The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
i found this book to be filled with a treasure trove of interesting info about how the brain, my brain, works. It gave me insight into everything from attention and memory and consciousness to procrastination and creativity, not to mention why Facebook is chemically addictive. At times the author, a neuroscientist, dragged out his story or spend too much time belaboring the obvious, but overall i thought the book was well written and did an excellent job of making a complex subject accessible and useful. The book is almost a self help book in that it doesn't just explain how your brain works but makes suggestions based on that knowledge. Who came up with this title, anyway? The marketing dept missed it on this one. It's more about why we're NOT organized than about how to organize. You could say it's about how brains try to organize info, and the barriers to organization in this day and age. There's very little actionable advice. A lot of digression into everything the author has ever learned about how brains function. Whether it's sleep phases, flow states, rational decision-making--most of this stuff has been published elsewhere. So, I guess you'd call this a synthetic work. Nothing wrong with it, except that very little of it seemed new to me. For example, the sleep phases stuff has been passed around on FB for ages now, and the REAL question is, what to do about it? If humans are more naturally oriented to a lunar cycle (which makes sense given that for most of our evolutionary history we were hunter-gatherers and not farmers), how to we get society to function on a 25-hour daily schedule? If people naturally sleep about 4 hours, wake up for about 2, and then return to sleep for another 4, again, how is that supposed to fit in today's world? (Also, what should they do in the 2 hours? Get up and do stuff? Lie there in the dark?) Since most of us don't have personal assistants, pretty much all that was useful was the index cards thing, using calendars more comprehensively (man, do I miss Palm Pilots... we're still not back to where we were 10 years ago regarding calendaring), and blocking off no-internet time for uninterrupted work, which I already do. Lots of info on raising children, some really shallow discussion of complementary & alternative medicine, a long discussion on medical decision-makin, and a lot about rational decisionmaking, which has been covered by lots of other people in full-length books. In short, the book wasn't very well organized, and you kind of have to have an organized mind in the first place to pick out the relevant details about organizing your mind.
What do You think about The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload (2014)?
The more I learn about how our minds work, the more I'm astonished we manage to do anything, ever.
—Susan
Lots of things to think about outlined in this book. I'm going to read Levitin's other books now.
—bookkeeper209
Good book that drives home some good points. A little repetitive and windy at points, but good.
—cbp22
I found the first few chapters particularly interesting.
—bethix
