BR_The Organized Brain

Question 1

P. 49 through P. 78.

Answer 1

• Memory is unreliable because the untrained brain has a crappy filing system. It takes everything that happens to you and throws it all willy-nilly into a big dark closet.
• If you can attend to one of the things on your to do list inl less than two minutes, do it now!
• Anything that takes more than two minutes to deal with, you defer. You might be deferring only until later today, but you defer it long enough to get through your list of two-minute tasks.
• Kitchen. Something as basic as the kitchen–didn’t exist in European homes until a few hundred years ago. Untill 1600, the typical European home has a single room, and families would crowd around the fire most of the year to keep warm.

Question 2

P. 96 through P. 97.

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new–the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens.

Answer 2

• The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: The very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the Internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty seeking, reward seeking centers of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!) [MN: Multitasking is simply an illusion. Even a computer cannot do it. A computer can switch task at the speed of light, creating the illusion it is working hard on several tasks at the same time.]
• Multitasking is the ultimate brain candy.
• Multitaslking interferes profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking.

Question 3

P. 110 through P. 162.

Answer 3

• HT organize special smaller items. Put them in individual ziplock bags along with a piece of notepaper stating what object they are for and keep all these bags in a shoe box labeled THINGS I WILL NEED.
• Today, 50% of Americans live alone.
• Using a tickler. A tickler is a reminder, something that tickles your memory.
• People in a relationship experience better health, recover from illnesses more quickly, and live longer. Indeed, the presence of a satisfying intimate relationship is one of the strongest predictors of happiness and emotional well being that has ever been measured.
• There is no color in the physical world, just light of different wavelengths reflecting off of objects; as Newton said, the light waves themselves are colorless.
• Our entire sense of color results from the visual cortex in our brains processing these wavelengths and interpreting them as color.

Question 4

P. 164 Through P. 206.

Answer 4

• The current practice of dividing the clock into 24 comes from the ancient Egyptians, who divided the day into ten parts and then added an hour for each of the ambiguous periods of twilight.
• Wildlife. In the harsh conditions of the wild, most species do not live long enough to age.
• Roughly 150,000 people who die in the world each day.
• Flow occurs when you are not explicitly thinking about what you are doing; rather, your brain is in a special mode of activity in which procedures and operations are performed automatically without your having to exert conscious control. This is why practice and expertise are prerequisites for flow. Musicians who have learned their scales can play them without explicitly concentrating on them, based on motor memory.

Question 5

P. 213 Through P 250.

Answer 5

• I will set a tickler, a reminder in the calendar three weeks before it is due. That is a week before the two weeks he needs to do it. So that he can start thinking about it and know that it is coming up. Then another tickler on the day he is suppose to start working on it, and ticklers every day to make sure he is doing it.
• For most of human history, from around 10,000 BCE to 1820, our life expectancy was capped at about 25 years. World life expectancy since then has increased to more than 60 years, and since 1979, U.S. life expectancy has risen from 71 to 79.