Daniel Levitin: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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