Daniel Levitin’s “The Organized Mind” is a brain scientist’s look at organization, balancing philosophical arguments with suggestions for concrete improvements you can implement.
The brain stores things associatively. Everything that has any similarities to everything else is tied to all those things by their similarities. You can jump quickly down a list of other objects with the any given property in common. “Firetruck” - red things. Vehicles. Safety equipment. Other public services. Phone services. Technology. Mathematics. Teachers. (and so on).
“Satisficing” - settling for “good enough” for the unimportant things. Not wasting time looking for the “perfect” pen. Or spend a loooong time looking for shampoos. Satisficing is finding an easy, good enough solution for things that don’t affect us much. It’s a good thing.
The processing speed of the mind has been estimated at 120 bits/second. A similar estimate is that you need about 60 bits/second to understand someone who’s talking to you.
The attentional filter. Your Brian is constantly seeking what’s most important in your environment. Highly successful people have a staff of individuals who are extensions of their brains. This allows them to be 100% focused on the task at hand.
Change and importance are the two main aspects of the attentional filter.
Socrates, Seneca, and many more famous thinkers thought the proliferation of books was a bad thing. Too much information!
Attention switching comes at a cost. The attentional filter can quickly pick out things and filter out other stuff. The hidden gorilla video.
Top down processing is when you queue up your brain to look for certain cues. You queue up red and white stripes when looking for Waldo.
Categorization is an incredibly use and important thing that we do all the time. The Lexical hypothesis postulates that categorical distinctions that are important to a culture are made apparent in their language. Family information allows you to know who you can and cannot marry. All cultures have robust terms describing familial relationships.
He’s going through languages and naming the orders in which languages develop words for animals. Plants. Color. (Light and dark, then red, then green or yellow).
Affordances are when the features of a tool tell you how to operate it. They are a shortcut to prevent you from having to think. You can open a door without thinking about it by looking at the jamb. You can create and utilize your own affordances to organize the world are you.
Your brain slips into the default mode when you’re bored or day dreaming. It skips from thing to thing via relations you’ve formed in your head. In doing so it makes those connections stronger. This is called “the default network” and it a relatively new discovery. It is not centralized to any spot in the brain. It’s a circuit.
<aside> ➡️ Dopamine is chemical motivation. That’s it’s role.
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Opposed to the Default mode is the Central Executive mode. It is the mode of focus. It is what keeps you on a task for hours.
Both modes are necessary, in addition to the Attentional Filter.