Daniel Levitin quotes - page 4

It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity. (Daniel Levitin)
By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us. View quote
Daniel Levitin
You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing. View quote
Daniel Levitin
During the first six months or so of life... the infant brain is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions. View quote
Daniel Levitin
It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems. View quote
Daniel Levitin
And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and. (Daniel Levitin)
The most fundamental principle of the organized mind. View quote
Daniel Levitin
This is the mode of thinking where your most creative acts are likely to occur and where problem solving is apt to occur. View quote
Daniel Levitin
A good rule of thumb is every couple of hours take fifteen minutes off. Naps are also very helpful, short naps. View quote
Daniel Levitin
You're entitled your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts. View quote
Daniel Levitin
What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you're not even able to judge well whether you're working well or not. View quote
Daniel Levitin
What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Evolution doesn't just look for things that are fun; if it did, we'd know how to fly. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads. View quote
Daniel Levitin
One big promise of the Internet was that it would be a great democratizing force, allowing us to become exposed to new ideas that we might not otherwise encounter in our town, workplace or social circle. (Daniel Levitin)
If you're studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you're automatically paying less attention to the other. View quote
Daniel Levitin
We're a social species, and we want to get along with the people we like and who are like us. That's just good adaptive behaviour. We're more likely to accept something if we hear it from a friend, whereas we're sceptical of people who are not like us - which is what leads to racism, nationalism, sexism and all forms of bigotry. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Neurons are living cells with a metabolism. And they need glucose in order to function. Glucose is the fuel of the brain, just like gasoline is the fuel of your car. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The history of science and culture is filled with stories of how many of the greatest scientific and artistic discoveries occurred while the creator was not thinking about what he was working on, not consciously anyway - the daydreaming mode solved the problem for him, and the answer appeared suddenly as a stroke of insight. View quote
Daniel Levitin