Daniel Levitin Quotes
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The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.
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In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.
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On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.
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Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.
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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.
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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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Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.
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Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinion.
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Of the thousands of ways that humans differ from one another, turns out there's this one cluster of traits called conscientiousness that predict a whole host of positive life outcomes, such as longevity over our health, life satisfaction.
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Collective music making... may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts...
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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.
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We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
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A good rule of thumb is every couple of hours take fifteen minutes off. Naps are also very helpful, short naps. Even a ten or fifteen minute nap in the middle of the day can be the equivalent of an hour and a half of extra sleep the night before, and it can raise your effective IQ by ten points.
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Our to-do lists are so full that we can't hope to complete every item on them. So what do we do? We multitask, juggling several things at once, trying to keep up by keeping busy.
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Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.
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One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!
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Maybe instead of asking political candidates to submit tax returns, we really should be asking to see their brain scans.
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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...
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Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not.
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I'm not a great guitarist, and I'm not a great singer.
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Neurons are living cells with a metabolism. And they need glucose in order to function. Glucose is the fuel of the brain, just like gasoline is the fuel of your car.
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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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Evolution doesn't design things... The brain is... like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.
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I think we will see personalized music stations in the next few years... controlled by computer algorithms... I think it will be important that... listeners have an 'adventuresomeness' knob that will control the mix of old and new, or the mix of how far out the new music is from what they usually listen to.