Daniel Levitin: Citations en anglais
“Your brain on music is all about… connections.”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: 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.
“The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song—rhythm, melody, contour—cause music to stick in our heads. That is the reason why many ancient myths, epics, and even the Old Testament were set to music in preparation for being passed down by oral tradition across generations.
“It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.
The Organized Mind (2014)
Contexte: Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, “When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world... Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.
“You’d think people would realize they’re bad at multitasking”
The Organized Mind (2014)
Contexte: You’d think people would realize they’re bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great.
“Music, or any art form… has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...
“Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing,”
The Organized Mind (2014)
Contexte: Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough.... Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior... we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: 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).
The World in Six Songs (2008)
Contexte: 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.
The World in Six Songs (2008)
Contexte: 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.
The Organized Mind (2014)
Contexte: It's not just that we remember things wrongly, but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true.
“The story of your brain on music is the story of an exquisite orchestration of brain regions”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: 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.
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: 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.
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: It is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity—the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unkown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.
“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Contexte: Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
“The most fundamental principle of the organized mind”
The Organized Mind (2014)
Contexte: The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.
Talks at Google (Oct 28, 2014)
Contexte: This mind wandering mode turns out to be very different from the task engagement mode, because it's where thoughts that are loosely connected seamlessly flow into one another like in a dream.... And you begin to see connections between things that you didn't see as connected before.... non-linear kinds of thinking... This is the mode of thinking where your most creative acts are likely to occur and where problem solving is apt to occur.
The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/31/AR2007053101848.html (June 1, 2007)
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
“On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.”
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
