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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo. Your job

This ability to recognize diversity and organize it into categories is a biological reality that is absolutely essential to the organized human mind.

Switching attention comes with a high cost.

We don’t always remember everything about an event, but if we can remember one thing (such as the approximate date, or where a given document fell roughly in sequence with respect to other documents, or which person was involved in it), we can find what we’re looking for by using the associative networks in our brains.

By 1850, the average family group in Europe had dropped from twenty people to ten living in close proximity, and by 1960 that number was just five. Today, 50% of Americans live alone.

the more cognitive load one is experiencing, the more likely one is to make errors in judgment about the causes of an individual’s behavior.

A Gibsonian affordance describes an object whose design features tell you something about how to use it.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

it could be said that what distinguishes experts from novices is that they know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

A third way we categorize is in conceptual categories that address particular situations.