CHAPTER 1: Don’t Try
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giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.
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overly attached to the superficial and fake,
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chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction.
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The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s
giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate
and important.
The Feedback Loop from Hell
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Feedback Loop from Hell.
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thoughts about our thoughts.
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consciousness!
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Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s
spiritual.
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The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative
experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is
itself a positive experience.
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Don’t try.
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backwards law
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learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts
effectively—how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter
to you based on finely honed personal values.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
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Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being
indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
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There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference.
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People who are indifferent are lame and scared.
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Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the
repercussions of their own choices.
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What are we choosing to give a fuck about? And how can we
not give a fuck about what ultimately does not matter?
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Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must
first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
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finding something important and meaningful in your life is
perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy.
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Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always
choosing what to give a fuck about.
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most of these sorts of things have little lasting impact on
our lives.
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Essentially, we become more selective
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maturity.
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one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly
fuckworthy.
So Mark, What the Fuck Is the Point of This Book Anyway?
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think a little bit more clearly about what you’re choosing
to find important in life and what you’re choosing to find unimportant.
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it’s okay for things to suck sometimes.
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reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is
important and what is not.
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“practical enlightenment.”
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how to lose and let go.
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not try.
CHAPTER 2: Happiness Is a Problem
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life itself is a form of suffering.
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pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying
to resist them.
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premise is that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be
worked for and earned and achieved as if it were
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This premise, though, is the problem.
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Happiness is not a solvable equation.
The Misadventures of Disappointment Panda
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Disappointment Panda.
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suffering is biologically useful.
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inspiring change.
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constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and
striving, building and conquering.
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our brains don’t register much difference between physical
pain and psychological pain.
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“Life is essentially an endless series of problems,
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solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next
one.”
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hope for a life full of good problems.”
Happiness Comes from Solving Problems
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Happiness Comes from Solving Problems
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Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or
upgraded.
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Happiness comes from solving problems.
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To be happy we need something to solve.
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Happiness is therefore a form of action;
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True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you
enjoy having and enjoy solving.
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1. Denial.
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2. Victim Mentality.
Emotions Are Overrated
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Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you
in the direction of beneficial change.
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negative emotions are a call to action.
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Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking
the proper action.
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Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the
entire equation.
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pain serves a purpose.
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our biology always needs something more.
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“hedonic treadmill”:
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problems are recursive and unavoidable.
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Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes
us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad.
Choose Your Struggle
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Choose Your Struggle
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“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to
struggle for?”
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settle.
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Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle
for.
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our struggles determine our successes.
CHAPTER 3: You Are Not Special
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delusional level of self-confidence.
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Sometime in the 1960s, developing “high self-esteem”—having
positive thoughts and feelings about oneself—became all the rage in psychology.
The Tyranny of Exceptionalism
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Even if you’re exceptional at one thing, chances are you’re
average or below average at most other things.
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few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing,
if anything at all.
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There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information
flowing past us constantly.
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Our lives today are filled with information from the
extremes of the bell curve of human experience,
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conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new
normal.
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more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and
addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing
or through other-aggrandizing.
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culture of entitlement
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mass-media-driven exceptionalism.
The Self-Awareness Onion
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Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers
to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start
crying at inappropriate times.
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It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying
blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions
appropriately. But this task is hugely important, and worth the effort.
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ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.
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Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do
something to change it.
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The third level is our personal values:
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our values determine the nature of our problems, and the
nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.
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Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately
comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.
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Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem
is not.
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We get to control what our problems mean based on how we
choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.
Rock Star Problems
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We’re apes.
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Our values determine the metrics by which we measure
ourselves and everyone else.
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If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to
change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Shitty Values
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Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you
get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will
naturally occur as a by-product.
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2. Material Success.
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The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right
about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.
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While there is something to be said for “staying on the
sunny side of life,” the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest
thing you can do is admit it.
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To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather
than solve them.
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Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life.
