[저녁독서중]The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload / Daniel J. Levitin

• INTRODUCTION: Information and conscientious organization
• PART ONE

1. Too much information, too many decisions : the inside history of cognitive overload
- Fundamentally, categorization reduces mental effort and streamlines the flow of information.

- Information Overload, Then and Now

 

2. The first things to get straight : how attention and memory work

• PART TWO
  3. Organizing our homes : where things can start to get better
  4. Organizing our social world : how humans connect now
  5. Organizing our time : what is the mystery?
  6. Organizing information for the hardest decisions : when life is on the line
  7. Organizing the business world : how we create value
• PART THREE
  8. What to teach our children : the future of the organized mind
  9. Everything else : the power of the junk drawer
• Appendix: Constructing your own fourfold tables.

 

The appearance of writing some 5,000 years was not met with unbridled enthusiasm.

- unbridled: not controlled or limited: done, felt, or expressed in a free and uncontrolled way. "The crowd was swept with unbridled enthusiasm."

 

Then, as now, printed words were promiscuous--it was impossible to control where they went or who would receive them, and they could circulate easily without the author's knowledge or control.

 

Lacking the opportunity to hear information directly from a speaker's mouth, the antiwriting contingent complained that it would be impossible to verify the accruacy of the writer's claims, or to ask follow-up questions.

 

Even Plato voiced these fears; his King THamus decried that the dependence on wirtten words would "Weaken men's characters and create forgetfulness in their soulds."

 

Brevity is often thought of as a virtue, but then again. the whole point of a book is that you don't have to be brief.

- brevity: concise and exact use of words in writing

 

Yet again. many complained that intellectual life as we knew it was done for.

 

Leibniz complained about "that horrible mass of books that keeps on growing" and that would ultimately end in nothing less than a "return to barbarism."

The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.