The Organized Mind

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about the limitations of the mind, and how we can utilize the environment to make our minds more organized and more structured. It goes through a lot of different types of cognitive failures and tries to highlight in a good way how the mind works.

🎨 Impressions

Very interesting read, the amount of information we process, and the way we are biologically structured makes understanding and leveraging the mind much more important. We must understand the limitations of the mind, and make sure that those limitations are being diminished by the way we structure our lives.

One interesting insight was how organizations are evolved in such a way to represent how they are meant to function. If safety is paramount, lots of hierarchies, if nonlinear innovation is important then maybe a flatter structure?

Understanding how things such as lack of sleep and alcohol affect our mind makes it important to be aware of those things and how they affect you.

Another organization rule that I thought was interesting is having an unlabeled type of folder, for things you don't know how to label.

Maybe we should all take a page out of Marie Kondos's book and throughout all the useless shit.

Finally, the most important lesson from this book, the most fundamental principle of organization, the one that is most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is this: Shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

I think that it is an interesting read and that people who want to get better at understanding how they can unclog their minds would like it very much.

✍️ My Top Quotes

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.
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.
The dominant metaphor for the computer is based on a 1950s Mad Men–era strategy for organization: a desktop with folders on it, and files inside of those. Even the word computer is outdated now that most people don’t use their computer to compute anything at all—
it’s been estimated that there are over one million products in the United States today (based on SKUs, or stock-keeping units, those little bar codes on things we buy).
Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload. Although most of us have no trouble ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don’t automatically do this.
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, words every day. The world’s 21, television stations produce 85, 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
A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.
Five exabytes ( × 1018) of new data were produced in January 2012 alone—that’s 50, times the number of words in the entire Library of Congress.
Collectively, this is known as shadow work—it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to the customer. Each of us is doing the work of others and not getting paid for it. It is responsible for taking away a great deal of the leisure time we thought we would all have in the twenty-first century.
Our own term bugs is an informal and heterogeneous category combining ants, beetles, flies, spiders, aphids, caterpillars, grasshoppers, ticks, and a large number of living things that are biologically and taxonomically quite distinct.
One thing HSPs do over and over every day is active sorting, what emergency room nurses call triage. Triage comes from the French word trier, meaning “to sort, sift, or classify.”
To recap, there are four components in the human attentional system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attentional filter, and the attentional switch, which directs neural and metabolic resources among the mind-wandering, stay-on-task, or vigilance modes
The word souvenir, not coincidentally, comes from the French word for “to remember.”
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky said that the problem with making decisions is that we are often making them under conditions of uncertainty.
Women’s cortisol levels (the stress hormone) spike when confronted with such clutter (men’s, not so much).
Organization Rule 1: A mislabeled item or location is worse than an unlabeled item.
Organization Rule 2: If there is an existing standard, use it.
Organization Rule 3: Don’t keep what you can’t use.
“People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.” And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.
“Nothing is foolproof because fools are ingenious
Speed daters are lousy at assessing who wants to date them and who does not (so much for intuition).
Specifically, the more cognitive load one is experiencing, the more likely one is to make errors in judgment about the causes of an individual’s behavior.
Racism is a form of negative social judgment that arises from a combination of belief perseverance, out-group bias, categorization error, and faulty inductive reasoning.
If you’re interested in seeing what it’s like to have prefrontal cortex damage, there’s a simple, reversible way: Get drunk. Alcohol interferes with the ability of prefrontal cortex neurons to communicate with one another, by disrupting dopamine receptors and blocking a particular kind of neuron called an NMDA receptor, mimicking the damage we see in frontal lobe patients.
