called the task-negative mode) of the brain.
• 
  Jenny (Reading Envy)

  I dipped into this off and on as one of the books I kept at my desk at work. Full confession: I did not read every word on every page. I stuck to a close read of the chapters most relevant to my interests and the work I do as a librarian, and skimmed the rest. This is quite the comprehensive overview of the neuroscience of information organization.
  
  The first chapter, "Too Much Information, Too Many Decisions: The Inside History of Cognitive Overload," had a lot to say about how people handle the flood of information in the 21st century. I thought a lot about what I read in this chapter, how it applies to undergraduates that I teach research skills and information literacy skills to, and explains a lot about why despite hours of instruction on the scholarly sources, some students will still just do a Google search.
  
  He also introduced me to the idea of satisficing, the idea of "good enough," and how it applies to information. Fascinating, and my group of librarians has had several interesting conversations about this idea - how it relates to the evaluation of resources, to-do lists, even revising.
  
  He follows this by talking about "Highly Successful Persons" and how the most successful people are likely to have staff who do a lot of information filtering for them, allowing them the luxury of focus, deep thinking, and creativity. So what do the rest of us do? We have to create systems of filtering before we even get bogged down. (And of course my brain is off thinking about how to use this idea as a librarian.)
  
  In the chapter, "Organizing our Social World," I was fascinated by the section on people being indirect. It is something I've struggled with since moving to the south (where people will not say "I disagree with you" but also in my marriage! I never just say "Please put X away" but approach it indirectly. And since my husband, according to Levitin, will not display "cooperative behavior" and play part of my social game, I am not successful in my indirect request. But fascinating!
  
  The chapter called "What to Teach our Children" also had some interesting information about evaluating sources, fake news, and what the immediacy of information means for the younger generation.
  
  The notes in the back have even more information and I found myself sucked into them at times. I wouldn't overlook them. But this is not a quick read.
• 
  Kara Babcock

  I first heard about this book when Daniel Levitin appeared on
  a Spark episode to talk about organization. I recommend you follow the link and listen to the interview; his examples are pretty much straight from the book, so it should give you a good idea of whether or not to read this. I mentioned the book to my friend Rebecca, because it seemed like she would be interested in it. Lo and behold, she goes out and buys the book herself … and then turns around and lends it to me before she reads it, because she has other books to read first. I don’t know this happened, but somehow I managed to acquire excellent friends.
  
  Anyway, The Organized Mind is not a GTD (Getting Things Done) book in that it doesn’t pretend to have one amazing system to turn you into a productivity powerhouse. Rather, Levitin aims to use cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive psychology to give the reader some insight into how our brains organize information and use that to make decisions. As he points out several times, humans are unique among animals for our ability to plan for the future and visualize alternative scenarios. But another thing that makes us unique is our ability to hack our own brains.
  
  That’s what Levitin is trying to teach us here. He’s showing us how to hack our brains.
  
  It doesn’t matter if you’re the best (or worst, I guess, depending on your perspective) procrastinator: you can still be productive if you can find a system that works for you. And the best way to do that is to be aware of how your brain works, and to work with your brain rather than fighting it.
  
  The first part of the The Organized Mind addresses the way our brain reacts to external information. Levitin identifies two complementary modes of attentional awareness: the default mode, or mind-wandering/daydreaming mode, and the central executive. The former is so named because it appears to be what our brains lapse into given the chance. It’s good for creativity, for chewing over tough problems “subconsciously” (in quotations because Levitin points out that consciousness is a more fluid notion than it used to be). The latter is what takes charge when we need to accomplish a specific task. It says, “Hey, we need to do this now!” If you’re following a recipe or, like me, writing a book review, your central executive is keeping you on task.
  
  I like how Levitin’s careful explication of current neuroscience reinforces how we used to view the brain in such black-and-white, siloed terms. To some extent this remains the baseline in mainstream perceptions of the brain: you are a “left-brain” or “right-brain” individual; you are logical or you are linguistic. Eyeroll. Levitin points out that being detail-oriented and organized is not necessarily antithetical to creativity; some of the most successful creative people succeed because their organizational system gives them more time to be creative. Similarly, specific cognitive functions are not always localized; sometimes they are distributed among neural networks throughout the brain. This is particularly important when forming memories—the same memory might be triggered by a sight, sound, smell, or link to another memory or concept, because of how memories get formed by our networks. Levitin is very skilled at using computer metaphors for describing how the brain stores information without making the common mistake of likening the brain too much to a computer.
  
