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

But if we can acquire a Zen-like mental clarity and pay attention to what we’re doing, letting go of thoughts of the future and past, we will remember each moment because each moment will be special.

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

he felt more relaxed and better able to focus on his work. This observation is based in neurology. When we have something on our minds that is important—especially a To Do item—we’re afraid we’ll forget it, so our brain rehearses it, tossing it around and around in circles in

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

Do it Delegate it Defer it Drop

These chemical tags, tied to emotional events, are the reason we so readily remember important national events such as the assassination of President Kennedy, the space shuttle Challenger explosion,

The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you’re working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset button on your brain and allows for more productive and creative thinking.

If only we could get every one of those original neurons active in exactly the same way they were the first time, our recollections would be strikingly vivid and realistic. But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation tha

it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex.