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We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin
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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.
Daniel Levitin -
As soon as you hear a proposition, the creative brain in humans assumes for the moment that it's true, and starts trying to find evidence. It's what computer scientists in the old days used to call 'Fifo:' first in, first out. The first piece of information that gets in has a privileged position, even if it's misinformation.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.
Daniel Levitin -
The six types of song that have shaped human nature-friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs-I've come to think are obvious...
Daniel Levitin -
Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex.
Daniel Levitin
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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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don't bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.
Daniel Levitin -
Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
I became a cognitive psychologist because I met a bunch of teachers I really liked.
Daniel Levitin
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So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.
Daniel Levitin -
Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. New information comes in all time, and the thing we ought to be thinking about doing is changing our beliefs as that new information comes in.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin -
Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
Daniel Levitin -
I believe in an informed electorate, and we need to teach our children to become informed enough to have opinions on world issues or, at least, to understand what the major issues are and who the players are.
Daniel Levitin
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Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music.
Daniel Levitin -
In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.
Daniel Levitin -
The phrase 'fake news' sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.
Daniel Levitin -
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.
Daniel Levitin