Daniel Levitin Quotes

88 Sourced Quotes

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
Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found.... Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

Daniel Levitin
Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

Daniel Levitin
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

Daniel Levitin
Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

Daniel Levitin
The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

Daniel Levitin
A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

Daniel Levitin
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Daniel Levitin
We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
The argument is that there may be a cluster of genes that influences both outgoingness and musicality. If this were true, we would expect to find that deviations in one ability co-occur with deviations in the other, as we do in WS and ASD.

Daniel Levitin
Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.

Daniel Levitin
Multitasking is a myth.... What's actually happening in the brain is sequential tasking.... the brain is rapidly shifting... so quickly and seamlessly that you don't really notice... What you end up with is attention that's been fractionated into little... bits and you're not able to actually sustain attention on any one thing.... You're not saving time. You're wasting time.

Daniel Levitin
Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience.... If I'm playing an instrument I like, and whose sound pleases me in and of itself... caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional regulation, alertness, and mood, is released, and the dopaminergic system aids in encoding the memory trace.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
During the first six months or so of life... the infant brain is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs; vision, hearing, and touch meld into a unitary perceptual representation.... inputs from the various sensory receptors may connect to many different parts of the brain, pending pruning that will occur later in life. As Simon Baron-Cohen has described it, with all this sensory cross talk, the infant lives in a state of complete psychodelic splendor (without the aid of drugs).

Daniel Levitin
Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
Music has been a shaping force... music has been there to guide the development of human nature.

Daniel Levitin
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.

Daniel Levitin
Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex.

Daniel Levitin
The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.

Daniel Levitin
Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

Daniel Levitin
Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don't know it.

Daniel Levitin
The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.

Daniel Levitin