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

Olds and Milner called it the pleasure center. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy howdy! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they ha

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

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

Decades of research have shown that human learning is influenced by context and by the location where the learning takes place. Students who studied for an exam in the room they later took it in did better than students who studied somewhere else. We go back to our childhood home after a long absence, and a flood of forgotten memories is released.

The simplest cases of speech acts are those in which the speaker utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what he says. Yet indirect speech acts are a powerful social glue that enables us to get along. In them, the speaker means exactly what she says but also something more. The something more is supposed to be apparent to the hearer, and

In stark contrast to this misperception, neuroscientists have recently discovered that parts of the brain can fall asleep for a few moments or longer without our realizing it. At any given moment, some circuits in the brain may be off-line, slumbering,

Due to the attentional filter, we end up experiencing a great deal of the world on autopilot, not registering the

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

Eleanor Rosch has shown that the act of categorizing is one of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kind so that we don’t have to waste valuable neural processing cycles on details that are irrelevant for our purposes.