Daniel Levitin Quotes

88 Sourced Quotes

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
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