Daniel Levitin Quotes
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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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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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The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.
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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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If you're making a bunch of little decisions - like, do I read this email now or later? Do I file it? Do I forward it? Do I have to get more information? Do I put it in the spam folder? - that's a handful of decisions right there, and you haven't done anything meaningful. It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue.
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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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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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In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.
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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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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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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.
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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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The history of science and culture is filled with stories of how many of the greatest scientific and artistic discoveries occurred while the creator was not thinking about what he was working on, not consciously anyway - the daydreaming mode solved the problem for him, and the answer appeared suddenly as a stroke of insight.
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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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Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
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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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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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Memory for playing a musical piece... involves a process very much like that for music listening... through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking... tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces.
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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.
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On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.
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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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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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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.
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An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.