Last night I finally managed to finish Daniel Levitin’s The Organised Mind and while that phrasing might make it sound like this book was a drag, it was the exact opposite. It is so densely packed with revelation after revelation, that to read it in a rush is to do yourself an injustice. I found that I had to break up the book into smaller manageable pieces and let them digest for a while before I could go on.

The Organised Mind is a thorough and exacting investigation into how our relationship with information has evolved, and how we can actively pursue mental habits that will empower us to become more effective in the modern age. Levitin demonstrates his mastery over the subject by how simply and easily he is able to drift through a multitude of disciplines to bring to life a compelling narrative. While some writing is great for the ideas it brings forth, and some writing is great for the text itself, The Organised Mind achieves both in what I would hope will become a classic work.

While I do not wish to ruin the enjoyment of the future reader of this work, I do want to touch on some of the concepts that stuck with me, even if just briefly. The primary idea that had the greatest impact on me was cognitive offloading: how we have developed tools to externalise information and thought processes so as to free up our brains to be able to devote more power to the thoughts that matter to us. It is a way to unclutter the brain and attention so that we may achieve focus and hopefully more effective cognition.

The second concept that stuck with me was that of the attentional filtering to conserve our attentional bandwidth. We have a very limited attention span, and rely largely on heuristics to filter out the unnecessary things. This means that if we are doing too many things at once, our brains start to drop memories and attention for things it deems low priority. This is how we can start to forget where we left something or what we were doing. Attention is a limited resource and susceptible to a buffer overflow.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone, and especially to those interested in building a stronger, working relationship with information and their mind.