Daniel Levitin Quotes
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Most jobs require some degree of creativity and flexible thinking.
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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.
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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.
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Memory is fallible... not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.
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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.
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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.
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Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody-the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes-regardless of the size of the interval.
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The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.
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If you aren't taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won't benefit from that extra cup of coffee.
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The electric guitar and its players hold a place of privilege in the annals of rock music. It is the engine, the weapon, the ax of rock.
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The phrase 'fake news' sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.
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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.
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President Trump, when challenged on facts, says that many people feel the way he does. But feelings should not take the place of reason in matters of public policy.
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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.
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The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.
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The brain is very good at self-delusion.
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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.