Don’t forget that the awareness of an unread e-mail 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.
This constant back-and-forth is one of the most metabolism-consuming things that our brain can do. We step out of time, out of the moment, and survey the big picture. We like what we see or we don’t, and then we go back to the task, either moving forward again, or backtracking to fix a conceptual or physical mistake.
The real job in supervising PhD students isn’t teaching them facts; it’s keeping them on track.
In particular, we now know that sleep plays a vital role in the consolidation of events of the previous few days, and therefore in the formation and protection of memories.
The first is unitization, the combining of discrete elements or chunks of an experience into a unified concept. For example, musicians and actors who are learning a new piece or scene might practice one phrase at a time; unitization during sleep binds these together into a seamless whole. The second kind of information processing we accomplish during sleep is assimilation. Here, the brain integrates new information into the existing network structure of other things you already knew. In learning new words, for example, your brain works unconsciously to construct sample sentences with them, turning them over and experimenting with how they fit into your preexisting knowledge. Any brain cells that used a lot of energy during the day show an increase of ATP (a neural signaling coenzyme) during sleep, and this has been associated with assimilation. The third process is abstraction, and this is where hidden rules are discovered and then entered into memory. If you learned English as a child, you learned certain rules about word formation such as “add s to the end of a word to make it plural” or “add ed to the end of a word to make it past tense.”
Most of the memory consolidation occurs in the first two hours of slow-wave, NREM sleep, and during the last 90 minutes of REM sleep in the morning. This is why drinking and drugs (including sleep medications) can interfere with memory, because that crucial first sleep cycle is compromised by intoxication.
When professional basketball players got ten hours of sleep a night, their performance improved dramatically: Free-throw and three-point shooting each improved by 9%.
Contrary to popular myth, the elderly do not need less sleep; they are just less able to sleep for eight hours at a stretch.
Sleepiness was responsible for 250, traffic accidents in 2009, and is one of the leading causes of friendly fire—soldiers mistakenly shooting people on their own side.
Sleep deprivation is estimated to cost U.S. businesses more than $ billion a year in absences, accidents, and lost productivity—for comparison, that’s roughly the same as the annual revenue of Apple Corporation.
Westward travel finds us having to delay our bedtime, which is not so difficult to do. Eastward travel finds us arriving in a city where it’s bedtime and we’re not yet tired. Traveling east is difficult even for people who do it all the time.
Once you’re on the plane, if you’re westbound, keep the overhead reading lamp on, even if it is your home bedtime. When you arrive in the western city, exercise lightly by taking a walk in the sun. That sunlight will delay the production of melatonin in your body. If you’re on an eastbound plane, wear eye shades to cover your eyes two hours or so before sunset in your destination city, to acclimate yourself to the new “dark” time.
Procrastination comes in two types. Some of us procrastinate in order to pursue restful activities—spending time in bed, watching TV—while others of us procrastinate certain difficult or unpleasant tasks in favor of those that are more fun or that yield an immediate reward.
The writer and polymath George Plimpton noted that successful people have paradoxically had many more failures than people whom most of us would consider to be, well, failures. If this sounds like double-talk or mumbo jumbo, the resolution of the paradox is that successful people (or people who eventually become successful) deal with failures and setbacks very differently from everyone else.
During flow, you experience freedom from worry about failure; you are aware of what needs to be done, but you don’t feel that you are doing it—the ego is not involved and falls away completely.
Flow is a chemically different state as well, involving a particular neurochemical soup that has not yet been identified. It appears there needs to be a balance of dopamine and noradrenaline, particularly as they are modulated in a brain region known as the striatum (seat of the attentional switch), serotonin (for freedom to access stream-of-consciousness associations), and adrenaline (to stay focused and energized).
Flow is not always good; it can be disruptive when it becomes an addiction, and it is socially disruptive if flow-ers withdraw from others and stay in their own cocoon.
The solution is to follow the five-minute rule. If there is something you can get done in five minutes or less, do it now. If you have twenty things that would only take five minute each, but you can spare only thirty minutes now, prioritize thTem and do the others later or tomorrow, or delegate them.
One thing that many successful people do for time management is to calculate how much their time is subjectively worth to them.
