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

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

Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine. When dopamine is released, it unlocks them, like a key in your front door, and they start firing tiny electrical impulses that stimulate other neurons in their network.

Cognitive economy dictates that we categorize things in such a way as not to be overwhelmed by details that, for most purposes, don’t matter.

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.

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

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.

In addition to neural networks in the brain that represent attributes of things, those attributes are also connected associatively to other things.

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

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