Robert Pirsig inspired a generation to philosophical reflection—and organizing their thoughts—with his hugely popular novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, published in 1974. In a somewhat less well-known later book (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize), Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, he endeavors to establish a way of thinking about metaphysi

number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.

Many believe that attention and memory are closely related, that you can’t remember things that you didn’t pay attention to in the first place.

There has been relatively less attention paid to the important interrelationship among categorization, attention, and memory.

Richness refers to the theory that a large number of the things you’ve ever thought or experienced are still in there, somewhere. Associative access means that your thoughts can be accessed in a number of different ways by semantic or perceptual associations—memories can be triggered by related words, by category names, by a smell, an old song or p

Do it Delegate it Defer it Drop it

Similarly, cognitive neuroscientists are increasingly appreciating that mental function is often spread out. Language ability does not reside in a specific region of the brain; rather, it comprises a distributed network—like the electrical wires in your house—that draws on and engages regions throughout the

I’ll set a tickler, a reminder in the calendar three weeks before it’s due—that’s a week before the two weeks he needs to do it—so that he can start thinking about it and know that it’s coming up.

if a work is wanted, “it can be asked for; but to be wanted, it must be known.”