Researchers call this mode 'the central executive.' This is the mode you use when you are doing your taxes, writing a report, or trying to drive in a foreign country. The second component is the 'stay-on-task' mode. Basically, whenever you are NOT focused on a task, you are in daydreaming mode. The interesting thing is that scientists have uncovered that this is the default state of your mind. This is where you envision the future, projecting yourself into a situation and imagine how that encounter might play out. The first component is something we call daydreaming mode. There are four main components of the human attentional system, which is what drives who and what you pay attention to.

In order to understand how to have a well-organized mind, we need to know how our minds organize themselves. To understand why this is important, let's take a look at how memory and attention work. Once you've exhausted the limit of your brain's decision-making capacity for the day, you are unable to make good decisions, and ultimately you are unable to do great work. This means that every status updates you read on Facebook and every text message you get from a friend is competing for resources in your brain with more important things like how to finish that project that's due by the end of the day.

Your brain seems to have the ability to make a certain number of decisions every day, and once we reach that limit, we can't make anymore, regardless of how important they are. Second, this means that you need to make decisions about who and what to pay attention to throughout the day. Multi-tasking is a myth - your brain simply doesn't have the capacity to do it. The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at approximately 120 bits per second, which means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. What does this have to do with your mind and how well it's organized?įirst, your brain evolved to focus on one thing at a time.

The average person watches 5 hours of television each day, which is the equivalent of processing 20 gigabytes of audio-visual images. Each of us processes about 100,000 words a day through all of the messages we are exposed to. Each day we are confronted with an unprecedented amount of information.

The organised mind daniel levitin