  Of course, even with a better understanding of how our brain works, there are limits to how far we can push that lump of grey matter. Levitin is a big proponent of cognitive offloading as a way of dealing with information overload. Basically: if you write something down, your brain treats it as stored, and stops mulling it over so much. Want to stop worrying about how much you have to do? Jot down a to-do list. Consequently, in this model of cognition, external organization systems are not just productivity fetishes but potentially useful adaptations. The Organized Mind explores several such systems, from the random-access 3x5 index card system to flat files and computer storage. Levitin makes it clear that he’s not trying to advocate “One System to Rule Them All” but instead encourage the reader to find something that works for them.
  
  I was surprised by how fascinating I found some of the history behind these systems. We take file folders for granted, but there was a time when they were being introduced and everyone was as excited about them as we are about the new iPhone. (Apparently Dewey premiered some of this technology at 1893 World’s Fair, which would be the equivalent of a modern day tech expo like CES.) There are some interesting anecdotes, such as the fact that the majority of people didn’t know the order of the alphabet in the eighteenth century. As a student of English literature I knew about the great variation in spelling, but it just didn’t occur to me that the order of the alphabet would be so unimportant. This just demonstrates how our current cultural values bias our view and assumptions of the past.
  
  At times Levitin’s digressions get the best of him, and he wanders off into tangents that don’t seem as related to organization as I would have liked. His discussions of statistical decision-making reminds me a lot of
  How Not to Be Wrong, with a few of the examples almost verbatim. And he refers to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky quite a bit, being a student of the latter, so there is some overlap with
  Thinking, Fast and Slow. For what it’s worth, Levitin’s writing is more enjoyable.
  
  The Organized Mind also has much to say about education, a topic I’m just a little passionate about. Neuroscience seems to support constructivism—the theory of learning that promotes student-led inquiry and construction of knowledge, rather than merely receiving it from an expert. Levitin points out that doing something imprints skills on our brain in a way that merely reading about or hearing about something does not. There are a couple of times in my notes where I’ve just jotted down, “Flipped classroom!” (a term in which students learn by tackling problems set by the instructor, who acts as another resource or guide but doesn’t actually lecture or otherwise instruct). And the conclusion is basically an impassioned plea by Levitin to make sure we are teaching students what they need to know for now rather than what we thought they needed to know a decade or two ago. In the Internet age, students need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. It’s not about what you know, it’s about what you know about how you can get the knowledge you need.
  
  I can’t not recommend this book. It’s intelligent, insightful, and well-written. The barrier to entry is on the higher side; even after hiding away the four-fold tables primer in an appendix, Levitin leaves an awful lot of science and math vocabulary out on the lawn for the neighbours to see. (Is that … is that a correlation coefficient in your driveway? How gauche!) I say this not to frighten but to be upfront: this is not a beach read type of popular science book but a “frown and think” type. I still recommend it, but know what to expect and what frame of mind you’ll need to get the most out of it.
  
  Oh, one last thing: this might seem like a thick book. However, if you are like me, the first thing you will do is flip to the back and see if there is an index and notes. There are, and they are over a hundred pages combined. This is a well-indexed, well-annotated science book, and that is even better. Sexy, even. Because I have a confession, ladies: I like big brains. I cannot lie. And you other brothers? You cannot deny that when a girl walks in with a big heavy bag and shoves a book full of learning in your face you get pumped … to spend a weekend reading about cognitive neuroscience.
  
  Or is that just me?
  
