How We Sort the World: Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories
Categories are how we organize information in our minds. Know your category and you’ll know where readers “fit” you into their own minds.
Nicolas Cole • The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention
First, we categorize them based on either gross or fine appearance. Gross appearance puts all pencils together in the same bin. Fine appearance may separate soft-lead from hard-lead pencils, gray ones from colored ones, golf pencils from schoolwork pencils.
Daniel J. Levitin • The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
“The world is terribly confusing; there’s too much happening at the same time—visually, auditorily, everything—and the way we cope is by categorizing. We process the minimum we need in order to behave properly.”