In a world with so much information how do you sort through all the noise and make sense of what actually matters? Here are my notes from The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin which aims to answer that question.
For the month of May I read the book The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin. I actually originally went to the library to read Presuasion but came across this book when I saw the byline/subtitle: “Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload”. I sometimes feel like I am bombarded by so much information and keeping my head organized with all this information can be a challenge. I was intrigued to see a book that helped address this issue.
Original book summary: https://blog.tomiwa.ca/the-organized-mind-summary-notes-and-review/
You can find all my book notes on my blog: https://blog.tomiwa.ca/tag/books/
You can find book notes drafts on my Github: https://github.com/ademidun/book-notes
Summary
- “AI/social media/ the internet is ruining everything”, they said the same thing about books and the printing press [14]
- Why Multitasking is overrated and the true cost of multitasking [16]
- Using Bayesian probability to make smarter bets [229]
- A framework to use for deciding wether to undergo a surgery procedure [240]
- How to lie with statistic [247]
- How to teach children to thrive in an information society
- The role of doctors in modern medicine, why some doctors justify lying to their patients and why most doctors may end up getting replaced by machine learning algorithms [249]
- How to organize your digital files: Make search a forethought, how will I look for this when I need it [320]
- The importance of developing both the left and right side of your brain, why National Cancer Institute invited artists to a cancer brainstorming session
- The story of Salvatore Iaconesi, an engineer that open sourced his medical data to help crowdsource solutions to his cancer [380]
- How a team of MIT scientists found 10 balloons hidden by US Military DARPA hidden across America [114]
- Do wet roads cause rain? Correlation vs Causation [348]
- Sleeping more efficiently with bimodal sleep [189]
Books are Evil
When the written word was introduced 5,000 years ago people complained that it would ruin society. [14]
Many of these similarities sound interestingly similar to many of the complaints people have about modern technology.
People said it would make people lazy, how would you detect fake news, they worried the technology could rot the mind.
Plato’s King Thamus decried: dependence on written would “weaken men’s characters and create forgetfulness in their souls”.
Greek poet, Callimachus said books were a “great evil”. Roman Philosopher Seneca said that “the abundance of books is a distraction”.
When the printing press came in the 1400s, many complained that this was was the end of intellectual life. Erasmus complained that there were a swarm of books. Leibniz said there was a “horrible mass of books that keeps on growing” which would cause a “return to barbarism”. Descartes recommended ignoring accumulated texts and instead relying on one’s observations.
These are all very smart people, yet they were unable to see the benefit of books
This is very prescient because the current vogue thing to do is complain that technology and social media is making our society worse. When in reality these technologies, for the most part are making our societies better and the real problem is how humans occasionally misuse them.
This is why I like to study history, because the more lessons I can draw from the past. I can get a clearer understanding of what happens in our modern society.
Attentional Switching, Why Multi Tasking is Overrated
Levitin makes a point about how attention is a limited-capacity resource and there is a cost when you switch your attention between multiple tasks. This is why I always tell people that multi tasking is massively overrated and really what most people is doing a series of tasks individually but switching back and forth between them and thus doing neither effectively. If you want to be very productive, I personally recommend focus on one task, finish the task, then switch to another task. [15]
Down the Categorization Rabbit Hole
The author spends a lot of pages talking about the science and structure of categorization [28]. Talking about how humans categorize words and why some languages have different words for animals and other languages only have 2 words to distinguish between land and sea animals. I think this section could have been shorter because I personally wasn’t interested in it but it’s hard to fault a book for such a subjective, personalized criticism.
I think there was a missed opportunity to add that Eskimos have 300 words for snow and the reason for why that is.
Our Brain Tries to Understand Our Brain
[Insert brain diagram from page 42]
An interesting thing about this book is that the author goes fairly deep on cognitive neuro-science which is a topic, along with genetics that I am gradually learning more about. There are some similarities between this book and Ray Dalio’s Principles which I have shared notes on as well.
I’m a bit conflicted because I feel like when explaining technical concepts you must walk a fine line between simplified enough for a general audience but rigorous enough to validate that your science is legitimate. I don’t know much about cognitive neuroscience yet but I wonder if we oversimplify our understanding of the brain.
I am also implementing a lot of neural network machine learning algorithms in my computer science research work with Atila so drawing parallels between the human brain’s biological neural net and a computer’s digital neural net is very interesting exercise in multidisciplinary, latticework thinking, if you find this interesting strongly encourage you to check out Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models.
Story Time: DARPA Missing balloons.
The story he tells on page 114 is one of the best stories I have ever read in a book [114]:
In December 2009, The US military advanced research Group (DARPA) offered $40,000 to anyone who could find the 10 balloons they had placed around the United States. This is the same group that created the internet, or at least the model for what became the internet.
A lot of very smart researchers involved pointed out that traditional intelligence gathering techniques would not work.
A team from MIT was able to solve the challenge in under nine hours. I also have to personally add that their solution was extremely clever. How did they do it?
Aside: Before you keep reading, I would encourage you to take about a minute to think about how you would solve this problem. Imagine you have been tasked to find 10 balloons placed in plain sight all over your country, how would you go about solving this problem?
The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you found the right balloon you would get $2,000. If you recruited a friend to join the program, your friend would get $2,000 and you would get $1,000. If a friend of the friend you recruited found the balloon, you would get $500 and so on. It took 4,6665 people less than nine hours to find all the balloons. If that’s not genius, I don’t know what is!
This to me was so fascinating. The author cleverly draws connections to how the same idea inspires things like Wikipedia and Kickstarter. I also drew parallels behind how this idea of collaboration and incentives, inspires the crowdsourced scholarships and media content on Atila.
Interesting anecdote on an engineer, Salvatore Iaconesi who open sourced his medical records to find treatment options for his brain cancer. [118]
Levitin says that sleeping 6–8 hours a day is a relatively modern invention and that our ancestors did segmented or bimodal sleeping. They would sleep four or five hours after dinner, stay awake for one or more hours in the middle of the night, then another four or five hour round of sleep. [189]
I just think this is an interesting experiment to try and for people who have trouble sleeping or feeling rested after sleeping, this might help.
Quick puzzle for you!
What word can be joined to all of these to make three new words? [201]
crab sauce pine
A tennis player named John McEnroe used to compliment players on things they were doing well, drawing attention to it, the player would overthink it and start messing up.[207]
Sompe simple tactics for getting things done and productivity [211]
- if something takes up mind space, write it down
- take walks every once in a while
- Schedule some form of daily physical activity
- if something takes more than five minutes, do it now
- Figure out what your time is subjectively worth, so you can spend time more efficiently by asking “does it make sense to just pay someone $50 to do this for me” (E.g. I used to pay my sisters to wash the dishes when it was my turn. My mom hates when I do this. )
Life Time (Or how to Stay Young) [215]
- As people get older they often perceive that time is racing by
- Often because their cognitive processes also start to slow down so life feels like it is going quickly
- Younger people tend to view life as open ended and discover what they like
- Older people view life as constrained and want to preserve what they already know they like
- One way to stay young mentally and physically is to keep your mind and body interactive
- Learn a new hobby, spend at least an hour a day socializing, one hour of physical activity a day
- As people start to live longer, healthier lives, (and outsourcing and automation continues to progress) I thank that the “post retirement rebranding” will result in more people having the opportunity to retrain themselves later in their lives
Organizing Information for the Hardest Decisions
This section was really good and a bit intense. He talks about how to organize information for the very important decisions in your life, your health and the health of those around you.
This is just a preview of my summary for this book, you can read the rest of the summary on my blog.
