by Daniel J. Levitin (2014)
Reading Time: 4 minutes
From the Jacket: Levitin presents recent advances in brain science as he reveals the key to how leaders in the information age excel – and how any reader can use their practical methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way we organize our homes, workplaces, and lives.
The Organized Mind starts with a mission statement: there’s too much information and too many demands on our time. The most accomplished people have assistants to help navigate the flurry, but how can the rest of us cope? Next it moves in to a summary of how our thoughts and memories work, then it takes several areas of life and applies the lessons of neuroscience to each in turn. Those areas are our homes, social worlds, time, decision-making / healthcare, and business.
Many scholarly types bemoan the state of learning today with particular focus on how little we know and memorize compared to “the good old days”. Levitin’s core point is the exact opposite: the strength of our current technology is instant access to nearly infinite quantities of information and we use far too much information for memorizing to be a practical solution, so we should work to encode information in our environments and develop our skills at retrieving and manipulating information rather than memorizing it.
A classic example of encoding information in the environment is the pill box with a cubby for every day. You fill it up at the beginning of the week and work your way through. Sounds like extra work if anything, but there are a some good lessons in there.
First, because taking pills every day is a very repetitious activity, our brain tends to mash all the instances into a single memory. This makes it very difficult for our brains to call up any single instance, including whether you took your pills that morning. Similarly, you probably occasionally find yourself wondering if you locked the door when you left the house in the morning. Same principle, except with life-saving and/or dangerous medications.
Second, there’s not any particular virtue at getting really good at remembering whether you already took your pill today.
Third, the pill box itself is dead simple and obvious: if it’s Tuesday and the Tuesday cubby is empty, you took your pills. You don’t have to spend precious time and mental energy on the intriguing question of “did I already take the green one today?”
This is a good book, but I think I’ve read too much that is similar lately. It has a number of practical suggestions for streamlining our lives and some interesting reasons why we should get better at it. That said, I have two problems with it. The first is that it seems a bit too long. It would probably take a very good editor to trim it down because there aren’t whole sections that are a waste of time, but I’m not sure I walked away with 383 pages worth of insights.
The second problem isn’t really a problem with the book but with neuroscience. Here’s a helpful insight for you: neuroscience is pretty hard (Be sure to file that stunningly original idea away in your favorite externalized organizational system). The human brain is unimaginably subtle and complex, so in spite of the massive progress being made the research still seems like doing entomology by driving a truck through a cloud of insects and poking around in whatever guts are left on the windshield. Every insight seems to be something like “this chemical does this” and then a few months or years later we figure out that “well, it actually does this sometimes but other times it does exactly the opposite. We’ll get back to you on that”. That kind of gets into the pace of the field, too; I’m pretty sure I spotted a couple things Levitin wrote in 2014 that, by 2019, have turned out to be not wrong but incomplete enough to pass as wrong (not that I’m necessarily qualified to make that judgment). That’s not a critique of Levitin, it’s just a statement about a fantastically difficult, intriguing, complex field of study.
Overall though, it was a good book on how to organize your life with interesting forays into cognitive neuroscience. I’m a big fan of reducing stress by prioritizing intelligently, and this book certainly hits that point a number of times from a number of directions.
Recommendation: Read this book if…. You are looking for practical ways to organize, prioritize, and reduce stress.