Daniel Levitin Quotes

88 Sourced Quotes

Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.

Daniel Levitin
A gene that promotes nurturing behavior postcopulation could... spread throughout the population, to the extent that the offspring of people with the nurturing gene fare better, as a group, in the competition for resources and mates.

Daniel Levitin
The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions, involving both the oldest and newest parts of the human brain, and regions as far apart as the cerebellum in the back of the head and the frontal lobes just behind your eyes. It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.... it reminds us of other music we have heard, and it activates memory traces of emotional times of our lives. Your brain on music is all about... connections.

Daniel Levitin
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...

Daniel Levitin
Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans.

Daniel Levitin
The Harvard neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug has shown that the front portion of the corpus callosum is significantly larger in musicians than in nonmusicians, and particularly for musicians who began their training early.... Schlaug found that musicians tended to have larger cerebellums than nonmusicians, and an increased concentration of gray matter... responsible for information processing, as opposed to white matter, which is responsible for information transmission.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space (or frequency space) takes the place of three-dimensional physical space... frequency maps in the auditory cortex... function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex.

Daniel Levitin
This mind wandering mode turns out to be very different from the task engagement mode, because it's where thoughts that are loosely connected seamlessly flow into one another like in a dream.... And you begin to see connections between things that you didn't see as connected before.... non-linear kinds of thinking... This is the mode of thinking where your most creative acts are likely to occur and where problem solving is apt to occur.

Daniel Levitin
The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.

Daniel Levitin
Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.

Daniel Levitin
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...

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin
Memory is fallible... not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.

Daniel Levitin
Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough.... Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior... we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

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
It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

Daniel Levitin
The brain's synapses are programmed to grow for a number of years, making new connections. After that time, there is a shift toward pruning, to get rid of unneeded connections.... Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself.... the amount of reorganization that can occur in most adults is vastly less than can occur in children and adolescents.

Daniel Levitin
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.

Daniel Levitin
Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life.

Daniel Levitin
Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that have two or more different roots.... Joni's music is as close to impressionist visual art as anything I've heard.... harmonic complexity born out of her strict insistence that the music not be anchored in a single harmonic interpretation.

Daniel Levitin
One hundred years from now Beatles songs may be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people will have forgotten who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like Oh Susannah, This Land Is Your Land, and Frère Jacques.

Daniel Levitin
We may have had music before we had a word for it.

Daniel Levitin
Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world... Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.

Daniel Levitin
Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems.... Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring.

Daniel Levitin
Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction.... Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement...

Daniel Levitin
On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.

Daniel Levitin
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.

Daniel Levitin