Organized Mind : Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

id you ever wonder why, if someone asks you to name a bunch of red things, you can do it so quickly? It’s because by concentrating on the thought red, represented here by a neural node, you’re sending electrochemical activation through the network and down the branches to everything else in your brain that connects to it. Below, I’ve overlaid additional information that resides in a typical neural network that begins with fire truck—nodes for other things that are red, for other things that have a siren, and so forth.

limited and unlikely set of circumstances often pop to mind and overwhelm statistical information based on a large number of observations that would be far more accurate in helping us to make sound decisions about medical treatments, investments, or the trustworthiness of people in our social world. This fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.

The researchers hypothesized that this created a template by which their brains could organize and store just the sort of generalized information that would be necessary to succeed at the game.