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these values—pleasure, material success, always being right,
staying positive—are poor ideals for a person’s life.
Defining Good and Bad Values
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Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive,
and 3) immediate and controllable.
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Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive,
and 3) not immediate or controllable.
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good, healthy values are achieved internally.
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These values are immediate and controllable and engage you
with the world as it is rather than how you wish it were.
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Bad values are generally reliant
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outside of your control and often require socially
destructive or superstitious means to achieve.
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priorities.
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What are the values that you prioritize above everything
else, and that therefore influence your decision-making more than anything
else?
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responsibility:
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taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your
life, regardless of who’s at fault.
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uncertainty:
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acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of
constant doubt in your own beliefs.
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failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and
mistakes so that they may be improved upon.
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rejection: the ability to both say and hear no,
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clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your
life.
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mortality;
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paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the
only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper
perspective.
The Choice
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we, individually, are responsible for everything in our
lives, no matter the external circumstances.
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We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always
control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
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What values are we choosing to base our actions on?
The Responsibility/Fault Fallacy
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We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all
the time. This is part of life.
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Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.
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Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you.
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you always get to choose how you see things, how you react
to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which
to measure your experiences.
CHAPTER 6: You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)
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doubt: doubt about our own
Kill Yourself
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define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways
possible.
How to Be a Little Less Certain of Yourself
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we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves.
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for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong
about something.
Pain Is Part of the Process
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Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone
and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional
resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally
happier life. Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail
end of our worst moments.
Rejection Makes Your Life Better
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to value something, we must reject what is not that
something.
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We are defined by what we choose to reject.
Something Beyond Our Selves
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“immortality projects,”
Posted by Via Syl at 3.11.18 No comments:
Labels: Manson - Mark — The Subtle Art
Levitin - Notes -Organized Mind
Notebook Export
Organized Mind : Thinking Straight in the Age of Information
Overload (9780698157224)
Levitin, Daniel J.
INTRODUCTION
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Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage
limitations so much as retrieval limitations.
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fondness for stories
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problems of storage, indexing, and accessing:
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most compelling properties of the human brain and its
design: richness and associative access. Richness refers to the theory
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Associative access means that your thoughts can be accessed
in a number of different
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ways
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by
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semantic or perceptual associations—memories
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random access.
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(sequential access).
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relational memory.
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attributes
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place memory system
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memory for facts and figures.
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The need for taking charge of our attentional and memory
systems has never been greater.
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Understanding how the brain’s attentional and memory systems
interact can go a long way toward minimizing memory lapses.
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An organized mind leads effortlessly to good
decision-making.
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science of social judgments and decision-making.
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evaluates evidence and processes information.
1. TOO MUCH INFORMATION, TOO MANY DECISIONS
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introductory course on the psychology of thinking and
reasoning.
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satisficing,
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organization theory and information processing.
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good enough. For things that don’t matter critically,
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reaching a kind of equilibrium between effort and
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benefit.
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cost-benefits analysis that is at the heart of satisficing
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decision overload.
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attentional restrictions,
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Attention is the most essential mental resource for any
organism.
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attentional filter.
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Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional
filter are change and importance.
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attention is a limited-capacity resource—there
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are definite limits to the number of things we can attend to
at once.
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inattentional blindness.
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external systems are available for organizing, categorizing,
and keeping track of things.
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Productivity and efficiency depend on systems that help us
organize through categorization.
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The drive to categorize developed in the prehistoric wiring
of our brains, in specialized neural systems that create and maintain
meaningful, coherent amalgamations of things—foods, animals, tools, tribe
members—in coherent categories.
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Fundamentally, categorization reduces mental effort and
streamlines the flow of information.
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The appearance of writing some 5,000 years ago was not met
with unbridled enthusiasm; many contemporaries saw it as technology gone too
far, a demonic invention that would rot the mind and needed to be stopped.
