Daniel Levitin Quotes
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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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We've always known that music is good for improving your mood.
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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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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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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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You're entitled your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
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Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females.
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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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Because you've been exposed to Western tonal music, you know after a certain chord sequence what the next possibilities are. Your brain has compiled a statistical map of which ones are most likely and least likely. If the song keeps hitting the most likely notes, you'll get bored, and if it's always the least likely ones, you'll get irritated.
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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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If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.
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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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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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An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.
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The brain is very good at self-delusion.
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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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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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Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. ...that is a feature of the musical brain.
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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.
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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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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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We need to take a step back and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don't want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don't want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.
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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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We need to support the media by subscribing to newspapers and magazines and supporting their advertisers to stay in business. And we need to be less greedy and allow journalists to take the time to pull the story together.