This is your Brain on Big Data: A Review of “The Organized Mind” by Stephen Few.
From the post:
In the past few years, several fine books have been written by neuroscientists. In this blog I’ve reviewed those that are most useful and placed Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast & Slow at the top of the heap. I’ve now found its worthy companion: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.
This new book by Daniel J. Levitin explains how our brains have evolved to process information and he applies this knowledge to several of the most important realms of life: our homes, our social connections, our time, our businesses, our decisions, and the education of our children. Knowing how our minds manage attention and memory, especially their limitations and the ways that we can offload and organize information to work around these limitations, is essential for anyone who works with data.
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See Stephen’s review for an excerpt from the introduction and summary comments on the work as a whole.
I am particularly looking forward to reading Levitin’s take on the transfer of information tasks to us and the resulting cognitive overload.
I don’t have the volume, yet, but it occurs to me that the shift from indexes (Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and the like) and librarians to full text search engines, is yet another example of the transfer of information tasks to us.
Indexers and librarians do a better job of finding information than we do because discovery of information is a difficult intellectual task. Well, perhaps, discovering relevant and useful information is a difficult task. Almost without exception, every search produces a result on major search engines. Perhaps not a useful result but a result none the less.
Using indexers and librarians will produce a line item in someone’s budget. What is needed is research on the differential between the results from indexer/librarians versus us and what that translates to as a line item in enterprise budgets.
That type of research could influence university, government and corporate budgets as the information age moves into high gear.
The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin is a must have for the holiday wish list!