“The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin
Humans are not the strongest species on Earth. We’re not the quickest, nor the biggest neither. But we’ve risen to the top of the food chain largely because of our cognitive capacity, and the ability of our brains to handle information.
And in this modern world in order to be an apex predator in an already abundance sea of information we need to be able to filter and organize all of the information that we receive, by distinguishing what’s important and what’s not, how and where to store these important information, and how to quickly recall them when needed.
As the author, Daniel Levitin, remarks in 2014 (the year of the first publication of this book), “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. The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of 5 hours of television each day, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images. That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour. And computer gaming? It consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet. Just trying to keep our own media and electronic files organized can be overwhelming.” Presumably the numbers are even far greater today, 11 years later.
This is where the book comes in handy. It provides the neurobiological explanations of how the brain functions, and the hacks and tricks on how to utilize these functions properly. In a way, this is some sort of a manual book for our brain.
Part 1 of the book discusses a long list of factors that influence our brain’s ability to process information. Such as the invention of language, the organization of life through towns and cities, commerce and the recording of transactions, the recording of knowledge (in scrolls, books, poetry, songs, etc), or the fascinating different ways that ancient societies organised time.
It also dives deep into how our brain perceive change or micro change. As Levitin remarks, “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. If your friend calls and her voice sounds normal, you don’t immediately think, “Oh, her voice is the same as always.” Again, this is the attentional filter doing its job, detecting change, not constancy.”
Another aspect that influences the brain to filter and record information is how important that message is to you. As Levitin explains, “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. If you’re driving, a billboard for your favorite music group might catch your eye (really, we should say catch your mind) while other billboards go ignored. If you’re in a crowded room, at a party for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attention, even if spoken from across the room. If someone says “fire” or “sex” or your own name, you’ll find that you’re suddenly following a conversation far away from where you’re standing, with no awareness of what those people were talking about before your attention was captured. The attentional filter is thus fairly sophisticated. It is capable of monitoring lots of different conversations as well as their semantic content, letting through only those that it thinks you will want to know about.”
And then there’s the importance of letting our mind wander to relax our brain and turn inward to recalibrate. As Levitin explains, “Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we now know, are a natural state of the brain. This accounts for why we feel so refreshed after it, and why vacations and naps can be so restorative. The tendency for this system to take over is so powerful that its discoverer, Marcus Raichle, named it the 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.”
Because here’s a simple truth, “the act of remembering something is a process of bringing back on line those neurons that were involved in the original experience.” And mind-wandering is beneficial to connect the many neurons of the brain. As Levitin explains, “the mind-wandering mode is a network, because it is not localized to a specific region of the brain. Rather, it ties together distinct populations of neurons that are distributed in the brain and connected to one another to form the equivalent of an electrical circuit or network. Thinking about how the brain works in terms of networks is a profound development in recent neuroscience.” Hence, the many random thoughts that often appear when you let your mind wander, or meditating, or moments just before you sleep.
Furthermore, part 1 of the book also addresses our brain’s ability to switch focus: “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. It’s a neural switchboard that directs your attention to that mosquito on your forehead and then allows you to go back to your post-lunchtime mind-wandering. In a 2010 paper, Vinod Menon and I showed that 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. Switching between two external objects involves the temporal-parietal junction.”
And then we get to part 2 and part 3, where Levitin shows us how to keep track of our lives in order to be productive, efficient, less stressed, and happy in a world increasingly filled with distractions. Which comes down to this: Externalize (write it down), categorize (between things to do now, or delegate, or do later), compartmentalize, protect your mind (plan a schedule to maximize effectiveness), plan a downtime (to recalibrate), have a “junk drawer” where you put all the things that hard to categorize, and so much more.
Indeed, the large majority of part 2 and part 3 of the book are more tips and tricks to live an organized life, in our home, in social settings, and in business. Which is a great premise on itself, but unfortunately (and ironically) they are written in such an inefficient way that they failed to reflect the main essence of the book. It is way too long at times, with examples that are often drifted too far away from the main points that he wants to make, and filled with too much informational gimmick that distracts us from the points.
That’s right, the book about thinking straight in the age of information overload is contributing to the information overload. Because it seems that Levitin is trying to get as much information as possible into his book, including topics that are a bit of a stretch for the main subject of organized minds: topics such as flow state, statistical bias, media partisanship, or parenting.
But still, when he’s drilling in the right place – so to speak – he strikes gold. Like one of the more eye catching brain organizing techniques, a method called satisficing. That is, not dwelling too much on the decision-making for small insignificant stuff (like deciding which dry cleaner to choose from, as long as they’re good enough), and using your mental energy for more important decision making (like choosing the right doctor for your disease). As Levitin remarks, “Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.”
Another gold strike is the description of how our memories are captured in neurons, and when we recall it, those same neurons will become active in the way they were during the original event. But our memory is highly susceptible to interruption and distortion, and most intriguingly, can be altered. As Levitin remarks, “When they are retrieved they are in a labile or vulnerable state and they need to be reconsolidated properly. If you’re sharing a memory with a friend and she says, “No, the car was green, not blue,” that information gets grafted onto the memory.” Which means, we can actually change the past!
Levitin then continues, “Memories in this labile state can also vanish if something interferes with their reconsolidation, like lack of sleep, distraction, trauma, or neurochemical changes in the brain.” Indeed, our current mood and environment when we receive the information can also influence our interpretation of the event, our beliefs about which events that actually occurred, and the emotional tone of the memory recall later on.
Moreover, in a lighter note, every now and then Levitin points out the amusing everyday stuff that are taken for granted today, which are actually designed to help us store information. For example in office doors, the side that meant to be pushed will normally have a flat plate while the side that meant to be pulled will have a handle on it. Or ever notice that scissors have 2 holes with different size? It is so that we instinctively know which hole meant for thumb and which other meant for the rest of the fingers. Not having to try to figure out how doors or scissors work, among many others, is contributing to the preservation of our mental energy that we can use for other more important stuffs.
All in all, this is a pretty useful book to help us understand the mechanism of our brain in filtering and receiving messages, then to organize them in the sea of abundance of information, so that we can retrieve them quickly when needed; which caters nicely to my mild OCD trait. It’s just that it could use a little de-cluttering, organizing, and re-editing, so that this almost 500 pages book can become an easier-to-digest, and more concise, 300+ pages book.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to daydream for a little bit and calibrate.
THE CHAOS THEORY 