The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
Daniel J. Levitin
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 0147516315
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written.” —Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
Readers of Daniel J. Levitin’s two previous New York Times bestsellers have come to know and trust his unique ability to translate cutting edge neuroscience into an informative and entertaining narrative. Now Levitin turns his attention to an issue that affects everyone in the digital age: organization. It’s the reason that some people are more adept than others at managing today’s hyper flow of data. The Organized Mind explains the science behind their success and—with chapters targeted specifically to business readers—shows how all of us can make small but crucial changes to regain mastery over our lives.
group might catch your eye (really, we should say catch your mind) while other billboards go ignored. If you’re in a crowded room, at a party for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attention, even if spoken from across the room. If someone says “fire” or “sex” or your own name, you’ll find that you’re suddenly following a conversation far away from where you’re standing, with no awareness of what those people were talking about before your
they will do things, even if they don’t support all those things. W [President George W. Bush] was elected not because everyone agreed with him but because they knew he was sincere and would do what he thought needed to be done. Ethics necessarily come into play in corporate and military decision-making. What is good for one’s own self-interests, or the company’s interests, is not always consonant with what is good for the community, the populace, or the world. Humans are social creatures,
is available—every version, every outtake, every subtle variation—the problem of acquisition becomes irrelevant, but the problem of selection becomes impossible. How will I decide what to listen to? And of course this is a global information problem not confined to music. How do I decide what film to watch, what book to read, what news to keep up with? The twenty-first century’s information problem is one of selection. There are really only two strategies for selection in the face of
November 2011 SEER data submission. Retrieved from http://seer.cancer.gov/archive/csr/1975_2009_pops09/ 3% of men will die American Cancer Society. (2013). What are the key statistics about prostate cancer? Retrieved from http://www.cancer.org radical surgery to remove the prostate National Cancer Institute. (2013). Prostate cancer treatment (PDQ®): Treatment option overview. Retrieved from http://www.cancer.gov and, Scholz, M., & Blum, R. (2010). Invasion of the prostate snatchers:
under nine hours. How did they do it? Not via the kinds of high-tech satellite imaging or reconnaissance that many imagined, but—as you may have guessed—by constructing a massive, ad hoc social network of collaborators and spotters—in short, by crowdsourcing. The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you happened to spot the balloon in your neighborhood and provided them with the correct location, you’d get $2,000. If a friend of yours whom you recruited found it, your friend