Mental Organization Quotes

My mind is a chest of drawers. When I wish to deal with a subject, I shut all the drawers but the one in which the subject is to be found. When I am wearied, I shut all the drawers and go to sleep.

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

I usually write things in my head before I ever write them down. When I write it out, usually I've already figured out what it is I'm trying to do.

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

Writing is thought crystalized on a piece of paper, which can then be reviewed.

Women should learn from men to compartmentalize. It's a great skill that some women have naturally but others have to practice. The goal is to keep one area of your life that might not be going well from causing unnecessary disruptions in another area.

Moving and motion tends to make things pop up. But things pop up for me, really, at just odd intervals or at random times that aren't really convenient, so I'm a big fan of the voice memo recorder on my phone. That's the only way I can remember things.

Sometimes writing it is a good way to understand something.

When everything has its proper place in our minds, we are able to stand in equilibrium with the rest of the world.

One way to organize your thoughts is to tidy up, even if it's in places where it makes no sense at all.

When I write a note, it sticks in my head differently.

I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I've only ever had one.

Over time, I've paid attention, taken notes and forgotten easily half of everything I've gone through.

Getting things straight in your head is a major achievement because there's so much clutter out there. You've got to push aside the static to really hear the music.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

People are so... seem so chaotic internally, but being filtered through some form, like making a record, sort of filters it down into something that can be understood.

Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that a man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?

I like order. It allows me to have chaos in my head.

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes-as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.

I always compartmentalized so many different things.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

Writing, for me, is an extension of thinking - it's my way of processing, and only when I've gotten something down on the page have I thought through it fully.