The Organized Mind: Not Organized for My Mind

What follows is a poorly informed review of a partially thumbed-through book by an unqualified reader. Viewer discretion is advised.

One of the tragic things about living out in the suburbs is the lack of interconnected libraries. My little family and I bit the bullet last week and bought a library card from the nearest connected town and grabbed a few books. I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve been enjoying the freedom to check out from the world for a little bit by escaping into the little world contained within the pages.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just leave well enough alone and just find fun books. Oh no. I feel like I need to squeeze some productivity out of my down time, secretly working on improving my mind so that I can return to the corporate Thunderdome with a freshly fueled metaphorical chainsaw of organized thought. So when I chanced upon “The Organized Mind” By Daniel Levitin, I eagerly launched in, notecards at the ready.

It turns out, I will keep on waiting for that mental transformation, because I just couldn’t get into the blasted thing.

I’m sure it’s not the book itself. Much more likely to be my own expectations and preferences I’m bringing into the experience, but man does this book drag. Levitin certainly did his research, I’ll give him that. The appendix is longer than the book itself. But you’ll have to forgive me if “organized” was not how I found it. The author gives so many examples from so many areas to talk about so many things. In just a few pages, there are pop science psychology stories like the Basketball Passing attention blindness, and singing the praises of “Highly Effective People” who can be so much more than all the lowly folks like you and me because they have effectively delegated every possible decision out to someone else. I just couldn’t keep following all the facts and figures and statistics and quotes from famous people and anecdotes about CEOs and how magical it is to talk to them because they are really present, ya know?

To keep with the title, I suppose every now and then he does throw a quasi-practical tidbit of advice out there like “Try putting a key hook or a bowl near your front door so you don’t forget where your keys are in your squalid little hole where you can’t afford to hire a key manager like the truly Highly Effective People.“

Who knows? This might be someone’s key to understanding the brain and how it all works, but I think I’ve absorbed enough from other books about pop psychology and “self improvement” that I didn’t have the patience to deal with this one. I gave up and started flipping through, skimming chapters looking for any possible indication that it gets any less wander-y as the introduction solidifies the ground work, but about 30 pages later, he’s waxing philosophic about company org charts and how hierarchies and 3x5 note cards are exactly like how the mind works, if you think about it. (Grossly oversimplifying here, but dear heavens was it boring and meandering, and I made it through a course on Discrete Finite Automata with only one embarrassing sobbing breakdown in the lobby of a Chipotle that semester.)

I can handle boring, dry works of literature when the situation calls for it. But that’s the beauty of reading for fun: As soon as it stops being fun, you can stop reading and switch to something else.

Total opposite end of the spectrum, I’m really digging “The Martian.” It’s about as low-brow pop sci-fi as you can get, but hey. Sometimes the snarky foul-mouthed astronaut beating the odds by surviving a nearly impossible situation is just the kind of pulp I want to consume. Maybe I’ll try later to plumb the depths of the human mind. For now, my Idaho upbringing really just makes me want to root for the potato farmer on another world.