Daniel Levitin quotes - page 5

Unfortunately, often found next to things that are true are an enormous number of things that are not - in websites, videos, books and on social media. (Daniel Levitin)
When you're at work, be fully at work. And let your leisure time be what it's meant to be - restorative and fun. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. View quote
Daniel Levitin
That walk around the block, that fresh air, is going to help you work more quickly and effectively when you get back. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Even though we think we're getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Healthy breaks can hit the reset button in your brain, restoring some of the glucose and other metabolic nutrients used up with deep thought. A healthy break is one in which you allow your brain to rest, to loosen its grip on your thoughts. View quote
Daniel Levitin
We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing. View quote
Daniel Levitin
We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with. View quote
Daniel Levitin
We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Most jobs require some degree of creativity and flexible thinking. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago. (Daniel Levitin)
Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don't bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Getting new information through Web-surfing almost always feels more rewarding than having to generate new information in the work that is in front of us. It therefore takes increasing amounts of self-discipline to stay on task. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Maybe instead of asking political candidates to submit tax returns, we really should be asking to see their brain scans. View quote
Daniel Levitin
We've always known that music is good for improving your mood. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle. View quote
Daniel Levitin
Google is a company whose very existence depends on innovation - on inventing things that are new and didn't exist before - and on refining existing ideas and technologies to allow consumers to do things they couldn't do before. View quote
Daniel Levitin
If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory. View quote
Daniel Levitin
I think we've debunked the myth of talent. It doesn't appear that there's anything like a music gene or center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else has. View quote
Daniel Levitin
I've always been interested in peak performance, why some people do better in life than others. (Daniel Levitin)
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... View quote
Daniel Levitin
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). View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
Daniel Levitin