# The Organized Mind - Author: [Daniel Levitin](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin.md) - Quotes: 15 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind ## Quotes > Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/recent-research-in-social.md) > You’d think people would realize they’re bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/youd-think-people.md) > In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/in-1976-the.md) > Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, “When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world . . . Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/former-secretary-of-state.md) > Memory is fallible... not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/memory-is-fallible.md) > Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/out-of-30-000.md) > Evolution doesn't design things... The brain is... like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/evolution-doesnt-design.md) > Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. ...If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition... leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes... leaving you with nothing. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/thinking-about-one.md) > An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/an-organized-mind.md) > Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/prior-to-the.md) > Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/fondness-for-stories.md) > The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/the-most-fundamental.md) > Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. ...Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior ...we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/most-of-us-have.md) > The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/the-information-age.md) > It's not just that we remember things wrongly, but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-levitin/the-organized-mind/its-not-just.md)