  
  
• 
  Nick Richtsmeier

  Books like An Organized Mind are such a struggle to review. On one hand there were sections of this book that were so rich and so valuable that I either went and implemented the changes suggested or spent hours thinking through how the issues Levitin raises have broad and sometimes unintended consequences.
  And yet, I find it difficult to rate this book more than 3 stars. It was dense, and not in a good way. There were long sections of under-edited rambling. The author was over-indulgent with his own ideas and lacked the discipline to edit what should be included and shouldn't be included in this valuable popular examination of human neurology and behavior.
  Herein lies the irony. How is it that book shouting about the importance of the organization, satisficing and de-cluttering in the age of over-information be so cluttered by... over-information? It is a quandary I myself don't have the proximity to the author to address. All I can offer is the warning to those who would wish to find a clear path to their own mental organization from Levitin's book--you won't find it here.
  What you will find are moments of uncommon brilliance that I can't imagine have missed by avoiding this book. And along side those moments are stretches of common ramblings that a skilled writer and ideator like Levitin should have been able to avoid.
• 
  K.J. Charles

  Ironically, there was just a lot too much information in this and I overloaded.
  
  The basic premise was interesting--looking at how much more mental work we have (numbers of people known, tasks to do, things to keep track of) and noting that our brains aren't wonderfully adapted to this scale of managing. However, this was expanded at what really felt unnecessary length and I ran out of steam at 28% although it's not like I have a lot of steam these days so this may be my fault.
• 
  Orsolya

  Our brains are remarkably able to store an insurmountable wealth of information… Or are they? Having not been biologically created to receive as much stimuli as we do in the modern world; how can our brains cope? How is the information stored and organized? Best-selling author, psychologist, and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores these questions in, “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.
  
  Levitin divides “The Organized Mind” into three main parts with the first explaining how information is sorted within the brain on a neurological standpoint; followed by how we organize our outside world and then a ‘how-to’ of sorts. For those who enjoy neuroscience, the first section will be especially pleasing as Levitin strikes again with his ability to mix neuroscience and psychology in an entertaining and readable way but without dummying down the information. In fact, Levitin is one of the few authors who present scientific jargon without overwhelming the reader; blowing one away with amazing information and thus keeping reader attention.
  
  Levitin also incorporates some humor, interactive exercises, and easy-to-understand examples into the text which breaks the heaviness of the topic. This is well-received as “The Organized Mind” is a slower read not because of poor writing but because there is a lot of information to absorb. The negative of this is that some of the material will quickly become dated as time goes on.
  
  Unfortunately, “The Organized Mind” takes a drastic turn after approximately 80 pages, entering the second section. Ironically for a book on organization, it feels like Levitin can not maintain his focus and strays on various tangents; losing his thesis. Although his scope of research and intelligence is impressive; the presentation lacks a cohesive strand bouncing from psychology to case studies to science but without truly connecting these ideas: everything is very choppy and cut apart. These areas are also interspersed with tips on organization which are so out of place (and sometimes, plain ridiculous); that they can be skimmed or skipped all together.
  
  Also evident is Levitin’s habit of repetition of ideas or using the idea differently in various sections to appeal to the topic at hand. As a result, “The Organized Mind” weakens in strength and slows its pace. As “The Organized Mind” proceeds, it truly loses its message with much of Levitin’s text being conjecture or even common sense, filling pages merely to add length. On the other hand, the material is still interesting enough to justify continued reading. “The Organized Mind” can be compared to a conversation which is “all over the place” but still with enough depth to find it satisfying.
  
  The concluding chapters of the second section elevate the confusion even more as they have no correlation with the topic and are lax in the science. In fact, there are many “I have no idea what is going on!”-moments. Levitin strays greatly from the aim of “The Organized Mind” and even ventures down a social history path. At this juncture, the text is very ‘up and down’.
  
  Similarly, the final (third) section of “The Organized Mind” strays from both its individual sectional intention and that of the overall book. The message of the organization theme is lost and once again, the science is eschewed. To add to the disappointment, the ending is abrupt and doesn’t summarize the book resulting in a weak and less-than-memorable ending.
  
  “The Organized Mind” rounds out with an appendix and notes which include sources. Although the notes are (author-admittedly) not exhaustive; they show great research and even encourage further reading.
  
  Unfortunately, only the beginning of “The Organized Mind” is powerful and on-par with Levitin’s usual excellence. After this, the text is jumbled and the thesis is lost producing a weak work. Despite these major flaws, “The Organized Mind” is still an interesting piece and is much better than other books on similar topics. The bottom line though: it is not cohesive and not as great as expected from Levitin. “The Organized Mind” is recommended for fans of the author or those who search out all neuroscience books but it is not necessary to rush into it.
  