As a time-saver, cognitive psychologist Stephen Kosslyn recommends that if you are not the kind of person who overspends—that is, if you know you can live within your means—stop balancing your checkbook. Banks seldom make errors anymore, he notes, and the average size of the error is likely to be minuscule compared to the hours you’ll spend squaring every purchase.
Tell a twenty-year-old that he has only five years left to live and he tends to become more like a seventy-five-year-old—not particularly interested in new experiences, instead favoring spending time with family and friends and taking time for familiar pleasures.
Indeed, prisoners on death row tend to ask for familiar foods for their last meals: pizza, fried chicken, and burgers, not crêpes suzette or cassoulet de canard.
Being creative means allowing the nonlinear to intrude on the linear, and to exercise some control over the output.
Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” President Obama observed. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it.”
At that point, President Obama says, “you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make, you’ll wind up with a thirty to forty percent chance that it isn’t going to work.”
“In any sufficiently large organization, with an effective management system in place, there is going to be a pyramid shape with decision makers at every level. The only time I am brought in is when the only known solutions have a downside, like someone losing their job, or the company losing large sums of money. And usually the decision is already framed for me as two negatives. I’m the one who has to choose which of those two negatives we can live with.”
This error in reasoning is so pervasive that it has a name—the representativeness heuristic. It means that people or situations that appear to be representative of one thing effectively overpower the brain’s ability to reason, and cause us to ignore the statistical or base rate information.
“Doctors generate better knowledge of efficacy than of risk, and this skews decision-making.”
Take cardiac bypass surgery—there are 500, performed in the United States every year. What is the evidence that it is helpful? Randomized clinical trials show no survival benefit in most patients who had undergone the surgery. But surgeons were unconvinced because the logic of the procedure to them was justification enough.
Angioplasty went from zero to 100, procedures a year with no clinical trials—like bypass surgery, its popularity was based simply on the logic of the procedure, but clinical trials show no survival benefit. Some doctors tell their patients that angioplasty will extend their life expectancy by ten years, but for those with stable coronary disease, it has not been shown to extend life expectancy by even one day.
A potent example of the pitfalls in medical decision-making comes from the current state of prostate cancer treatments. An estimated 2. million men in the United States have prostate cancer, and 3% of men will die from it. That doesn’t rank it in the Top Ten causes of death, but it is the second leading cause of cancer death for men, after lung cancer. Nearly every urologist who delivers the news will recommend radical surgery to remove the prostate. And on first blush, it sounds reasonable—we see cancer, we cut it out. Several things make thinking
A potent example of the pitfalls in medical decision-making comes from the current state of prostate cancer treatments. An estimated 2. million men in the United States have prostate cancer, and 3% of men will die from it. That doesn’t rank it in the Top Ten causes of death, but it is the second leading cause of cancer death for men, after lung cancer. Nearly every urologist who delivers the news will recommend radical surgery to remove the prostate. And on first blush, it sounds reasonable—we see cancer, we cut it out.
“Surgeons are taught that ‘a chance to cut is a chance to cure,’” he says. “It’s part of the DNA of their culture. In the examples you’ve been giving me about cancer, with the odds and statistics all carefully analyzed, the science of treatment is in collision with the art of practicing medicine—and it is an art.”
“We don’t mention these complications to patients because they might be discouraged from getting the biopsy, which is a very important procedure for them to have.” This is the kind of paternalism that many of us dislike from doctors, and it also violates the core principle of informed consent.
“Every parent who has stayed up waiting for a teenage daughter who is late from a party will recognize the feeling. You may know that there is really (almost) nothing to worry about, but you cannot help images of disaster from coming to mind.”
In the two months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, so many people in the United States were afraid to fly that they took to their cars for trips they otherwise would have taken by plane. There were no more airplane crashes in October or November, but 2, more people died in automobile crashes during that period than usually do. These people focused on the numerator (four horrible airplane crashes, 246 people aboard them) but not the denominator (ten million safe commercial flights per year in the United States).
