Notebook Export
Organized Mind : Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (9780698157224)
INTRODUCTION
Highlight(yellow) - Location 122
Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 127
fondness for stories
Highlight(yellow) - Location 146
problems of storage, indexing, and accessing:
Highlight(yellow) - Location 153
most compelling properties of the human brain and its design: richness and associative access. Richness refers to the theory
Highlight(yellow) - Location 154
Associative access means that your thoughts can be accessed in a number of different
Highlight(yellow) - Location 155
ways
Highlight(yellow) - Location 155
by
Highlight(yellow) - Location 155
semantic or perceptual associations—memories
Highlight(yellow) - Location 157
random access.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 159
(sequential access).
Highlight(yellow) - Location 160
relational memory.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 165
attributes
Highlight(yellow) - Location 210
place memory system
Highlight(yellow) - Location 211
memory for facts and figures.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 217
The need for taking charge of our attentional and memory systems has never been greater.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 234
Understanding how the brain’s attentional and memory systems interact can go a long way toward minimizing memory lapses.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 252
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 253
science of social judgments and decision-making.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 256
evaluates evidence and processes information.
1. TOO MUCH INFORMATION, TOO MANY DECISIONS
Highlight(yellow) - Location 325
introductory course on the psychology of thinking and reasoning.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 340
satisficing,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 341
organization theory and information processing.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 342
good enough. For things that don’t matter critically,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 350
reaching a kind of equilibrium between effort and
Highlight(yellow) - Location 350
benefit.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 350
cost-benefits analysis that is at the heart of satisficing
Highlight(yellow) - Location 365
decision overload.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 399
attentional restrictions,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 402
Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 405
attentional filter.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 447
Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 471
attention is a limited-capacity resource—there
Highlight(yellow) - Location 471
are definite limits to the number of things we can attend to at once.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 481
inattentional blindness.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 495
external systems are available for organizing, categorizing, and keeping track of things.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 499
Productivity and efficiency depend on systems that help us organize through categorization.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 500
The drive to categorize developed in the prehistoric wiring of our brains, in specialized neural systems that create and maintain meaningful, coherent amalgamations of things—foods, animals, tools, tribe members—in coherent categories.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 501
Fundamentally, categorization reduces mental effort and streamlines the flow of information.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 515
The appearance of writing some 5,000 years ago was not met with unbridled enthusiasm; many contemporaries saw it as technology gone too far, a demonic invention that would rot the mind and needed to be stopped.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 526
The printing press was introduced in the mid 1400s, allowing for the more rapid proliferation of writing, replacing laborious (and error-prone) hand copying. Yet again, many complained that intellectual life as we knew it was done for.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 531
Descartes famously recommended ignoring the accumulated stock of texts and instead relying on one’s own observations.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 540
“Same as it ever was.”)
Highlight(yellow) - Location 550
we struggle to come to grips with what we really need to know and what we
Highlight(yellow) - Location 550
don’t.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 552
evolutionarily outdated attentional system. I mentioned earlier the two principles
Highlight(yellow) - Location 553
of the attentional filter: change and importance.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 554
difficulty of attentional switching.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 554
Switching attention comes with a high cost.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 559
Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 561
our brains flit from one to the other, each time with a neurobiological switching cost.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 564
Attention is a limited-capacity resource.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 571
This vigilance system incorporating the attentional filter
Highlight(yellow) - Location 571
is always at work, even when you’re asleep, monitoring the environment for important events.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 612
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.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 622
neuroattentional resources with the things we need to know to live
Highlight(yellow) - Location 624
it’s not that we need to take in less information but that we need to have
Highlight(yellow) - Location 624
systems for organizing it.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 649
We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive biases.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 657
decision-making shortcuts.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 707
The formation of categories in humans is guided by a cognitive principle of wanting to encode as much information as possible with the least possible
Highlight(yellow) - Location 708
effort. Categorization systems optimize the ease of conception and the importance of being able to communicate about those systems.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 710
6,000 languages known to be spoken on the planet today,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 710
Kinship
Highlight(yellow) - Location 750
classifications have their roots in animal behavior, so they can be said to be precognitive.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 753
distinctions most important to a culture become encoded in that culture’s language.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 807
Those who were interested in acquiring knowledge—whose brains enjoyed learning new things—would have been at an advantage for survival, and so this love of learning would eventually become encoded in their genes through natural selection.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 813
Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 814
human brain has a strong cognitive propensity toward order.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 826
brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 827
We humans are hardwired to enjoy knowledge, in particular knowledge that comes through the senses.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 830
We are hardwired to impose structure on the world.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 842
Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus distracting knowledge.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 846
active sorting,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 875
using the physical world to organize your mind.
2. THE FIRST THINGS TO GET STRAIGHT
Highlight(yellow) - Location 930
default mode. This mode is a resting brain state,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 934
stay-on-task mode is the other dominant mode
Highlight(yellow) - Location 935
central executive.”
Highlight(yellow) - Location 942
mind-wandering mode is a network,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 981
the attentional filter is constantly monitoring the environment for anything that might be important.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 983
This switch enables shifts from one task to another,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 988
insula has bidirectional connections to an important brain part called the anterior cingulate cortex.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1006
internal dialogues
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1008
Your brain, however, is a
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1008
collection of semidistinct, special-purpose processing units.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1009
The inner dialogue is generated by the planning centers of your brain in the prefrontal cortex, and the questions are being answered by other parts of your brain that possess the information.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1012
The attentional network has to monitor all these activities and allocate resources to some and not to others.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1028
We feel that there is an internal narrator of our lives up here in
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1029
our heads,
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1039
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.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1102
to the moment of putting them down. 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. That little bit of focus goes a long way in training the brain (specifically the hippocampus) to remember where we put things, because we’re invoking the central executive to help with encoding the moment. Having systems like key hooks, cell phone trays, and a special hook or drawer for sunglasses externalizes the effort so that we don’t have to keep everything in our heads. Externalizing memory is an idea that goes back to the Greeks, and its effectiveness has been confirmed many times over by contemporary neuroscience.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1127
remembering is imperfect;
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1129
Memory is fiction.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1129
Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1141
the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or have a strong emotional component.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1145
Your memory merges similar events not only because it’s more efficient to do so, but also because this is fundamental to how we learn things—our brains extract abstract rules that tie experiences together.
Highlight(yellow) - Location 1167
neurochemical tags,
No comments:
Post a Comment