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

Levitin, Daniel J.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0147517214 ISBN 13: 9780147517210

Casa editrice: Dutton, 2015

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Praise for THE ORGANIZED MIND

 "[An] impressively wide-ranging and thoughtful work..."The Organized Mind" is an organized book, but it also rewards dipping in at any point, for there are fascinating facts and examples throughout." - The Wall Street Journal

"From how not to lose your keys to how to decide when the risks of surgery are worth it, Levitin focuses on smart ways to process the constant flow of information the brain must deal with." - The Washington Post

"[M]ore than a self-help book...Levitin's insights into sleep, time, socializing and decision-making are profound." - San Jose Mercury News

"[An] ingenious combination of neuroscience and self-help." - Kirkus

“Dan Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The Organized Mind is smart, important, and as always, exquisitely written.” —Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University, author of Stumbling on Happiness
 
“Combine genuine knowledge and scholarship with plain common sense and what do you get? A book that is really worth reading: Dan Levitin’s The Organized Mind.” —The Honorable George P. Shultz, 60th U. S. Secretary of State
 
“There are surprising parallels between Levitin’s work and mine. Today’s environment in war, business, and just about everything else has increased in speed and complexity to the point where the essential quality required for success is adaptability. The Organized Mind provides the latest neuroscience on cognitive adaptability and how to apply it to so that leaders can excel. It is a tremendous achievement, and a must read for leaders at every level.” —General Stanley McChrystal, U. S. Army (ret.)
 
“A brilliant and engaging book about the science of thinking. The Organized Mind provides the tools that we all need to understand and manage the deluge of information that assaults us every day.” —Jerome Groopman, MD and Pamela Hartzband, MD, Harvard Medical School, authors of Your Medical Mind
 
“A profound piece of work. Levitin documents the mismatch between our narrow bandwidth hunter-gatherer minds and the multitasking chaos of today’s world. He even shows us how to stay sane in environments that are constantly tempting us to stretch ourselves hopelessly thin.” —Philip E. Tetlock, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
 
 “An erudite synthesis of Levitin’s own contributions, recent advances in our understanding of attention and memory, and a deep perspective on the ways the human mind works.” —Stanley Prusiner, M.D. Nobel Laureate, director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, University of California, San Francisco
 
“Daniel Levitin’s book follows in the ancient tradition of knowledge as a guide to a better life.  Discover the creative power of organized thought, whether you are a writer or a scientist, a disorganized mess or a super robot seeking new frontiers of effectiveness.” —Eric Kaplan, co-executive producer and writer, The Big Bang Theory, writer, The Simpsons and Flight of the Conchords

“An eloquent spokesperson for our field. Levitin writes about the brain with an ease and familiarity that is captivating.” —The late David Hubel, Nobel Laureate in honor of discoveries concerning information processing in the human visual system
 
“Fascinating... Combing neuroscience and cognitive psychology, the Organized Mind underscores the critical importance of individuals taking charge of their own attentional and memory systems so they can lead optimally productive and satisfying lives. Invaluable insights are offered with regard to organizing our homes, social world, time, decision-making, and business world.” —Nadine J. Kaslow, Ph.D., president of the American Psychological Association and professor and vice chair, Emory University School of Medicine
 
 “This book is far more than tips on how to think clearly and manage information overload. It is also a tour through some of the most exciting aspects of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science, with a specific emphasis on implications for everyday life. Anyone who has ever wondered about the mind will find much that is fascinating and useful in these pages.” —Stephen Kosslyn, dean, Minerva Schools of Arts and Sciences at the Keck Graduate Institute, former chair, department of psychology, Harvard University
 
“Running a major PBS television series on tight budgets and turnarounds requires organization and efficiency and sometimes a little magic too. Levitin’s behind the curtain peek at the brain’s inner workings of decision-making provides that extra bit of magic—and would make a fascinating documentary in and of itself!” —Pamela Hogan, Emmy award-winning Producer for PBS
 
“In the age of TMI, we all need better organized minds.  With characteristically clear prose and scientific insight, Dan Levitin gives us tips on how to get or mental closets in order.  I really enjoyed this book.” —Joseph LeDoux, Center for Neural Science, New York University
 
“Dan Levitin has done it again.  Having explained music and the brain, now he shows us the best, most effective ways to organize the rest of our life by giving us key insights into how the brain works.  His style is so appealing, his knowledge so deep and practical, that we learn, from The Organized Mind, not only why we do what we do, but how, potentially, we can run our lives more smoothly, efficiently, and even happily.”  —Cathy N. Davidson, director, The Futures Initiative, City University of New York

"Using the latest information on the brain and how it works, Levitin presents a series of ideas on how to organize one's life and business.  Essential reading for anyone who aspires to be highly effective.  Or even find their keys!" —David Eidelman, MD, dean of the McGill University Medical School

 “The Organized Mind reads like a movie— not the dry tome you might expect. It’s an exciting tour through the science of productivity and how to best manage your thinking to get things done—and be more creative at the same time." — David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

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INTRODUCTION

Information and Conscientious Organization

We humans have a long history of pursuing neural enhancement—ways to improve the brains that evolution gave us. We train them to become more dependable and efficient allies in helping us to achieve our goals. Law schools, business schools, and medical schools, music conservatories and athletic programs, all strive to harness the latent power of the human brain to deliver ever higher levels of achievement, to provide an edge in a world that is increasingly competitive. Through the sheer force of human ingenuity, we have devised systems to free our brains of clutter, to help us keep track of details that we can’t trust ourselves to remember. All of these and other innovations are designed either to improve the brain we have, or to off-load some of its functions to external sources.

