Daniel J. Levitin

Non più di tre stelle. Il libro non mi ha detto molto su come organizzare la mente per il semplice fatto che non ancora sappiamo come la mente funziona. Non sono uno scienziato, uno studioso della mente, sono soltanto uno che, come tutti, una mente ce l'ha e vorrebbe farla funzionare meglio. In questo caso si parla di organizzazione, qualcosa di più, ed è in questo che il libro difetta. Possiamo organizzare qualcosa soltanto se conosciamo con che cosa abbiamo a che fare. La mente umana show more non è un algoritmo, un programma, è certamente "qualcosa" di più. Presuntuoso parlare di organizzare ... show less

I started reading The Organized Mind and have abandoned it as life is too short to waste time on verbose trivia.

In abandoning this book I am applying the author's approach to dealing with information overload: filtering out trivia.

The Introduction takes up fourteen pages to say what could be said in one: Our minds are overloaded by the amount of information we receive and the number of decisions we have to make. Reduce the load on your mind by filtering out trivial information and not show more wasting time making decisions on trivial issued. Oh! I said it in two sentences.

The main text is no less verbose. It contains endless anecdotes of people being overloaded with information and exhausted from making decisions. On page 77 it starts to offer advice on how to declutter. This too is verbose and tiresome.

I quickly got to the point of skimming by reading the first sentences of paragraphs. That only led me to the conclusion that most of the paragraphs were unnecessary.

As Levitin advises, avoid wasting your time on unimportant things. He is right. Apply his approach and avoid this book. show less

We are drowning in information. Levitin illustrates this with a biological example (15). Google Scholar reports 30,000 research articles on the nervous system of a squid. You can have a PhD in biology and never know all that’s been written on the topic!

This superabundance of accessible information has left us confused. We waste our time away making meaningless decisions that would not have been a matter of choice a few decades ago. This plethora of information can leave us overwhelmed. We show more have this vague sense that we can’t quite keep on top of everything we should know.

Daniel Levitin draws on scientific research studies as well as time management gurus to help us understand the problem. More than that, he offers practical ways for us to (as the subtitle says), think “straight in an age of information overload.”

One of the most interesting parts of Levitin’s book was his attack on the myth of multi-tasking. While we think we can do many things at once, “what we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task” (306). This leads to two problems:

1. We don’t devote enough attention to any one task.
2. We decrease the quality of our attention to a task.

Levitin is aware that self-professed multitaskers will disagree with this research. In one of the best scientific jargon-laden insults I’ve read, “a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great” (306). Uni-taskers unite!

Multitasking is just a small part of this 500 page book (400+notes and index) in which every section had something interesting and enlightening to offer. If you want to understand more about how your mind works and how you can stay in control of the modern information torrent, Levitin is a great guide. show less

Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist who is also a musician and former record producer, so he would seem to be uniquely qualified to write a book like this, about how music has shaped the human mind and how the human mind has shaped music.

The "six songs" of the title are actually six categories of song, which Levitin believes can be used to describe the various functions of music in human society: songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love. He regards this as an show more exhaustive list. I am unconvinced by that, personally, although I will say that it's at least closer to exhaustive then you might think, as he defines these categories very broadly. "Friendship" songs, for example, are defined as any (non-religious) songs that function to bind people together, including national anthems, work songs designed to establish the rhythm of a task, and songs associated with a particular movement or group.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I think it contains a lot of interesting and often insightful commentary on music, the role it plays in human society and the effect it can have on us as individuals. I found the chapter on "knowledge songs" particularly interesting. Here, Levitin discusses the fact that we remember things much better if we learn them in the form of a song, which, when you stop to think about it, is both obvious and kind of strange. He also talks about techniques that make songs easier to memorize, which is extremely important in cultures without writing, where all knowledge and all stories must be passed on orally. And he considers the idea that many songs are written to remind the writer of their own experiences and the life lessons they have learned, and to share those experiences and lessons with others. There's some thought-provoking stuff here.

As a popular science book, though, I think it's less successful. A lot of his discussions about music and the brain seem rather simplistic to me, and to imply a lot more scientific certainty and scientific understanding than we really have yet about how anything this complex works in the brain. (Although Levitin has apparently written a previous book specifically about music and the brain, so it's possible he deals with the subject in a more nuanced way there and has deliberately simplified things a bit here to avoid going over too much of the same ground.) Also, while his more general explanations about evolution are fine, the specific ideas he presents about how music might have influenced human evolution and vice versa are really speculative. Evolutionary psychology is often criticized for making up "Just So Stories." I think that's often kind of an unfair characterization, but there are places here where it most definitely applies.

Levitin can also get a bit rambly and is sometimes prone to repeating himself. And while his tendency to include his own experiences with music provides a nice personal touch, I think there are parts of the book where he lets it all become a little bit too much about him for just a little too long.

Bottom line: It's worth reading and sometimes fascinating, but flawed, and some of it is probably best taken with a grain of salt. show less