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The brain is very good at self-delusion.
Daniel Levitin -
I've always been interested in peak performance, why some people do better in life than others.
Daniel Levitin
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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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin
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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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.
Daniel Levitin -
If you aren't taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won't benefit from that extra cup of coffee.
Daniel Levitin
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The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.
Daniel Levitin -
I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
It's not just that we remember things wrongly, but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads.
Daniel Levitin
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Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. ...Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings.
Daniel Levitin -
We've always known that music is good for improving your mood.
Daniel Levitin -
The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song-rhythm, melody, contour-cause music to stick in our heads. That is the reason why many ancient myths, epics, and even the Old Testament were set to music in preparation for being passed down by oral tradition across generations.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin