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Daniel Levitin quotes - page 2
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
Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Franz Schubert -- a master of melody, writing tunes anyone can sing, songs that seem to have been there all along. Most people don't realize that "Ave Maria" and "Serenade" were written by Schubert (or that his "Moment Musical in F" so resembles "Martha My Dear"). McCartney writes with similar universality. His "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song in history. Its stepwise melody is deceptively complex, drawing from outside the diatonic scale so smoothly that anyone can sing it, yet few theorists can agree on exactly what it is that McCartney has done.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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
Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience. ...If I'm playing an instrument I like, and whose sound pleases me in and of itself... caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional regulation, alertness, and mood, is released, and the dopaminergic system aids in encoding the memory trace.
Daniel Levitin
I have never seen a proton or electron spinning around it. I have never actually seen a chromosome. I trust that they exist because people who I trust tell me they do.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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
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.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.
Daniel Levitin
Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females.
Daniel Levitin
We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.
Daniel Levitin
Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
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.
Daniel Levitin
Music changed more between 1963 and 1969 than it has in the 37 years since, with the Beatles among the architects of that change.
Daniel Levitin
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...
Daniel Levitin
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