Words matter. These are the best Daniel Levitin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Many of us feel as though we are overloaded and overwhelmed by all the things that are happening, and we can’t stop work for even five minutes or we’ll fall behind: the idea that if we don’t take breaks, we’re being more productive.
Evolution doesn’t just look for things that are fun; if it did, we’d know how to fly.
Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.
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.
One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!
Google is a company whose very existence depends on innovation – on inventing things that are new and didn’t exist before – and on refining existing ideas and technologies to allow consumers to do things they couldn’t do before.
Anything you care about, from vacation plans to exercise to the best Ethiopian restaurant, is going to be guided by your individual search history.
We need to take a step back and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don’t want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don’t want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.
Yes, there were piano bands and great rock pianists, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard to Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, and Elton John. But something about the electric guitar speaks of more than music – it epitomizes and gives voice to the rebellion, power, and sexuality of rock.
Getting new information through Web-surfing almost always feels more rewarding than having to generate new information in the work that is in front of us. It therefore takes increasing amounts of self-discipline to stay on task.
Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.
The phrase ‘fake news’ sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.
We need to support the media by subscribing to newspapers and magazines and supporting their advertisers to stay in business. And we need to be less greedy and allow journalists to take the time to pull the story together.
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.
Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.
We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that’s not true. That’s a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you’re going to lose some brainpower.
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don’t bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.
Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.
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.
I’m a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.
The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting’s brain organizes music. That’s important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one’s mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.
We’re not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.
The left brain is responsible for making order out of chaos, for making sense of things in the world that don’t always add up. To do this, it often makes up stories, fantastic confabulations in some cases, just to be able to explain what we’re experiencing.
Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.
Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.
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.
The electric guitar and its players hold a place of privilege in the annals of rock music. It is the engine, the weapon, the ax of rock.
Procrastination comes in two types. Some of us procrastinate in order to pursue restful activities – spending time in bed, watching TV – while others delay difficult or unpleasant tasks in favor of those that are more fun.
We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting.
Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
There’s an ancient connection between movement and music. Most languages don’t make a distinction between the words ‘music’ and ‘dance.’ And we can see that in the brain. When people are lying perfectly still but listening to music, the neurons in the motor cortex are firing.
When do you suppose the electric guitar was invented? If you thought the 1950s, you’d be wrong. If you can muster a recollection of hearing electric guitar in Lionel Hampton’s big band in the 1940s and date it to that decade, you’d still be off – by more than 30 years.
What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.
Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.
In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.
That daydreaming mode turns out to be restorative. It’s like hitting the reset button in your brain. And you don’t get in that daydreaming mode typically by texting and Facebooking. You get in it by disengaging.
I’ve always been interested in peak performance, why some people do better in life than others.
The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.
President Trump, when challenged on facts, says that many people feel the way he does. But feelings should not take the place of reason in matters of public policy.
Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. New information comes in all time, and the thing we ought to be thinking about doing is changing our beliefs as that new information comes in.