• 
  David Ranney

  For people of any age, the world is becoming increasingly linear---a word I'm using in its figurative rather than mathematical sense. Nonlinear thinkers, including many artists, are feeling more marginalized as a result. As a society, it seems we take less time for art. In doing so, we may be missing out on something that is deeply valuable and important from a neurobiological standpoint. Artists recontextualize reality and offer visions that were previously invisible. Creativity engages the brain's daydreaming mode directly and stimulates the free flow and association of ideas, forging links between concept and neural nodes that might not otherwise be made. In this way, engagement in art as either a creator or consumer helps us by hitting the reset button in our brains. Time stops. We contemplate. We reimagine our relationship to the world.
  
  Being creative means allowing the nonlinear to intrude on the linear, and to exercise some control over the output. The major achievements in science and art over the last several thousand years required induction, rather than deduction--required extrapolation from the known to the unknown and, to a large extent, blindly guessing what should come next and being right some of the time. In short, they required great creativity combined with a measure of luck. There is a mystery to how these steps forward are made, but we can stack the decks in our favor. We can organize our time, and our minds, to leave time for creativity, for mind-wandering, for each of us to make our own unique contribution in our time here.

  Overlong with nothing new to say, Levitin is only successful in 'organizing' for uninformed readers some oft-referenced case studies from cognitive science and offering some half-hearted advice for practical application.
  
  Admittedly I have some familiarity with the subject material, but I had almost no reason to annotate while reading. Too late and undercooked.
• 
  Mirela

  rating totale : tre e mezza
• 
  Andrea McDowell

  OK, I didn't completely finish it--I skipped/skimmed the last two chapters (not quite sure why this book required an extended discussion on the pitfalls of wikipedia, but there it was).
  
  The book was ok. It repeats a lot of the popular experiments other authors of popular psychology books use, which makes me wonder if maybe the Invisible Gorilla etc. are the only experiments that have been done in the past 20 years. Regardless, I wasn't sure why they were there. They're interesting experiments and he wrote about them well, but they had only tangential relevance to the book's subjects (of organizing and not being overwhelmed by information overload), and it struck me as both unfortunate and ironic that a book about how much we are overloaded by information nowadays chose to communicate that by overloading readers with information. Come on. Did we really need a 20 page discourse on the origins and development of the flat-file hanging-folder system? No.
  
  If you are already a fairly organized person, you won't find anything new here. The advice portion can be summed up in a paragraph:
  
  1. Externalize your organization. Don't keep everything in your head. Make folders, boxes, cubbies, ticklers, whatever; it doesn't matter so much what you do, as that the information is organized in the physical world.
  
  2. Put everything in your calendar. Also put reminders for everything in your calendar.
  
  3. Don't check your email and social media compulsively. Use tools to put limits on how much you can be distracted online.
  
  4. Use file folders and organize them, maybe alphabetically or by subject. (I'm not kidding. He discusses the pros and cons of each.)
  
  5. Really lucky people get to hire assistants to be their organization for them. Chances are, you don't.
  
  If these are things you already do, or already know, then you are screwed, my friend, because there is apparently nothing else to be done to manage the overwhelm.
• 
  Laura Noggle

  2.5 Rounded up
  
  Hodgepodge of everything ranging from interesting to tedious at points.
  
  I could have done without the tips for organizing my junk drawer, but it was not *all* bad. Segments were quite all right!
  
  You’d think a book dealing with organization wouldn’t be so totally random.
  
• 
  د.أمجد الجنباز

  كتاب عميق وخطير وصعب. يتحدث عن الدماغ وكيف يعمل. ويحوي نصائح عملية متناغمة مع آلية عمل الدماغ لتحسين حياتنا
  الكتاب علمي، ومؤلفه بروفيسور وباحث في الدماغ. ولذلك فأسلوب الكتاب صعب وجامد. ومع ذلك فهو ممتع ومفيد للغاية
  
• 
  Brent

  Cognitive psychology applied to everyday challenges. I read it really slow because I didn't want to miss anything.
• 
  Mike

  Nothing reveals more about our vigorous, bootstrap American culture than self-help literature. And nothing reveals more about our own insecurity and alienation than that same literature. While we are simultaneously driven to control our destinies, we are also driven to reach for a book to rescue us from our inability. This reveals our deep-seated dread of contingency and imperfection and our deep-seated hunger for universality and perfection. The desire for change implies the need for change.
  
