Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.

It seems like I'm thinking 400 hours a day; that's kind of how it feels.

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

... he was juggling issues and solving problems, which was why his brain had no space left for memories.

This was just no fun. I wanted my brain back.

If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else...

What’s burning?” “Your brain.

I don’t want to start thinking again. Not like I have this last week. I can’t think again. Not ever again.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it.

Two languages in one brain? No one can live at that speed!

and just like that, I shut off the switch to my brain.

I wished there was some kind of switch on my brain. That I could turn it off in the same way that I could turn off the television. Just click it off and immediately empty my mind of all these images and worrying thoughts. And simply leave a blank screen. Or if I could just remove my head and put it on the bedside table and forget about it until morning. And then attach it again when I needed it.

When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general well-being suffers a palpable hit.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

Thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in the world.

The abstract intelligence produces a fatigue that's the worst of all fatigues. It doesn't weigh on us like bodily fatigue, nor disconcert like the fatigue of emotional experience. It's the weight of our consciousness of the world, a shortness of breath in our soul.

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.

My brain's just full of passwords.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

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.

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.