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If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory.
Daniel Levitin -
Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.
Daniel Levitin
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I don't think I'm always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.
Daniel Levitin -
I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.
Daniel Levitin -
That daydreaming mode turns out to be restorative. It's like hitting the reset button in your brain. And you don't get in that daydreaming mode typically by texting and Facebooking. You get in it by disengaging.
Daniel Levitin -
The argument is that there may be a cluster of genes that influences both outgoingness and musicality. If this were true, we would expect to find that deviations in one ability co-occur with deviations in the other, as we do in WS and ASD.
Daniel Levitin -
We need to blinker ourselves, to better monitor our attentional focus. Enforced periods of no email or Internet to allow us to sustain concentration have been shown to be tremendously helpful. And breaks - even a 15-minute break every two or three hours - make us more productive in the long run.
Daniel Levitin -
We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing.
Daniel Levitin
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Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems. ...Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.
Daniel Levitin -
Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.
Daniel Levitin -
That walk around the block, that fresh air, is going to help you work more quickly and effectively when you get back.
Daniel Levitin -
If we are to appropriate money for roads, we need statistics on how bad our roads really are and, moreover, where more roads will be beneficial - it would be irresponsible to just build them where our gut tells us to.
Daniel Levitin -
For language to be generative, children must not be learning by rote. Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note... to generate a new musical phrase.
Daniel Levitin -
Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.
Daniel Levitin
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We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.
Daniel Levitin -
When it comes to snowing people, one effective technique is to get a whole bunch of verifiable facts right and then add one or two that are untrue.
Daniel Levitin -
Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space (or frequency space) takes the place of three-dimensional physical space... frequency maps in the auditory cortex... function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex.
Daniel Levitin -
I reject the notion of a post-truth area. I don't believe there is such a thing, and we shouldn't accept that.
Daniel Levitin -
Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.
Daniel Levitin -
We're a social species, and we want to get along with the people we like and who are like us. That's just good adaptive behaviour. We're more likely to accept something if we hear it from a friend, whereas we're sceptical of people who are not like us - which is what leads to racism, nationalism, sexism and all forms of bigotry.
Daniel Levitin
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Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.
Daniel Levitin -
Myelin is a fatty substance that coats the axons, speeding up synaptic transmission. Myelanation... is generally completed by age twenty. Multiple sclerosis is one of several degenerative diseases that can affect the myelin sheath...
Daniel Levitin -
When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.
Daniel Levitin -
Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.
Daniel Levitin