One of the biggest advances in neural enhancement occurred only 5,000 years ago, when humans discovered a game-changing way to increase the capacity of the brain’s memory and indexing system. The invention of written language has long been celebrated as a breakthrough, but relatively little has been made of what exactly were the first things humans wrote—simple recipes, sales receipts, and business inventories mostly. It was around 3000 BCE that our ancestors began to trade nomadic lifestyles for urban ones, setting up increasingly large cities and centers of commerce. The increased trade in these cities put a strain on individual merchants’ memories and so early writing became an important component of recording business transactions. Poetry, histories, war tactics, and instructions for building complex construction projects came later.

Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain; the hard part is finding it and pulling it out again. Sometimes the information that comes out is incomplete, distorted, or misleading. Vivid stories that address a very limited and unlikely set of circumstances often pop to mind and overwhelm statistical information based on a large number of observations that would be far more accurate in helping us to make sound decisions about medical treatments, investments, or the trustworthiness of people in our social world. This fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.

It’s helpful to understand that our modes of thinking and decision-making evolved over the tens of thousands of years that humans lived as hunter-gatherers. Our genes haven’t fully caught up with the demands of modern civilization, but fortunately human knowledge has—we now better understand how to overcome evolutionary limitations. This is the story of how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of civilization. It’s also the story of how the most successful members of society—from successful artists, athletes, and warriors, to business executives and highly credentialed professionals—have learned to maximize their creativity, and efficiency, by organizing their lives so that they spend less time on the mundane, and more time on the inspiring, comforting, and rewarding things in life.

Cognitive psychologists have provided mountains of evidence over the last twenty years that memory is unreliable. And to make matters worse, we show staggering overconfidence in many recollections that are false. It’s not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don’t even know we’re remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true.

The first humans who figured out how to write things down around 5,000 years ago were in essence trying to increase the capacity of their hippocampus, part of the brain’s memory system. They effectively extended the natural limits of human memory by preserving some of their memories on clay tablets and cave walls, and later, papyrus and parchment. Later, we developed other mechanisms—such as calendars, filing cabinets, computers, and smartphones—to help us organize and store the information we’ve written down. When our computer or smartphone starts to run slowly, we might buy a larger memory card. That memory is both a metaphor and a physical reality. We are off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer.

These external memory mechanisms are generally of two types, either following the brain’s own organizational system or reinventing it, sometimes overcoming its limitations. Knowing which is which can enhance the way we use these systems, and so improve our ability to cope with information overload.

Once memories became externalized with written language, the writer’s brain and attentional system were freed up to focus on something else. But immediately with those first written words came the problems of storage, indexing, and accessing: Where should the writing be stored so that it (and the information it contains) won’t get lost? If the written message is itself a reminder, a kind of Stone Age “To Do” list, the writer needs to remember to look at it and where she put it.

Suppose the writing contains information about edible plants. Maybe it was written at the morbid scene of watching a favorite uncle die from eating a poisonous berry—wanting to preserve information about what that plant looks like and how to distinguish it from a nutritious plant that is similar in appearance. The indexing problem is that there are several possibilities about where you store this report, based on your needs: It could be stored with other writings about plants, or with writings about family history, or with writings about cooking, or with writings about how to poison an enemy.

Here we come upon two of the most compelling properties of the human brain and its design: richness and associative access. Richness refers to the theory that a large number of the things you’ve ever thought or experienced are still in there, somewhere. Associative access means that your thoughts can be accessed in a number of different ways by semantic or perceptual associations—memories can be triggered by related words, by category names, by a smell, an old song or photograph, or even seemingly random neural firings that bring them up to consciousness.

Being able to access any memory regardless of where it is stored is what computer scientists call random access. DVDs and hard drives work this way; videotapes do not. You can jump to any spot in a movie on a DVD or hard drive by “pointing” at it. But to get to a particular point in a videotape, you need to go through every previous point first (sequential access). Our ability to randomly access our memory from multiple cues is especially powerful. Computer scientists call it relational memory. You may have heard of relational databases—that’s effectively what human memory is. (This is revisited in Chapter 3.)

Having relational memory means that if I want to get you to think of a fire truck, I can induce the memory in many different ways. I might make the sound of a siren, or give you a verbal description (“a large red truck with ladders on the side that typically responds to a certain kind of emergency”). I might try to trigger the concept by an association game, by asking you to name as many red things as you can in one minute (most people come to “fire truck” in this game), or to name as many emergency vehicles as you can. All of these things and more are attributes of the fire truck: its redness, its emergency vehicle-ness, its siren, its size and shape, the fact that uniformed men and women are usually found riding both in and on it, that it is one of only a small subset of motor vehicles that carries a ladder around.

