Daniel Levitin citations

Page 2

“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.”

“We may have had music before we had a word for it.”

“Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. …If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition… leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes… leaving you with nothing.”

“We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.”

“An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.”

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

“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.”

“Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.”

“The argument is that there may be a cluster of genes that influences both outgoingness and musicality. If this were true, we would expect to find that deviations in one ability co-occur with deviations in the other, as we do in WS and ASD.”

“So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.”

“Primates, some birds, and humans have mirror neurons… that fire both when performing an action and when observing someone else performing… We've found mirror neurons in Broca's area, a part… involved in speaking, and learning to speak. …our mirror neurons may be firing when we see or hear musicians perform … in preparation for being able to mirror or echo them back as part of a signaling system.”

“Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.”

“The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others.”

“Memory is fallible… not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.”

“Myelin is a fatty substance that coats the axons, speeding up synaptic transmission. Myelanation… is generally completed by age twenty. Multiple sclerosis is one of several degenerative diseases that can affect the myelin sheath…”

“I think we will see personalized music stations in the next few years… controlled by computer algorithms… I think it will be important that… listeners have an "adventuresomeness" knob that will control the mix of old and new, or the mix of how far out the new music is from what they usually listen to.”

“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…”

“Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.”

“Memory for playing a musical piece… involves a process very much like that for music listening… through establishing standard schemas and expectation. In addition, musicians use chunking… tying information together into groups, and remembering the group as a whole rather than individual pieces.”

“The emerging picture from… studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of master associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.”

“Collective music making… may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts…”