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

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.

The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships, compared to a fraction of that in the decade before.

Thamus, king of Egypt, argued that the written word would infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge. The Greek poet Callimachus has been

A second way we categorize is based on functional equivalence when objects lack similarity of appearance.

We evolved a specialized brain structure called the hippocampus just for remembering the spatial location of things. This was tremendously important throughout our evolutionary history for keeping track of where food and water could be found, not to mention the location of various dangers. The hippocampus is such an important center for place memor

These external memory mechanisms are generally of two types, either following the brain’s own organizational system or reinventing it, sometimes overcoming its limitations.

We externalize our memory by putting that information on index cards. We then harness the power of the brain’s intrinsic and evolutionarily ancient desire to categorize by creating little bins for those external memories, bins that we can peer into whenever our central executive network wishes to.

A key principle, then, is that memory retrieval requires our brains to sift through multiple, competing instances to pick out just the ones we are trying to recollect. If there are similar events, it retrieves many or all of them, and usually creates some sort of composite, generic mixture of them without our consciously knowing it. This is why it

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something that cognitive psychologists actually refer to as the rehearsal loop, a network of brain regions that ties together the frontal cortex just behind your eyeballs and the hippocampus in the center of your brain. This rehearsal loop evolved in a world that had no pens and paper, no smartphones or other physical extensions of the human brain;