Daniel Levitin - Human Quotes

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

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

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

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
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