The organized mind - Daniel Levitin

• The decision making network in our brain doesn't prioritize.
• Inattentional blindness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
• We are not the first generation of humans to be complaining about too much information.
• Switching attentions comes with a high cost.
• We are prone to cognitive illusions when we try to make decisions.
• Categorization systems optimize the ease of conception and the importance of being able to communicate about those systems.
• Minimize complexity and maximize ease of communication.
• Classifications aid in the organization and communication of complex knowledge.
• Functional categories: function in our lives.
• The human brain has a strong cognitive propensity toward order.
• Some birds and rodents create boundaries around their nests, typically out of rock or leaves, that are ordered; if the order is disturbed, they know that an intruder has come by.
• Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus distracting knowledge. How do they do it?
• After you have prioritized and you start working, knowing what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.
• The mind-wandering mode works in opposition to the central executive mode.
• This is where the attentional network comes in; the attention filter is constantly monitoring the environment for anything that might be important.
• To recap, were 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 mode.
• The remedy is to practice mindfulness and attentiveness, to train ourselves to a Zen-like focus of living in the moment, of paying attention whenever we put things down or put things away.
• Each of our thoughts, perceptions, and experiences has a unique neural correlate.
• The more we can externalize memory through physical records out-there-in-the-world, the less we must rely on our overconfident, under precise memory.
• This ability to recognize diversity and organize it into categories is a biological reality that is essential to the organized human mind.
• Gross of fine appearance.
• A feature of all categorization processes used by the human brain, including appearance-based categorization, is that they are expandable and flexible, subject to multiple levels of resolution or graininess.
• Functional equivalence.
• Particular situations.
• Your wallet, childhood photographs, cash, jewellery, and the family dog.
• "Things you might take out of your house in case of a fire"
• Of course we also cross-classify, placing things in more than one category.
• The former is based on a taxonomic classification, the latter on a functional category.
• The importance of categorization in our lives today.
• Our ability to use and create categories on the spot is a form of cognitive economy.
• Functional categories in the brain can have either hard (sharply defined) or fuzzy boundaries.
• Category boundaries are flexible, malleable, and context-dependent.
• In the age of information overload, not to mention decision overload, we need systems outside our heads to help us.
• Every time any thought intrudes on what you're doing, you write it down. This kind of note-taking is called "clearing the mind".
• Your mind will remind you of all things when you can do nothing about them, and merely thinking about your concerns does not at all equate to making any progress on them.
• Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind. That trusted system is to write it down.
• To do list: Do it - Delegate it - Defer it - Drop it.
• You might say categorizing and externalizing our memory enables us to balance the yin of our wandering thoughts with the yang of our focused execution.

