Daniel Levitin Quotes
-
One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.
-
As a tool for the activation of specific thoughts, music is as good as language. The combination of the two-as best exemplified in the love song-is the best courtship of all.
-
Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we've all made.
-
The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag... Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle...
-
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.
-
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.
-
People who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.
-
Google is a company whose very existence depends on innovation - on inventing things that are new and didn't exist before - and on refining existing ideas and technologies to allow consumers to do things they couldn't do before.
-
Procrastination comes in two types. Some of us procrastinate in order to pursue restful activities - spending time in bed, watching TV - while others delay difficult or unpleasant tasks in favor of those that are more fun.
-
The rest-seeking procrastinators would generally rather not exert themselves at all, while the fun-task procrastinators enjoy being busy and active all the time but have a hard time starting things that are not so amusing.
-
People have different styles: Some are filers and some are pilers. The people who pile things often know exactly where things are, and they're often just as organized as the people who file things.
-
Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.
-
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.
-
If you're studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you're automatically paying less attention to the other.
-
Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans.
-
Anything you care about, from vacation plans to exercise to the best Ethiopian restaurant, is going to be guided by your individual search history.
-
Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.
-
I'm a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.
-
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.
-
Unfortunately, often found next to things that are true are an enormous number of things that are not - in websites, videos, books and on social media.
-
Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots. ...Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard. ...harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.
-
Most jobs require some degree of creativity and flexible thinking.
-
Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.
-
Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice.