Daniel Levitin quotes

We may have had music before we had a word for it. (Daniel Levitin)
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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... View quote
Daniel Levitin
Music's evolutionary origin is established because it is present across all humans; it has been around for a long time; it involves specialized brain structures... and it is analogous to music making in other species. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities. (Daniel Levitin)
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Memory is fallible... not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Music has been a shaping force... music has been there to guide the development of human nature. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don't know it. View quote
Daniel Levitin
In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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)
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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... View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
The six types of song that have shaped human nature-friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love songs-I've come to think are obvious... View quote
Daniel Levitin