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The printing press was introduced in the mid 1400s, allowing
for the more rapid proliferation of writing, replacing laborious (and
error-prone) hand copying. Yet again, many complained that intellectual life as
we knew it was done for.
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Descartes famously recommended ignoring the accumulated
stock of texts and instead relying on one’s own observations.
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“Same as it ever was.”)
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we struggle to come to grips with what we really need to
know and what we
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don’t.
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evolutionarily outdated attentional system. I mentioned
earlier the two principles
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of the attentional filter: change and importance.
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difficulty of attentional switching.
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Switching attention comes with a high cost.
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Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to
focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.
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our brains flit from one to the other, each time with a
neurobiological switching cost.
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Attention is a limited-capacity resource.
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This vigilance system incorporating the attentional filter
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is always at work, even when you’re asleep, monitoring the
environment for important events.
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shadow work—it represents a kind of parallel, shadow economy
in which a lot of the service we expect from companies has been transferred to
the customer.
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neuroattentional resources with the things we need to know
to live
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it’s not that we need to take in less information but that
we need to have
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systems for organizing it.
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We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive
biases.
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decision-making shortcuts.
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The formation of categories in humans is guided by a
cognitive principle of wanting to encode as much information as possible with
the least possible
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effort. Categorization systems optimize the ease of
conception and the importance of being able to communicate about those systems.
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6,000 languages known to be spoken on the planet today,
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Kinship
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classifications have their roots in animal behavior, so they
can be said to be precognitive.
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distinctions most important to a culture become encoded in
that culture’s language.
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Those who were interested in acquiring knowledge—whose
brains enjoyed learning new things—would have been at an advantage for
survival, and so this love of learning would eventually become encoded in their
genes through natural selection.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss,
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human brain has a strong cognitive propensity toward order.
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brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when
we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an
ordered structure.
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We humans are hardwired to enjoy knowledge, in particular
knowledge that comes through the senses.
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We are hardwired to impose structure on the world.
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Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus
distracting knowledge.
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active sorting,
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using the physical world to organize your mind.
2. THE FIRST THINGS TO GET STRAIGHT
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default mode. This mode is a resting brain state,
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stay-on-task mode is the other dominant mode
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central executive.”
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mind-wandering mode is a network,
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the attentional filter is constantly monitoring the environment
for anything that might be important.
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This switch enables shifts from one task to another,
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insula has bidirectional connections to an important brain
part called the anterior cingulate cortex.
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internal dialogues
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Your brain, however, is a
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collection of semidistinct, special-purpose processing
units.
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The inner dialogue is generated by the planning centers of
your brain in the prefrontal cortex, and the questions are being answered by
other parts of your brain that possess the information.
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The attentional network has to monitor all these activities
and allocate resources to some and not to others.
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We feel that there is an internal narrator of our lives up
here in
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our heads,
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To recap, there are four components in the human attentional
system: the mind-wandering mode, the central executive mode, the attentional
filter, and the attentional switch, which directs neural and metabolic
resources among the mind-wandering, stay-on-task, or vigilance modes.
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to the moment of putting them down. The remedy is to
practice mindfulness and attentiveness, to train ourselves to a Zen-like focus
of living in the moment, of paying attention whenever we put things down or put
things away. That little bit of focus goes a long way in training the brain
(specifically the hippocampus) to remember where we put things, because we’re
invoking the central executive to help with encoding the moment. Having systems
like key hooks, cell phone trays, and a special hook or drawer for sunglasses
externalizes the effort so that we don’t have to keep everything in our heads.
Externalizing memory is an idea that goes back to the Greeks, and its
effectiveness has been confirmed many times over by contemporary neuroscience.
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remembering is imperfect;
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Memory is fiction.
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Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting.
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the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or
have a strong emotional component.
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Your memory merges similar events not only because it’s more
efficient to do so, but also because this is fundamental to how we learn
things—our brains extract abstract rules that tie experiences together.
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neurochemical tags,
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Labels: Levitin - Notes -Organized Mind
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