Daniel Levitin Quotes

88 Sourced Quotes

For language to be generative, children must not be learning by rote. Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note... to generate a new musical phrase.

Daniel Levitin
Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy. Indeed, as the Four Wise Ones once said, it may be all you need.

Daniel Levitin
When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

Daniel Levitin
Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Daniel Levitin
The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

Daniel Levitin
Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.

Daniel Levitin
No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

Daniel Levitin
A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

Daniel Levitin
Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process.

Daniel Levitin
Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.

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
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.

Daniel Levitin
Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories.... If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition... leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes... leaving you with nothing.

Daniel Levitin
You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great.

Daniel Levitin
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
Primates, some birds, and humans have mirror neurons... that fire both when performing an action and when observing someone else performing... We've found mirror neurons in Broca's area, a part... involved in speaking, and learning to speak.... our mirror neurons may be firing when we see or hear musicians perform... in preparation for being able to mirror or echo them back as part of a signaling system.

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
Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.

Daniel Levitin
Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females.

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
Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Franz Schubert — a master of melody, writing tunes anyone can sing, songs that seem to have been there all along. Most people don't realize that "Ave Maria" and "Serenade" were written by Schubert (or that his "Moment Musical in F" so resembles "Martha My Dear"). McCartney writes with similar universality. His "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song in history. Its stepwise melody is deceptively complex, drawing from outside the diatonic scale so smoothly that anyone can sing it, yet few theorists can agree on exactly what it is that McCartney has done.

Daniel Levitin
Human process music using both absolute and relational processing... we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species... These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.

Daniel Levitin
As a tool for the activation of specific thoughts, music is as good as language. The combination of the two—as best exemplified in the love song—is the best courtship of all.

Daniel Levitin
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
The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

Daniel Levitin
The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag... Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle...

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
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.

Daniel Levitin
Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs

Daniel Levitin
Myelin is a fatty substance that coats the axons, speeding up synaptic transmission. Myelanation... is generally completed by age twenty. Multiple sclerosis is one of several degenerative diseases that can affect the myelin sheath...

Daniel Levitin