Dietary supplements now account for 20% of drug-related liver injuries, tripling the rate from ten years ago.
One of Kahneman and Tversky’s many great insights was that both gains and losses are nonlinear, meaning that the same amount of gain (or loss) does not cause equal happiness (or sadness)—
Nuclear power plants, for example, tend to have very tall vertical structures because supervision is extremely important—even a small error can result in a disaster.
At McGill University, the dean of science undertook an initiative several years ago called STARS (Science Talks About Research for Staff). These were lunchtime talks by professors in the science department who described their research to the general staff: secretaries, bookkeepers, technicians, and the custodial staff. These jobs tend to be very far removed from the actual science. The initiative was successful by any measure—the staff gained an understanding of the larger context of what they were doing. A bookkeeper realized she wasn’t just balancing the books for any old research lab but for one that was on the cusp of curing a major disorder.
But one could argue that William Shakespeare was immensely productive. Before dying at the age of fifty-two, he composed thirty-eight plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. Most of his works were produced in a twenty-four-year period of intense productivity.
Greater productivity appears to be the reward. Other factors contribute to productivity, such as being an early riser: Studies have shown that early birds tend to be happier, more conscientious and productive, than night owls
“For deadlines, you might need to keep a tickler file. For example, as soon as you learn about any kind of deadline, you need to talk to the boss about it and see how long they think they’ll need. Then you put a tickler on the calendar on the day they’re supposed to start working on it.”
You may want to turn off all your e-mail accounts during a productivity hour except for the one your assistant and your boss use to reach you right away.
Studies have found that productivity goes up when the number of hours per week of work goes down, strongly suggesting that adequate leisure and refueling time pays off for employers and for workers.
This may remind you of the problem with online dating sites mentioned in Chapter 4—that more information is not always better and, in that context, has been found to lead to poorer selectivity and poorer choices as online daters become overwhelmed by irrelevant information and suffer both cognitive overload and decision fatigue.
He said that a string is random if there is no way to describe it or represent it in an abbreviated form. By his definition, number 1 above is not random because we can come up with a scheme (computer scientists call this an algorithm) to represent it in brief.
Kolmogorov complexity theory encapsulates it this way: Something is random when you cannot explain how to derive a sequence using any fewer than the number of elements in the sequence itself.
And, according to Kolmogorov complexity theory, if the org chart can be described by a small number of simple rules, the company is said to be highly structured.
It seems obvious to us, but in a company with 250, employees, big ideas can get lost.
This reduces the Shannon information content and reduces Kolmogorov complexity.
Why do psychiatrists work a fifty-minute hour? They use that extra ten minutes to write down what happened. Rather than scheduling meetings back-to-back, experts advise giving yourself ten minutes to write down what happened, to make notes about what needs to be done, and other comments that will orient you to this project when you next start to work on it.
A study by Microsoft engineers found that 25% of all servers suffer a disk failure within two years. These are reasons to back up your data—many IT experts have an aphorism, “It’s not if your hard drive will fail—it’s when.”
“Social media isn’t journalism, it’s information. Journalism is what you do with it.”
Because the industry is unregulated, figures are hard to come by, but The Economist estimates that it is a $ billion business worldwide. Forty percent of Americans report using alternative medicines and therapies;
Pseudoscience often uses the terminology of science and observation but does not use the full rigor of controlled experiments and falsifiable hypotheses.
As I’ve emphasized throughout this book, the most fundamental principle of organization, the one that is most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is this: Shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.
If we can take some or all of the process out of our brains and put it into the physical world, we are less likely to make mistakes. But the organized mind enables you to do much more than merely avoid mistakes. It enables you to do things and go places you might not otherwise imagine. Externalizing information doesn’t always involve writing it down or encoding it in some external medium.
“There is a whiff of nostalgia in this sort of warning, along with an undeniable truth: that in the pursuit of knowledge, slower can be better.
As with Einstein, the key to the NCI initiative is that nonlinear, creative thinking 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.