Modern life presents us with too much stuff and too much information to
deal with. In The Organized Mind, psychologist
Daniel
J. Levitin explains how we can work with our mind, instead of against it,
to handle information and make better decisions.
Attention
is the critical resources for taking in information, making good decisions, and
forming memories. The difficulty is that we only have so much attention to go
around. Our attentional systems work to make us unconsciously ignore many of
the signals that come our way; we would be overwhelmed if they did not. Our
built in systems pay attention to change or to things that seem important. Our
natural state is to have a wandering mind, broadly attentive to the
environment, screening out the stable and safe, occasionally zooming in on
something novel or critical.
We can also use the executive functions of our mind to focus attention
where we want it. This can consume a lot of energy, but we can do it very
effectively, sometimes focusing to the point where we lose track over
everything else.
Both forms of attention have their strengths and limitations. In
addition, it is costly to our attention bank to switch between modes or to
switch focus from one subject to another. The load of information that we have
to deal with can exhaust our attentional system, leading to inattention, poor
memory, and bad decisions.
Levitin offers solutions to alleviate these problems and work with the
strengths of our brains. The primary suggestion is to offload as much
information as possible to the environment. The less we have to remember, and
the fewer minor decisions we have to make, the better off we’ll be. Highly
successful people use systems of habits, calendars, filing, labels, and
standards to minimize the amount of information they have to carry in their
memories. It is often not so important to know something as it is to be able to
find it when you need it.
A related concept is to use categories and chunk up information. Our
minds do this naturally. For instance, we typically don’t remember a telephone
number as seven digits, but as two chunks of digits. We can apply a chunking
strategy by breaking large jobs into doable tasks, or be grouping related tasks
together. We can create scenes or stories in our mind (we do it anyway) to
connect a string of events. Sleep seems to be important our natural chunking
process, consolidating memories, connecting new information to old, and
formulating new concepts.
Levitin presents many tools to organize information and things to make
it easier on our brains. In my opinion, one of the most helpful tools is the fourfold
table. This is a simple method to organize statistical
information and assess the probabilities
of certain outcomes. We have horrible intuition for understanding probabilities
and assessing risks. Even people trained in statistics typically get
probabilities wrong when they guess. The fourfold table, which Levitin
describes in some detail with examples, allows one to break down the numbers and
evaluate the most relevant probabilities.
The Organized Mind is not a how-to
manual, though it has many strategies for organizing based on how the brain
works. Levitin discusses the structure and function of parts of the brain, but
is not excessively technical. A reader could skim these sections without too
much loss. A reader could also focus on a particular aspect of organizing (business,
time, and even social life) based on the way the book is organized, though the
first few chapters have a lot of information that is background for the other
sections.
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