  I see that same dread and hope in my own encounter with this genre. I don’t remember the moment that the pendulum began swinging toward self-reflexivity, but I’m pretty sure that prior to my self-help binge, I was perfectly capable of doing the things that much of the self-help literature suggested. I was fine at reading books until I read Mortimer Adler's _How to Read a Book_, after which I couldn’t make heads or tails of a book. Should I be underlining it, highlighting it, making an outline, memorizing the page numbers, indexing them all? After reading David Allen’s _Getting Things Done_, I remember coming to a crisis point in my ability to properly prioritize my tasks. Granted that I now had a system to process incoming tasks, I now found that my previous knack for “just knowing” which tasks took higher priority had withered to the point that I could no longer decide if it were more important to “process my inbox” or “pay my electric bill.”
  
  That’s the problem with much of the self-help literature I’ve encountered. So much of the conventional wisdom in that literature, if applied too heavy handedly, can make one’s life worse than no system at all. Moreover, the people who tend to love this genre are generally conscientious (and insecure) folks anyway, so there is a very real danger that if such books are not careful, they can do more harm than good.
  
  Enter stage left: _The Organized Mind_ by Daniel Levitin. At the height of my crisis point, I suddenly realized three things about getting things done: 1. I cannot possibly do everything that comes across my “to do” list; 2. consequently, I need to learn how to prioritize and vet the things that do come through this list, and 3. how on earth am I supposed to be creative and add meaning to this world when I’m constantly having to shuffle my pile of tasks around? Levitin’s solution to my problem is neuroscience.
  
  Underlying the entirety of this book is the assumption that current neuroscientific research is a needed voice in this desperately overblown and oversold genre. His central, and more explicit, purpose is to convey the beautiful insight that an optimal human life balances both creativity with rationality, chaos with organization. You get from this book the much needed counterpart to almost all other self help literature: the recognition that this world is a complex and baffling place, and the human mind copes with that by categorizing it, but only imperfectly. At the end of the day, our categorizing and filing and sorting and sifting can’t do it all, and as we finally compartmentalize most of what we have, we’re still left with a handful of things that we must toss in a “junk drawer.” In other words, at the very least, we should recognize that no organizational system is air tight, and for us as human beings, that’s just fine.
  
  This book is structured into three parts. The categorization of these parts isn’t all that clear, even after having read the book. I'll take a stab at it though. Part one contains chapters 1 and 2, detailing his introductory assumptions. Chapter 1 claims that only over the last couple of decades has the sheer volume of data we face as a people increased to a critical state, and we are overloaded and struggling to manage it; chapter 2 argues that human memory is best served by (in fact, depends upon) categorization (or abstraction) from data, and it forms the very basis of human language. Part two, chapter 3-7, appears to be the application of those first principles to domains in our lives. Chapter 3 argues that we organize our homes best by externalizing our memories into our living spaces. Chapter 4 argues that we best organize our social lives through understanding social reasoning (and avoiding things like the fundamental attribution error). Chapter 5 digs deeper into subjective perceptions as it relates to time and attention—and why it passes so differently for so many activities and stages of life. Chapter 6 discusses medical decision making using statistical reasoning—which, he argues, we aren’t very good at doing, and chapter 7 discusses both the structures of business organizations, a defense of all this paperwork (finally!), and how a good business model will allow for human creativity. Part three, chapters 8 and 9, seems to serve as both a conclusion to the book and a “junk drawer” for his stray observations not easily categorized in the rest of the book. Chapter 8 argues that we should be teaching our children information literacy above all, and chapter 9 argues very eloquently that human creativity and human rationality should serve complimentary roles, rather than in opposition to one other.
  
  What makes this book so valuable, contrary to so many other self-help books, is that it doesn’t indulge in pandering or pedantry. Too many books are weak on research and overbearing in maxims. Daniel Levitin manages to avoid both an academic tediousness and a layperson’s favoritism for his/her pet rule. This work is both accessible to an average (but educated) reader, but rigorous enough for an academic reader (though probably not as useful to an established neuroscientist—for obvious reasons). Pedagogically, the book is structured quite well—each chapter building upon itself. That is, from a pedagogical standpoint, his reiteration of previous concepts helps the reader to learn things through repetition, like the role of the prefrontal cortex as the “executive center.” Having no background in neuroanatomy, this was appreciated.
  
