Daniel Levitin Quotes
-
Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don't bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Maybe instead of asking political candidates to submit tax returns, we really should be asking to see their brain scans.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.
-
Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex.
-
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.
-
The left brain is responsible for making order out of chaos, for making sense of things in the world that don't always add up. To do this, it often makes up stories, fantastic confabulations in some cases, just to be able to explain what we're experiencing.
-
Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago.
-
On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species' history.
-
Across a range of inferences involving not just language but mathematics, logic problems, and spatial reasoning, sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before.
-
There's an ancient connection between movement and music. Most languages don't make a distinction between the words 'music' and 'dance.' And we can see that in the brain. When people are lying perfectly still but listening to music, the neurons in the motor cortex are firing.
-
When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable-we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...