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

This book has helped me tremendously. I don’t know where I’d be without it. Over the years I’ve lost precious valuables all because I didn’t know how to properly keeping track of things that are important to me. Because of this book I feel a lot more confident that I won’t lose track of things.

Doctor Levitin writes with a clarity and patience that makes complex neuro science research quite accessible and useful for almost any reader with a purpose to understand how to use recent research to manage our lives in times of endless information overload.He suggests how people can use a simple statistical table to get clarity for whether to do a medical procedure when one has the statistics from research on the likelihood of either needing the procedure, or discussing the risks versus benefits.He speaks to the blend of Science, Intuition and Artful comprehension, citing Mr. Einstein:"The greatest scientists are artists as well" (p. 380).He points to research that confirms " The tentative and intriguing take-home message is that reading high-quality fiction and literary nonfiction, and perhaps listening to music, looking at art, and watching dance, may lead to two desirable outcomes: Increased interpersonal empathy and better executive attentional control" ( p. 368).Dr. Levitin also points to research that looks at longitudinal benefits with "being organized and conscientious are predictive of a number of positive outcomes, even decades later, such as longevity, overall health, and job performance." p. 336.The core theme of the book deals with how we each keep track of an endless amount of information in our daily lives, and he discussed the attributes of 'filing systems' that are physical and local in nature as well as invisibly on 'servers' somewhere in a 'cloud.' But the crowning essence of this incredible narrative is that we each must find a way to 'file' and 'verify' information that is pushed on us daily in the form of infomercials and uncorroborated data, and he shows us how each of us with a bit of effort can filter the information flow to be creative as well as productive. The book could be a terrific go-to resource for families struggling with dysfunctional habits, as well as for families looking to gain an edge in a competitive world.

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.

researches all the facts and writes for the layman with some for the professional but explained. I've recently lost my husband, moved to a new area, finding memory for new names and all the etcs not good but I wanted to know the reason - successful!

Explains in detail the brain functioning and its impact on your capacity of dealing with information (mountains of ...), decision-making and other aspects of your private and professional lifes. To basic aspects like prevention of data loss (hard-disk breakdown).The books deals with topics like- how to organize your home/kitchen/garage,- how to evaluate data for taking relevant (business or health) decisions, how to handle statistics and what they mean (e.g. correlation and deduction are not the same!),- what to learn our children, in the age when information is available everywhere.- how to motive your collaborates at work (e.g. why multitasking is non-sense, what happens then in your brain).The author arguments with neurosciences studies, daily life experiences and lessons learned from highly efficient executives (or executive assistants) in world known sucessfull companies.Each reader can learn something in this book, and implement some recipes in his/her life to make it more efficient and do not loss time with burdening and time-demanding aspects.A great read, I recommand!

Excelente livro para entender sobre como funciona nossa cabeca

Must read if you have self doubts. Problem with mind. You will read how to orgnaize your mind again with new thinking and nee setup. Writer have good way to express his ways.

If you are expecting a sort of guide book that will already confirm what you already believe you should do in order to spend more time offline, then this book is not for you.HOWEVER, if you are interested in how the brain works, how attention works, how much switching between tasks costs, how the states of mind wandering and focus work and many other similar things, this book is definitely for you. You will learn a lot about the brain, mind illusions and the like. It's been a real entertaining and interesting book.What I found funny was the author mentioning a professor and his friend who both have written a book I've read. I found this book better than his professor's, though.*Spoiler alert*What I also found very interesting was learning that people used to consider writing and later books a bad idea because it enabled everyone to write them and there would be a too large amount of books for one to read. Some also claimed writing could be falsified and that it were better for someone to get information directly from the horse's mouth.