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

1. "As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

2. "No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

3. "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"
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

4. "The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

5. "In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

6. "Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects"
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

7. "efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain an attentional set for an extended period. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy. Related to the manager/worker distinction is that the prefrontal cortex contains circuits responsible for telling us whether we’re controlling something or someone else is. When we set up a system, this part of the brain marks it as self-generated. When we step into someone else’s system, the brain marks it that way. This may help explain why it’s easier to stick with an exercise program or diet that someone else sets up: We typically trust them as experts more than we trust ourselves. My trainer told me to do three sets of ten reps at forty pounds—he’s a trainer, he must know what he’s talking about. I can’t design my own workout—what do I know? It takes Herculean amounts of discipline to overcome the brain’s bias against self-generated motivational systems. Why? Because as with the fundamental attribution error we saw in Chapter 4, we don’t have access to others’ minds, only our own. We are painfully aware of all the fretting and indecision, all the nuances of our internal decision-making process that led us to reach a particular conclusion. (I really need to get serious about exercise.) We don’t have access to that (largely internal) process in others, so we tend to take their certainty as more compelling, in many cases, than our own. (Here’s your program. Do it every day.)"
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

8. "people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

9. "Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

10. "You’d think people would realize they’re bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great."
- Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload