Daniel Levitin: Brain

Daniel Levitin is American psychologist. Explore interesting quotes on brain.
Daniel Levitin: 152   quotes 1   like

“Your brain on music is all about… connections.”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: 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.

Music

“During the first six months or so of life… the infant brain is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: During the first six months or so of life... the infant brain is unable to clearly distinguish the source of sensory inputs; vision, hearing, and touch meld into a unitary perceptual representation.... inputs from the various sensory receptors may connect to many different parts of the brain, pending pruning that will occur later in life. As Simon Baron-Cohen has described it, with all this sensory cross talk, the infant lives in a state of complete psychodelic splendor (without the aid of drugs).

Life

“Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. …that is a feature of the musical brain.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)
Context: Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality.... that is a feature of the musical brain.

Art , Music , Reality , Drawing

“Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)
Context: 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.

Problem

“The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: 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.

Music

“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)

Children , Time

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

Daniel Levitin

Talks at Google (Oct 28, 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)

Art , Music

“Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.”

Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

Way

“Evolution doesn't design things… The brain is… like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.”

Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

Housing

“Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. …Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement…”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music , Exercises , Singing , Help

“Multitasking is a myth. …What's actually happening in the brain is sequential tasking. …the brain is rapidly shifting …so quickly and seamlessly that you don't really notice… What you end up with is attention that's been fractionated into little… bits and you're not able to actually sustain attention on any one thing. …You're not saving time. You're wasting time.”

Daniel Levitin

Talks at Google (Oct 28, 2014)

Time

“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 book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Music , Understanding , Nature

“Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand… increases in size as a result of practice.”

Daniel Levitin

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Study