Daniel Levitin Quotes
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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.
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I reject the notion of a post-truth area. I don't believe there is such a thing, and we shouldn't accept that.
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Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.
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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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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.
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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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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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We can say that speaking French 'runs in families,' but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.
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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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What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.
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Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.
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In songbirds, it is generally the male of the species that sings, and for some species, the larger the repertoire, the more likely it is to attract a mate.
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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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The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.
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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...
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There are people from lots of different fields in my department. In my lab, they come from computer science, education, psychophysics, psychology, music - and we all work together, and it feels very comfortable. All the careers I've had have been interdisciplinary; working in a studio is like being an engineer and a musician and a therapist.
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There are a lot of books about how to get organized and a lot of books about how to be better and more productive at business, but I don't know of one that grounds any of these in the science.
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The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you've got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they're competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you're actually trying to do, like getting your work done.
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I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?
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Singing and dancing have been shown to modulate brain chemistry, specifically levels of dopamine, the 'feel good' neurotransmitter.
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Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
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One big promise of the Internet was that it would be a great democratizing force, allowing us to become exposed to new ideas that we might not otherwise encounter in our town, workplace or social circle.
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I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.
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As soon as you hear a proposition, the creative brain in humans assumes for the moment that it's true, and starts trying to find evidence. It's what computer scientists in the old days used to call 'Fifo:' first in, first out. The first piece of information that gets in has a privileged position, even if it's misinformation.