The Organized Mind

“even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself.” A steady flow of complaints about

Over time, your idea of what is similar or what binds different ideas together may change, and this system—because it is random and not sequential—allows for that flexibility.

functional categories.

These two brain states form a kind of yin-yang: When one is active, the other is not. During demanding tasks, the central executive kicks in. The more the mind-wandering network is suppressed, the greater the accuracy of performance on the task at hand.

First, some objects, though different in presentation, are inherently identical.

Second, avoid putting too many dissimilar items into a drawer or folder unless you can come up with an overarching theme. If you can’t, MISCELLANEOUS or JUNK or UNCLASSIFIABLE are OK. But if you find yourself having four or five junk drawers, it’s time to re-sort and regroup their contents, into MISC HOUSEHOLD versus MISC GARDEN versus MISC KIDS’ S

relieving hunger,

another in trillions of different ways. These connections don’t just lead to learning—the connections are the learning.

People at the top of their professions, in particular those known for their creativity and effectiveness, use systems of attention and memory external to their brain as much as they can. And a surprising number of them, even in high-tech jobs, use decidedly low-tech solutions for keeping on top of things.

When that neural activity reaches a certain threshold, you become aware of it, and we call that consciousness. Consciousness itself is not a thing, and it is not localizable in the brain. Rather, it’s simply the name we put to ideas and perceptions that enter the awareness of our central executive, a system of very limited capacity that can general