In Short 💡
Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin gives the reader practical tips to organize all the aspects of our live in a way that prioritize brain well-being and efficiency.
About the Author 👨⚖
Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and bestselling author. He is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI (now Minerva University) in San Francisco, and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, A Field Guide to Lies and Successful Aging (published in the UK as The Changing Mind).
(excerpt from his website https://www.daniellevitin.com/)
✎ The Theory ✎
👷 Attentional Filter and Decisions 👷
In the modern world, we are exposed to lots of information and distractions, each of them asking us for an action to take (ex : watch this cat video or not ?). This is a problem because our brain doesn’t prioritize, and each decision we make every day has an impact on its capacity. The brain has a daily processing limit; it can only handle a certain number of decisions per day.
On the other hand, the brain has an “attentional filter” that allows us to focus on the important things (e.g., we don’t notice the noises around us when we do something). Events that pass through this filter can cause our attention to switch to another topic.
🧠 The 2 Brain Modes 🧠
The brain has 2 modes :
Mind Wandering Mode
“daydreaming” mode
Intuitive, creative and the most productive, default brain mode
vs
Central Executive Mode
“focused” mode
Task achievement mode
You are either in one state or in the other. The switch is controlled by a brain region called “insula”, and depends on the stimuli you receive from your attentional filter.
Strategies of efficiency consist in narrowing this attentional filter, reducing external stimuli (ex: phone notifications) and internal stimuli (thoughts popping out of you’re head). The latter is achieved by externalizing parts of your brain outside of the body, with systems such as calendars, reminders…
📐 Categories 📐
Humans create mental categories to help them reduce the complexity of the world. When we look at a bowl of beans, we don’t “see” each bean individually, with their differences: we just think of them as beans. It’s only when something happens (for example a bean is rotten) that we zoom out and distinguish within these categories. Categories help us organize our mental world.
🚧 Practical Tips 🚧
Organizing Your Home
- Design a specific location for important objects (ex: your keys) and be strict about it 🔑
- Organize your drawers so that they contain no more than 5 different types of items
- Make things you need often separated from things you need less often (ex : daily dishes vs Christmas dishes)
- Use a “junk drawer” for all the things that you cannot organize with other items. It’s better to put an object in the junk drawer than to put it in the wrong drawer
- Don’t keep what you don’t use
- Put things where you need them
- Prepare backup for emergency situations (e.g.: what happens if you lose your keys ? Put a copy in the garden)
Digital Life
- If possible, use different places and devices for different activities: one laptop and desk for work, iPad for Netflix…
- Paperwork: either digitize everything or print everything
- Use filters in your mailbox, and phone notifications… in order not to be distracted every minute while you’re doing something
Social World
- If you have a large network, store some minimal personal information about people you meet (name, phone number, why you know them, some facts about them)
- Set reminders for yourself to regularly communicate with your social network
- Cognitive bias in the social sphere :
- when judging people, we tend to overestimate the influence of personality, compared to the situations they’re put into.
- Group-in / group-out bias : We view members of our group as distinct individuals, and members of other groups as a more indistinct mass. (ex : tennis club anecdote)
- Bystander effect : Individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when there are other people present
Managing Our Time
- Multitasking is the worst way to do most things
- People who multitask actually don’t do things in parallel, but constantly switch their attention between different topics
- People thinking they are good at multitasking are victims of a bias empowered by dopamine
- Switching between “boss and worker modes”, executing and monitoring a task (for example cleaning and verifying we cleaned well) is as detrimental as multitasking. To limit that, try to do your similar chores at the same time.
- Sleep
- the naturally perfect night for humans is something like 4h of sleep, 2h awake, and 4h of sleep again
- 1 hour less of sleep can already affect your productivity
- There’s no such thing as “catching up on sleeping time” by sleeping more the next night
- go to bed at the same time every night
- 10-minute naps during the day are useful, but micro naps after waking up (delaying your alarm) are useless
- Procrastination
- Do the worst task first
- Procrastination is highly linked to an individual’s tendency to associate his self-esteem to the success of a task. Successful people fail much more than usual people, expect failures and obstacles, and don’t think life is easy.
- successful people have a better resiliency than most people. There is a genetic predisposition to that, but a good strategy against genetics as to do as if.
- Creative Time
- “Flow” State
- the state of mind where we are so involved in a task that we loose track of time
- this is the most productive state and the most creative state
- creative people optimize their time to reach this state as often as possible (ex: Neil Young stops everything when he has an idea, even if it means being late somewhere)
- to reach this state, avoid distractions
- external : set time in advance for this activity, turn off your phone, setup a routine atmosphere…
- internal : clear incoming thoughts by writing them in your productivity system
- take breaks every 90 minutes
- schedule daily physical activity
- These boring tasks to do every day
- rule : if a task takes less than 2 minutes to do, do it now
- Schedule 30 minutes a day for this kind of tasks
- Use calendar or reminders to track events, birthdays, task lists
Conclusion
The primary quality of this book is that it excels in both theory and practice.
If there were one key takeaway from this book, it would be the concept that you can maximize the potential of your brain by ensuring you allocate your time and attention in ways that facilitate being in a single brain mode at a time. The author demonstrates that many of our daily tasks are actually suboptimal in this regard. For instance, a seemingly straightforward task like cleaning actually involves two simultaneous tasks: execution and result monitoring.
By raising the reader’s awareness about such topics and providing practical advice along with a solid theoretical foundation, this book is essential reading for lifelong learners and individuals who aspire to optimize their brainpower.