  Nevertheless, there are some areas that didn’t quite work. For one, the chapters themselves are a bit lengthy. This is, I think, due to his categorization system. A great example of this is chapter 4, where he attempts to address how to organize our “social world.” The chapter begins with crowdsourcing, then moves to the sociology of cities/networking, then externalizing our memories to close social connections, then group membership decisions, social networking, intimacy, the virtue of “agreeableness,” matchmaking, online dating, lie detection, honesty and forgiveness, conversational implicatures and indirect speech acts, social contracts, oxytocin and vasopressin’s relationship to relationships, the “invisibility” problem of mental states, a discussion of judging others based on external criteria, belief perseverance, in-group/out-group bias, and wraps up by discussing bystander inaction—all in that order. These subjects fall under only five headings within the chapter (if you count the beginning of the chapter as a heading); most of his ideas just move from one paragraph to the next, like a stream of consciousness narrative. It’s enjoyable to read, and it does seems to make intuitive sense to go in the directions he does, but it becomes unwieldy and difficult to remember which path you’ve taken to get where you are.
  
  I also noticed that misleading title. I had picked it up thinking I would get a book about developing a way to organize what goes into my head, and how to arrange all of that information while it’s in there. Instead, I got a book that suggested offloading as much of that information as possible! It’s good advice, in retrospect, but it wasn’t what I was after when I picked it up. Perhaps that is his purpose, though—to rope in those who naively believe that they can have a memory megastructure inside their little heads. Instead, when all the science is tallied and reconciled, he reveals this as a lost cause.
  
  Overall, these weaknesses may actually be a result of his “joining of creativity and rationality.” They are large categories, but he allows himself the indulgence of meandering through much of the research to ensure that he’s covered a whole lot of material—to show the narrative relationship in much of human knowledge, rather than removing pieces that don’t neatly fit into easy categories. I like it.
  
  I think the primary point he is trying to convey, though, can best be summarized by a quote from the last chapter. With all the vast and inundating amounts of information at our fingertips, it’s becoming increasingly more important to recognize where computers and databases cannot go—and to recognize what characteristics of our humanness make us such a powerful and progressive species: our creativity. Computers, encyclopedias, and databases don’t have it. We do. Thus, he can say, “nonlinear, creative thinking [should] be tethered to rational, linear thinking in order to implement it in the most robust and rigorous way possible—the dreams of men and women paired with the vast resources of computers” (380).
  
  As we continue to consume our self-help candy, it’s best to attend to the insecurities that provide the impetus for so much of it. Computers we are not, but artists we are. If there is anything we should be more optimistic about, it’s the very human ability to take the data we’re given (and we can’t handle very much), and to dream and imagine where it might take us, or what it might mean. Looking at massive bones buried deep in the earth, we can imagine both dragons and dinosaurs. That’s just who we are.
  
  I think this book is a wonderful edition to a genre that is implicitly pessimistic about human organizational potential. Rather than lamenting “messiness,” Levitin celebrates it as that which gives us so much of life’s meaning. To rephrase Jesus of Nazareth when he said “man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man.” So we might say that we are not created for organization, but organization was created for us—to free us to be more human.
• 
  Юра Мельник

  Якщо ви читали Канемана і не зрозуміли, то ця книжка вам не допоможе. Якщо ви зрозуміли Канемана - то вона вам не потрібна.
• 
  Maher Razouk

  اليوم ، نواجه كمية غير مسبوقة من المعلومات ، وكل واحد منا يولّد معلومات أكثر من أي وقت مضى في تاريخ البشرية. كما لاحظ عالم بوينج السابق والكاتب في صحيفة نيويورك تايمز «دينيس أوفرباي» ، فإن تدفق المعلومات هذا يحتوي على "المزيد والمزيد من المعلومات حول حياتنا - أين نتسوق وما نشتريه ، في الواقع ، أين نحن الآن - الاقتصاد ، وجينومات عدد لا يحصى من الكائنات الحية ، لا يمكننا حتى تسمية المجرات المليئة بالنجوم التي لم نحسبها ، والاختناقات المرورية في سنغافورة والطقس على المريخ. " هذه المعلومات " تنتشر بشكل أسرع وأسرع من خلال أجهزة الكمبيوتر الأكبر والأسرع وصولًا إلى أطراف أصابع الجميع ، والتي تحتوي على أجهزة تتمتع بقوة معالجة أكبر من وحدة التحكم في مهمة أبولو."
  
  لقد حدد علماء المعلومات كل ذلك : في عام 2011 ، أخذ الأمريكيون خمسة أضعاف كمية المعلومات كل يوم كما فعلوا في عام 1986 - أي ما يعادل 175 صحيفة. خلال أوقات فراغنا ، دون احتساب العمل ، يعالج كل واحد منا 34 جيجا بايت أو 100000 كلمة يوميًا. تنتج 21274 محطة تلفزيونية في العالم 85000 ساعة من البرامج الأصلية كل يوم حيث نشاهد ما متوسطه 5 ساعات من التلفزيون يوميًا ، أي ما يعادل 20 غيغابايت من الصور الصوتية والمرئية. هذا لا يشمل YouTube ، الذي يحمّل 6000 ساعة من الفيديو كل ساعة. وألعاب الكمبيوتر؟ تستهلك وحدات بايت أكثر من جميع الوسائط الأخرى مجتمعة ، بما في ذلك أقراص DVD والتلفزيون والكتب والمجلات والإنترنت.
  مجرد محاولة الاحتفاظ بوسائطنا وملفاتنا الإلكترونية منظمة قد يكون أمرًا مربكًا. كل واحد منا لديه ما يعادل أكثر من نصف مليون كتاب مخزّن على أجهزة الكمبيوتر الخاصة بنا ، ناهيك عن جميع المعلومات المخزنة في هواتفنا المحمولة أو في الشريط المغناطيسي الموجود على ظهر بطاقات الائتمان الخاصة بنا. لقد أنشأنا عالماً به 300 إكسابايت (300.000.000.000.000.000.000 قطعة) من المعلومات من صنع الإنسان. إذا تمت كتابة كل جزء من هذه المعلومات على بطاقة فهرس 3 × 5 ثم انتشرت جنبًا إلى جنب ، فإن مشاركة شخص واحد فقط - حصتك من هذه المعلومات - ستغطي كل بوصة مربعة من ماساتشوستس وكونيتيكت مجتمعين.
  
  تمتلك أدمغتنا القدرة على معالجة المعلومات التي نتلقاها ، ولكن بتكلفة: يمكن أن نواجه مشكلة في فصل التافه عن المهم ، وكل معالجة المعلومات هذه تجعلنا متعبين. الخلايا العصبية هي خلايا حية لديها عملية تمثيل غذائي. إنهم بحاجة إلى الأكسجين والجلوكوز للبقاء على قيد الحياة وعندما يعملون بجد ، نشعر بالتعب. كل تحديث للحالة تقرأه على Facebook ، أو كل تغريدة أو رسالة نصية تتلقاها من صديق ، تتنافس على الموارد في عقلك مع أشياء مهمة مثل وضع مدخراتك في الأسهم أو السندات ، أو المكان الذي تركت فيه جواز سفرك ، أو أفضل طريقة للقيام بذلك ، أو حتى التصالح مع صديق مقرب كنت قد تشاجرت معه للتو ...
  .
  Daniel levitin
  The Organized Mind
  Translated by #Maher_Razouk
• 
  Robert Muller

