Daniel Levitin Quotes
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Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.
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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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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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A gene that promotes nurturing behavior postcopulation could... spread throughout the population, to the extent that the offspring of people with the nurturing gene fare better, as a group, in the competition for resources and mates.
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Healthy breaks can hit the reset button in your brain, restoring some of the glucose and other metabolic nutrients used up with deep thought. A healthy break is one in which you allow your brain to rest, to loosen its grip on your thoughts.
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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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Through studies of music and the brain, we've learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing, and perception - and production of sequences. They've told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation.
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There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists - and the rest of us - must stop giving equal time to things that don't have an opposing side.
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Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.
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We've always known that music is good for improving your mood.
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If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.
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I've always been interested in peak performance, why some people do better in life than others.
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The brain is very good at self-delusion.
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Music's evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans; it has been around for a long time; it involves specialized brain structures... and it is analogous to music making in other species.
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Our species uses music and dance to express various feelings: love, joy, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, and friendship. And each one is distinct and widely recognized within cultures. Love songs cause us to move slowly and fluidly, for example, while songs of joy inspire us to dance in a full-body aerobic way.
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Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life.
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We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.
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Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don't bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.
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If you hear on the weather report that it's going to rain tomorrow, rather than reminding yourself to bring your umbrella, set the umbrella by the front door - now the environment is reminding you to bring the umbrella.
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The emerging picture from... studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of master associated with being a world-class expert-in anything.
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Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.
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An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.
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Use the environment to remind you of what needs to be done. If you're afraid you'll forget to buy milk on the way home, put an empty milk carton on the seat next to you in the car or in the backpack you carry to work on the subway.
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What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.