The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

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		The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
		The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin shifts his keen insights from your brain on music to your brain in a sea of details.

The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.

But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.

With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.

网友对The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload的评论

很好读的一本书，对生活工作很有指导意义。

非常好的一本书，值得阅读。有指导意义。

I think there is a cynical trend in publishing that goes like this: (1) identify a topic that is a real problem (2) reference new scientific discoveries (3) drone on and on to make it into a book as that's the most effective monetization strategy. This book is a prime example.

If you're looking for practical advice, look away. Levitin punishes you with a meandering and excruciatingly boring take on 'recent scientific discovers'. If you hang on and take your medicine, you're rewarded with the meagerest of unhelpful tips. For todo list management he suggests "you might want to try index cards!"

On the practical stuff, I think Levitin would have you read David Allen, who he mentions in worshipful tones. On the science, while probably accurate, he's not worth reading.

I wrote this review because I truly think it's a travesty that this is (currently) a #1 bestseller on amazon. The species is sagging.

I found this book to be excellent at explaining how present-day society has led to information overload. I'm in my mid-twenties, and recall growing up and perusing my parents' formidable library whenever I had a question for a school project. How times have changed! Levitin outlines how the internet has changed the way we take in and process information. We used to struggle to find information sources, requiring a trip to the library to check out a book and flick through the indices to look up certain topics. Now, information is a click away, searchable .pdfs and Ebooks are readily available, and the challenge now is not access to information (at least in most American households) but how to identify reliable sources and process information without getting overwhelmed. This ubiquity and sheer volume of digital information has helped greatly in terms of efficiency in research and in my case, the medical field, but the downsides are that unreliable information can be easily perpetuated, and that the Internet can often be a distracting place (though the potential wealth of knowledge is enormous).

Levitin puts words to my thoughts about modern society - one thing that struck me was his explanation of record collections and how they've been replaced by mp3's. He writes nostalgically about how the record collection used to be a reflection of the owner's personal interests and taste in music, and how it was a collated collection. He writes about how mp3's have replaced the record collection and that since the cost of mp3's is much lower than records and the physical space taken up by an mp3 is nonexistent (save for the device it is carried on), the threshold for someone to add a song to their 'collection' is much lower and people consume music in a much more ephemeral way. While I am of the age group that didn't really grow up on records, I can sort of relate as a child of the "mix CD" era and then later the "iPod/Zune era" which was replaced by the "iPhone/multimedia device" era and now the streaming era. In each subsequent phase, the idea and soul behind a music collection has been diluted from 'owning '(if you can ever own music) a record or song in a physical form, to having a digital file which served as a surrogate, and now to subscribing to a digital service where songs may be added to your playlist or are selected for you based on your preferences. I've had difficulty articulating/defending my fondness for my beloved Zune (which I kept from 2007-2014 until the screen finally shattered from an accidental drop) and now my iPod which serves the sole purpose of carrying my music and nothing else. I relish the idea of my music in one simple storage device, which may not sound convenient but from a neural perspective makes sense in that I use it if and only if I'm listening to music, and I do not use my other computers or devices to listen to music.

I also liked the tips in the book about how to organize oneself and the flashcard method of writing tasks down on a flashcard and flipping through them daily to see what needs to be done was appealing to me. In my profession as with many, there's an endless list of to-do's which pile up and can often be forgotten if they aren't immediately written down.

My only criticism of the book was that it sometimes uses a lot of medical terminology that can be confusing to the layperson. I'm a neurologist-in-training, so I found it to be right up my alley but I did notice that Levitin uses a lot of medical terms (ie., epigenetic, GABA) without always explaining through them.

However, overall, this was a thought provoking and fascinating book about how the brain processes information and how to best utilize our most powerful tool to focus on important information and tune out the noise.

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