“I’m a scientist, self-help is not what I do,” Levitin said. “If The Organized Mind was going to have tips, I wanted them to be grounded in science.”

Or math, in the case of “Organizing Information for the Hardest Decisions,” one of the book’s most compelling and sure-to-be-useful chapters. Indeed, Levitin devises a kind of logarithm for dealing with life-and-death medical decisions, a formula that begins with him encouraging readers to become “the CEO of their own health care.”

Another useful tip from The Organized Mind: no multitasking. That uniquely contemporary activity is, according to the latest scientific evidence, a disaster of misguided effort. According to neuroscientists, multitasking not only causes information “to go to the wrong part of the brain,” it plays havoc with our ability to make effective decisions.

Still, it would be easy to mistake Levitin’s own surplus of interests as a kind of multitasking: he dropped out of university as a young man to pursue a successful career as a session musician, music producer, and music journalist; then, a decade later, he dropped out of the music business to earn a PhD in psychology.

“For the past few years, I’ve been playing music professionally, running a lab, writing books, and teaching. It’s true that I’ve always pursued two or three different interests with great enthusiasm, but it’s not multitasking in the main definition of the term. I try to structure my day so I’m never doing more than one thing at a time. Think of it as multiple tasking,” Levitin said. And if his interests – in music and neuroscience, for instance – connect in interesting and surprising ways, you could argue the same is true for the connections in the brain that Levitin has spent a life- time studying. The Organized Mind is all about the unlikely, sometimes unexpected links between disparate things: from how our memory really works to the real reason we keep junk drawers. (The common denominator: junk drawers counterbalance the profound unreliability of memory.)

For all its advice on effective time-management and organizational skills, The Organized Mind also makes room for serendipity. The more information we have easy access to, the more important it becomes not only to filter out what we don’t need to know, but also to figure out what we want to know. According to Levitin, “the twenty-first century’s information problem is one of selection.”

Levitin practiced what he preached while writing The Organized Mind, allowing himself to be guided whenever possible by serendipity. He did research in libraries and not exclusively on the Internet, often discovering books and ideas he wasn’t looking for and didn’t even know he was interested in. “The thing about Google and Wikipedia is that they take you exactly where you want to go. I found I didn’t always want to take the direct path.”