  The one thing this book has going for it is that it is organized, no doubt about it. It is also much too long and in need of serious editing, another case of way too much writing for the actual content. I was going along pretty well on the content until we got to the chapter on hard decisions, in which he introduces all kinds of stuff relating to making life-and-death decisions. He talks about statistics, probability (confusing the two, actually) and decision theory. The valuable part of this chapter is his journalistic work reporting on how doctors and surgeons help us all make decisions on prostate cancer. The material on statistics and decision theory, however, lost me. A note: Bayesian statistics are not all about "conditional probability" (probability of this given that)--Bayes rule is about updating a prior distribution with data into a posterior distribution. How he can talk about Bayesian statistics without actually using the concept of a distribution at all is beyond me. Another note: a contingency table is not a decision tree. Really weird approach to decisions. He'd be much better off using the usual tree graph or (sigh) a Bayesian network representation. Then he got to alternative medicine. He defines "medicine" as treatments based on scientific evidence. Really! Shouldn't be talking so much to doctors, perhaps a little bit more to philosophers of science. He never mentions to important concept of "evidence-based medicine", which is, after all, unusual in today's medical world. It is not an oxymoron. Doctors don't prove things, they know things. It's not the same thing. And alternative medicine is not the simple negation of medicine--treatment not based on evidence. That's called circular reasoning--and without bothering to define "evidence" in any convincing way. I'm left thinking his real approach to evidence is like art: you know it when you see it :) . At that point, my brain shut down on me and I gave up.
• 
  L.A. Starks

  This is a superlative book about brain science (longer dendrites on the right side of the brain--who knew?), organization, statistics, and a host of related topics. Every man and every woman who cares about the men in her life should read the information/statistics on prostate biopsies and prostate cancer that starts at page 240. BTW, it will not be what readers expect to hear.
• 
  Cathleen

  This book will soon become dog-eared from all of the re-reading and noting I'll be doing. For anyone who feels inundated by the never ending torrent of info or anyone interested in learning, memory, and retrieval, this book is well worth reading.
• 
  Nikita Umov

  Mulle ääretult meeldib lugeda selle kohta, kuidas meie aju töötab ning, kuidas oleks võimalik oma igapäevaseid tegemisi paremini organiseerida. Nendeks tegevusteks võivad olla nii isiklikid mõttemustrid, suhted, aeg jne. Daniel Levitin seletab väga huvitavalt, mida on võimalik ette võtta, et võimendada kognitiivseid võimeid, parandada loomingulisust ning pakub võimalusi, kuidas eldada mõtestatud ja tähendusrikast elu.
• 
  Donna Craig

  The information in this book is interesting. However, it felt scattered rather than organized into actionable chapters. Almost as if he fails to demonstrate an organized mind in his writing! It does contain a great deal of information about how minds work and can be organized.
• 
  Tomas Liutvinas

  I would not recommend this book. Its a waste of time, that could be spent reading books that are actually interesting, useful or at least entertaining.
  
  Instead, I would suggest looking up a video or a few articles about Bayesian probability/theorem or picking up one of the following books: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Work or 59 Seconds.
  
  I did like the book at the start and I think it might be worth reading at least up to half. Seems like this author likes 'Thinking Fast and Slow' and the authors. Presents and explains some concepts about organizing and it does sound exactly what I've expected and I did like the first 200ish pages.
  
  But this is where the book should have ended.
  
  Now a bit more than halfway through the thing, I was forced to spend over an hour reading about how paper files were being organized during nobody fucking cares era in the most boring way I've ever experienced anything. I think waiting in line at the hospital would bring more value to your life than reading this, since then you'd at least have some time to reflect on your life. And all this history about sorting paper in the past was followed by the sudden hate on technology and a massive bash on Wikipedia and its free model.
  
  Now if I understand correctly, the idea behind all this, was to promote fact-checking and fight the fake-news propaganda, but it was presented in such a stupid, repulsive and triggering way I've started double-checking if I'm still reading the same book. Because on the title it says "The organised mind" rather than "Things were better back in the 90's".
  
  This is probably 2nd negative review I've ever written, but the author will not mind it, because I'm not a fucking librarian, because apparently the only information that matters is provided by librarians and encyclopedias, well I'm no librarian, but this book does not look like an encyclopedia to me, so, Daniel, excuse me, but what the fuck?
  
  Thank you for bearing through this rant-review with me, which fortunately for both of us, did not last HALF OF THE FUCKING BOOK (looking at you here, Daniel).
• 
  Wanda Pedersen

  This is an excellent book, but the wrong one for me at this particular time. Much too dense, while I am starting to slip into my “Summer Festival of Reading Fluff.” Lots of good information on the organization of the brain and how to work with your weaknesses, rather than against them.
  
  It is entirely possible that I will read this again (preferably during the winter, which I habitually think of as part of the “School Year”) and get much more out of it the second time.
  
  Not the book’s fault—just bad timing on my part.