Executive Planning - The Organizer

Memory Tip

The Brainwaves Center and Brainwaves Books

Brain Basics Glossary Brain Functions

The Organizer

Even the messiest human brain loves to organize things. As a species, we feel uncomfortable with randomness. We like to figure things out and gain control over them. In fact, when you organize and categorize data your brain releases natural chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin (sarah-tone-in), which make you feel a sense of satisfaction. That is one reason you feel good when you solve a puzzle.

Our organizing impulse lies at the root of our evolutionary success, and of almost all the cognitive skills we value. Even our instincts, gut reactions, irrational urges, and visceral emotions are things we try to analyze, organize, and control. Those who make a living doing that are called psychologists or marketing executives.

You’ve heard of the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. You’ll probably remember that she had a lot of children. It’s less well known that all her kids had serious food allergies, which posed quite a challenge come mealtime.

Seven were allergic to wheat.
Six were allergic to seafood.
Five were allergic to dairy products.
Four of the kids who were allergic to wheat were also allergic to seafood.
Three who couldn’t eat wheat also couldn’t eat dairy products.
Two who were allergic to seafood also couldn’t eat dairy products.
One of the children had allergies to all three.

How many children did she have?

Mom and kids

Try a Graphic Organizer
A puzzle like the one at left can be confusing. But it’s easy to get the answer as long as you organize the information in the right way. You can do that with a Venn diagram. Draw three overlapping circles, with each circle representing one of the food allergies.

Venn Diagram Start in the middle of the diagram. One of the children had allergies to all three foods, so put a “1” in the space where all three circles overlap. Two were allergic to seafood and dairy products; one of those two was the poor kid in the middle of the diagram (who also couldn’t eat wheat) so you only need one more — so put a “1” where the seafood and dairy product circles overlap. Keep going to the beginning of the list, then just add up the numbers. Simple, right? It’s all in the organization!

The Key
Organization is a key to problem-solving. It is also a key to memory. Patterns of data are easier to recall than random scatterings, meaningful things are easier to memorize than meaningless ones, and things that are related to each other are easier to remember than things that aren’t.

Left-Hemisphere Logic
The organizing skills par excellence are language, logic, and math. Those are largely left-brain skills, and it’s our brain’s left hemisphere that is usually viewed as the analytical, logical, order-imposing side. The left hemisphere takes things apart to see how they work, and it excels at step-by-step sequential reasoning. The right side takes things more on their own terms, and appreciates the forest without feeling the need to identify and classify every tree within it.

Like Dutch artist M.C. Escher’s impossible worlds where one man’s up is another man’s down or where water flows uphill, “impossible” objects like this are composed of entirely ordinary individual elements. It’s only when they’re combined and viewed as a whole that the impossibility emerges.

Right-Brained Visualization
The “forest” and “trees” approaches both have their merits. In the dictionary, the word science is right next to the word scissors, and many of our most impressive scientific discoveries have come from disassembling and dissecting things. But the left-brain approach has its limits. You can’t understand a cat’s purr by dissecting the cat, and jokes never retain their humor when subjected to dry academic analysis. Our visualization skills are right-brain-based, as well as our social and emotional skills. Skills of spatial construction reside largely in the right brain, too. So you can see that it’s not really true that the right brain goofs off while the left brain organizes. They just have different ways of figuring things out.