If you just started thinking, at the end of that last sentence, what other vehicles carry ladders (for example, telephone company repair trucks or the vans belonging to window installers, roofers, and chimney sweeps), then you have come upon an important point: We can categorize objects in many, and often seemingly infinite, ways. And any one of those cues has its own route to the neural node that represents fire truck in your brain.

The concept of fire truck is represented in the picture (below) by a circle in the center—a node corresponding to a cluster of neurons in the brain. That neuronal cluster is connected to other neuronal clusters that represent the different features or properties of fire truck. In the drawing, other concepts that are most closely associated with a fire truck, and are retrieved from memory more quickly, are shown closer to the fire truck node. (In the brain, they may not actually be physically closer, but the neural connections are stronger, allowing for easier retrieval.) Thus, the node containing the fact that a fire truck is red is closer than the one that says it sometimes has a separate steering wheel in the back.

In addition to neural networks in the brain that represent attributes of things, those attributes are also connected associatively to other things. A fire truck is red, but we can think of many other things that are: cherries, tomatoes, apples, blood, roses, parts of the American flag, and Sun-Maid raisin boxes, for example. Did you ever wonder why, if someone asks you to name a bunch of red things, you can do it so quickly? It’s because by concentrating on the thought red, represented here by a neural node, you’re sending electrochemical activation through the network and down the branches to everything else in your brain that connects to it. Below, I’ve overlaid additional information that resides in a typical neural network that begins with fire truck—nodes for other things that are red, for other things that have a siren, and so forth.

Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of activations can cause competition among different nodes, leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get through to consciousness, and you end up with nothing.

The ancient Greeks sought to improve memory through brain training methods such as memory palaces and the method of loci. At the same time, they and the Egyptians became experts at externalizing information, inventing the modern library, a grand repository for externalized knowledge. We don’t know why these simultaneous explosions of intellectual activity occurred when they did (perhaps daily human experience had hit a certain level of complexity). But the human need to organize our lives, our environment, even our thoughts, remains strong. This need isn’t simply learned, it is a biological imperative—animals organize their environments instinctively. Most mammals are biologically programmed to put their digestive waste away from where they eat and sleep. Dogs have been known to collect their toys and put them in baskets; ants carry off dead members of the colony to burial grounds; certain birds and rodents create symmetrically organized barriers around their nests in order to more easily detect intruders.

A key to understanding the organized mind is to recognize that on its own, it doesn’t organize things the way you might want it to. It comes preconfigured, and although it has enormous flexibility, it is built on a system that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to deal with different kinds and different amounts of information than we have today. To be more specific: The brain isn’t organized the way you might set up your home office or bathroom medicine cabinet. You can’t just put things anywhere you want to. The evolved architecture of the brain is haphazard and disjointed, and incorporates multiple systems, each of which has a mind of its own (so to speak). Evolution doesn’t design things and it doesn’t build systems—it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit (and if a better way comes along, it will adopt that). There is no overarching, grand planner engineering the systems so that they work harmoniously together. The brain is more like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.

Consider this, then, as an analogy: You have an old house and everything is a bit outdated, but you’re satisfied. You add a room air conditioner during one particularly hot summer. A few years later, when you have more money, you decide to add a central air-conditioning system. But you don’t remove that room unit in the bedroom—why would you? It might come in handy and it’s already there, bolted to the wall. Then a few years later, you have a catastrophic plumbing problem—pipes burst in the walls. The plumbers need to break open the walls and run new pipes, but your central air-conditioning system is now in the way, where some of their pipes would ideally go. So they run the pipes through the attic, the long way around. This works fine until one particularly cold winter when your uninsulated attic causes your pipes to freeze. These pipes wouldn’t have frozen if you had run them through the walls, which you couldn’t do because of the central air-conditioning. If you had planned all this from the start, you would have done things differently, but you didn’t—you added things one thing at a time, as and when you needed them.

Evolution has built our brain in much the same way. Of course, evolution has no will, no plan. Evolution didn’t decide to give you memory for where you put things. Your place memory system came about gradually, through the processes of descent with modification and natural selection, and it evolved separately from your memory for facts and figures. The two systems might come to work together through further evolutionary processes, but they are not necessarily going to do so, and in some cases, they may be in conflict with each other.

It might be helpful to learn how our brain organizes information so that we can use what we have, rather than fight against it. It is built as a hodgepodge of different systems, each one solving a particular adaptive problem. Occasionally they work together, occasionally they’re in conflict, and occasionally they aren’t even talking to one another. Two of the key ways that we can control and improve the process are to pay special attention to the way we enter information into our memory—encoding—and the way we pull it out—retrieval. This will be unpacked in Chapters 2 and 3.

The need for taking charge of our attentional and memory systems has never been greater. Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumor, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Dutton
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0147517214
• ISBN 13: 9780147517210
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 528