The Organized Mind
The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up. But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time. With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
18mentions
8people
2016–2026years
78% recommend22% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Here are a few books that can help you improve your cognitive skills and keep your brain sharp:
1. "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer - This book is about the science of memory and how to improve your memory through techniques like memory palaces and mnemonic devices.
2. "The Organized Mind" by Daniel Levitin - This book is about how to manage information overload and stay organized in the digital age. It covers topics like time management, decision making, and multitasking.
3. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman - This book is about the psychology of decision making and how our minds can sometimes lead us astray. It covers topics like cognitive biases, heuristics, and the role of emotions in decision making.
4. "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg - This book is about the science of habits and how they can be changed to improve our lives. It covers topics like how habits are formed, why they are hard to break, and how to create new habits.
5. "Solve for Happy" by Mo Gawdat - This book is about how to find lasting happiness and fulfillment in life. It covers topics like the science of happiness, the role of the mind in happiness, and how to overcome negative thoughts and emotions.
- This article, like other things I've read in books like "The Organized Mind", or the class "Learning How to Learn" is that learning for adults is usually difficult not because of reduced learning capacity, but instead individual behaviors, emotional regulation, and culture.
Dr. Levetin suggests that it's mostly around how much frustration you can handle, and how much time you think you have left vs. the amount of value you'll get from what you are learning. Procrastination, a great killer of self-education, is primarily driven by low emotional intelligence/regulation.
This is exactly what I get from this article again: the issue is not brain plasticity in learning, but the willingness to be frustrated, a desire to learn new things (we can't all be Paul Erdos) and the time to learn.
- Nassim Taleb's books (Black swan, Antifragile, Fooled by Randomnesss)
Thinking Fast and Slow
The Organized Mind
The Vital Question by Nick Lane.
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
- I recently read "The Organized Mind". I didn't expect it to be a book on ethics, but it certainly did impact me that way, and caused me to alter an enormous number of faulty mental behaviors, and allowed me to see abuse in language.
> "Oh look at those rednecks who voted for Trump, why can't they get a college education."
This right here is an example of why it's so easy. Part of what I'm reading there is fundamental attribution error. A person, anywhere right now, that can't get a college education in the US is dealing with a lot of headwind. Our education system is punitive, starting with an A and stripping you of points all the way through, causing undue stress, knowing that if you fail, you probably won't have the money to move forward, and will have great difficulty. Rich people get a free pass on this. Put a system like this together and the reason that people can't get educations is situational, not dispositional. We as a society must do better.
I mentioned miscategorization already, which is something that our brains naturally do when seeing people different from us, and requires intentional mental unbundling to see all humans as the same category. This is why racism is so common as well; without intentional work, humans will find categories by which to judge outsiders.
Our social media breaks human relationships because far too many interactions are decided publicly, through shame, rather than through communication. An enormous emotional abuse crisis in the US has now reached the highest levels of society, both private and public, and I certainly put enormous amounts of blame not on the companies that make social media sites, but because our brains are simply not well-tasked to deal with it. Further, the end of comprehensive mental health, particularly CBT and emotional withholding and the damages that they cause so many people and relationships.
I have a strong feeling that in the coming decade, there will be studies in cognitive psychology demonstrating the connection between stock markets and wealth and the base level fear/reward circuitry of the brain, delaying and reducing ethical and social cognition. Causing a focus on economic power rather than social conformity, and thus damaging society.
Regardless, I apologize for blathering, I think about this stuff a lot.
- I just take handwritten notes, then convert them into carefully designed and tagged cards in Anki. Even if I forget something, searching my Anki deck will usually not just tell me the information, but what book it came from, and often which page. I'm pretty diligent about careful note collation. I've definitely gotten better since I read "The Organized Mind", a book which was so enlightening for my persona that I built more than 1000 cards to remember as many of its concepts as I could.
Regardless, I'm reading my previous comment and should admit that I'm quite intense about efficiency in learning. Less so about money. I've spent a lot of time tutoring, making this an important subject to me and I get.... emotional. I apologize if my original comment seems rude. It certainly feels that way to me.
- I have the same system going, and i started it right after reading The Organized Mind also. What a great book! - that never really gets hyped up.
