Daniel Levitin: Trending quotes

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Daniel Levitin: 152 quotes1 like

“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

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“For language to be generative, children must not be learning by rote. Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note… to generate a new musical phrase.”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“The brain is very good at self-delusion.”

Daniel Levitin

Talks at Google (Oct 28, 2014)

“On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“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 book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

“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

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“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

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“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

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“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

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“As a tool for the activation of specific thoughts, music is as good as language. The combination of the two—as best exemplified in the love song—is the best courtship of all.”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“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

Australian Broadcasting Corporation http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/5009818 (October 11, 2013)

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

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

“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

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

“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 book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

“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 book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

“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 book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

“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

Talks at Google (Oct 28, 2014)

“The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

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

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)