PART TWO

• The task of organizational systems is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort.
• One of the big rules in not losing things is the rule of the designated place.
• Use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.
• The categories you create need to reflect how you use and interact with your possessions. That is, the categories have to be meaningful to you.
• A mislabelled item or location is worse than an unlabelled item.
• If there is an existing standard, use it.
• Don't keep what you can't use.
• Students who studied for an exam in the room they later took it in did better than students who studied somewhere else.
• If you are working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each.
• Hierarchically organized files and folders have the big advantage that you can browse them to rediscover files you had forgotten about. This externalizes the memory from your brain to the computer.
• When people think they're multi-tasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there is a cognitive cost in doing so.
• Multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
• Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
• And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time.
• By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose.
• But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priorities activities with e-mail.
• Most people under the age of thirty think e-mail as an outdated mode of communication used only by "old people".
• Many people under twenty now see Facebook as a medium fo the older generation.
• You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out "More! More! Give me more!"
• Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.
• Experts recommend that you do e-mail only two or three times a day.
• Attention is a very effective way of entering something into memory.
• Many successful people report that they experience mental benefits from organizing or reorganizing their closets or drawers when they are stressed.
• Amazon used a a mathematical algorithm called collaborative filtering. This is a technique by which correlations or co-occurrences of behaviours are tracked and then used to make recommendations.
• Cognitive neuroscience says we should externalize information in order to clear the mind.
• Social networking provides breadth but rarely depth.
• People in a relationship experience better health, recover from illnesses more quickly, and live longer.
• As you now know, all that rapid switching between central executive calculating and dreamy mind-wandering depletes neural resources, leading us to make poor decisions.
• With one-third of people who get married meeting online; 81% lie about their height, weight or age. Men tend to lie about height, women about weight. Both lie about their age.
• If being transparent strengthens the social ties that make life worth living, and enables others to forgive our shortcomings, why not do it more often?
• One way of helping to keep large numbers of humans living in close proximity is through the use of non confrontational speech, or indirect speech acts.
• Rules of conversation
• Quantity. make your contribution to the conversation as informative as required. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required
• Quality. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Manner. Avoid obscurity of expression (don't use words that your intended hearer doesn't know). Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary proximity). Be orderly.
• Relation. Make your contribution relevant.
• Oxytocin that has been called by the popular press the love hormone. Oxytocin-the same social-affiliative hormone that increases trust and social cooperation among humans.
• There's a well-established finding that people who receive social support during illness (simple caring and nurturing) recover more fully and more quickly.
• The "invisibility" problem: the inner thoughts of others are invisible to us.
• This cognitive illusion is so powerful it has a name: the fundamental attribution error. An additional part of the fundamental attribution error is that we fail to appreciate that the roles of people are forced to play in certain situations constrain their behaviour.
• In cases of in-group/out-group bias, each group thinks of the other as homogeneous and monolithic, and each group views itself as variegated and complex.
• This tendency to not get involved is driven by three powerful, interrelated psychological principles. One is the strong desire to conform to other's behaviour in the hope that it will allow us to gain acceptance within our social group, to be seen as cooperative and agreeable. The second is social comparison-we tend to examine our behaviour in terms of others. The third force pushing us toward inaction is diffusion of responsibility.
• One measure of the success of a society is how engaged its citizens are in contributing to the common good.
• The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that helps us to organize time and engage in planning, to maintain attention and stick with a task once we've started it.
• A few species don't age at all and so are technically immortal. These include some species of jellyfish, flatworms (planaria), and hydra.
• 150 000 people die in the world each day, two-thirds die from age-related causes, and this number can reach 90% in peaceful industrialized nations.
• We have a more highly developed prefrontal cortex than any other species. It's the seat of many behaviours that we consider distinctly human: logic, analysis, problem solving, exercising good judgment, planning for the future, and decision-making.
• Eat a donut instead of sticking to your diet? That's your prefrontal cortex not doing the job.
• It may be obvious, but the brain coordinates a large share of the body's housekeeping and timekeeping functions- regulating heart rate and blood pressure, signalling when it's time to sleep and wake up, letting us know when we're hungry or full, and maintaining body temperature even as the outside temperature changes. This coordination takes place in the so-called reptilian brain.
• The entire brain weighs 1,4 kg and so is only a small percentage of an adult's total body weight, typically 2%. But it consumes 20% of all the energy the body uses. Why? The perhaps oversimplified answer is that time is energy.
• It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. This means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing.
• The principle applies at all scales: if you have something big you want to get done, break up into chunks-meaningful, implementable, doable chunks. It makes time management much easier.
• From boss down to worker down to detail worker and back again, is a shifting of the attentional set and it comes with the metabolic costs of multitasking.
• The research says that if you have chores to do, put similar chores together.
• Organizing our mental resources efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain attentional set for an extended period. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy.
• Reaching our goals efficiently requires the ability to selectively focus on those features of a task that are most relevant to its completion, while successfully ignoring other features or stimuli in the environment that are competing for attention.
• Items that are processed at a deeper level, with more active involvement by us, tend to become more strongly encoded in memory.
• We now know that sleep plays a vital role in the consolidation of the events of the previous few days, and therefore in the formation and protection of memories.
• Disrupted sleep even two or three days after an experience can disrupt your memory of it months or years later.
• A night of sleep more than doubles the likelihood that you'll solve a problem requiring insight.
• If you struggle with the language for an hour or more during the day, investing your focus, energy, and emotions in it, then it will be ripe for replay and elaboration during your sleep.
• A normal sleep cycle lasts about 90-100 minutes.
• Sleep deprivation leads to memory loss.
• Parts of the brain sleep while others do not. If you've ever had a brain freeze, momentarily unable to remember something obvious, it may well be that part of your brain is taking a nap. Or it could just be that you're thinking about too many things at once, having overloaded your attentional system.
• Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function, and mood regulation.
• There is scientific evidence that the bimodal sleep-plus-nap regime is healthier and promotes greater life satisfaction, efficiency, and performance.
• Going to bed just one hour late one night, or sleeping in for an hour or two just one morning, can affect your productivity, immune function, and mood significantly for several days after the irregularity.
• In the short run, the consistency of your cycle is more important than the amount of sleep.
• Naps: for many people, five or ten minutes is enough.
• Do the most unpleasant task first thing in the morning.
• Action and awareness merge.
• Flow states occur more regularly for those who are experts or who have invested a great deal of time to train in a given domain.
• With no need to exercise self-control to stay focused, we free neutral resources to task at hand.
• Serotonin: for freedom to access stream-of-consciousness associations
• Adrenaline: to stay focused and energized.
• By combining his exceptional self-discipline and focus with a world in which distractions have been dramatically reduced, he can be more easily become absorbed in creative pursuits.
• The fundamental principle of neuroscience: the brain is a giant change detector.
• There is an old saying that if you really need to get something done, give it to a busy person.
• A large part of efficient time management revolves around avoiding distractions.
• Realizing when a diversion has got out of control is one of the great challenges of life.
• The social networking addiction loop, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, e-mail, texting, or whatever new things that will be adopted in the coming years, sends chemicals through the brain's pleasure center that are genuinely, physiologically addicting. The greatest life satisfaction comes from completing projects that required sustained focus and energy. It seems unlikely that anyone will look back at their lives with pride and say with satisfaction that they managed to send an extra thousand text messages or check social network updates a few hundred extra times while they were working.
• Live in the moment and attend one hundred percent to the person in the front of him.
• Exercise has also been shown to prevent age-related cognitive decline by increasing blood flow to the brain, causing increases in the size of the prefrontal cortex and improvements in executive control, eery, and critical thinking.
• 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 minutes each, but you can spare only thirty minutes now, prioritize them and do the others later or tomorrow, or delegate them.
• It's important that you put everything in the calendar, not just some things. The reason is simple: If you see a blank spot on the calendar, you and anyone else looking at would reasonably assume that the time is available.
• Set up automatic bill payments for every recurring bill.
• I's a life time pattern of learning and exercising the brain.
• It turns out that young people with terminal diseases tend to view the world more like old people.
• Law of large numbers: Observed probabilities tend to get closer and closer to theoretical ones when you have larger and larger sample.
• 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.
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