The gist: our current contexts (social, material, economic, etc.) tax our ability to pay attention and make decisions. Now onto part 1 of the book… Chapter 1: Too Much Information, Too Many Decisions - The Inside History of Cognitive Overload The cognitive neuroscience of memory and attention - our improved understanding of the brain, its evolution and limitations - can help us to better cope with a world in which more and more of us feel we’re running fast just to stand still. (E.g., through writing.) Grokking how the mind categorizes things + how we manifest those categories in the world can help us be more effective. So, another way we enhance our minds is by offloading cognitive tasks to the environment. Our capacity for paying attention is limited and memory is unreliable. E.g., “Most mammals are biologically programmed to put their digestive waste away from where they eat and sleep.” 👀💩 One way we do this is by organizing (i.e., categorizing) aspects of our experience. The introduction sets the context by tracing the evolution of human neural enhancement and how it’s helped us interact with each other and our environments more skillfully. Part 3 looks to the future and discusses junk drawers.Part 2 offers practical advice for organizing various areas of our lives.Part 1 explains information overload and how our minds work.So, what’s “The Organized Mind” about? The back cover promises neuroscience-backed suggestions for navigating “the age of information overload.” Information overload leads to sub-optimal performance (e.g., misplaced car keys, missed appointments, exhaustion, etc.) - but “small, simple, yet consequential changes” can help.

I’ve learned more about this subject since then and am revisiting it as a (hopefully) better reader. The book in question is Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind. To make these notes easier to reference, I’ve pasted the resulting thread below. Recently, I tried sharing my notes on Twitter as I read (on in this case, re-read) a book.

I’ve previously shared notes about books I’ve read on this website. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Cue overload principle