Daniel Levitin Quotes

Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago.

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.

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.

I reject the notion of a post-truth area. I don’t believe there is such a thing, and we shouldn’t accept that.

Anything you care about, from vacation plans to exercise to the best Ethiopian restaurant, is going to be guided by your individual search history.

Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.

Singing and dancing have been shown to modulate brain chemistry, specifically levels of dopamine, the ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter.

Across a range of inferences involving not just language but mathematics, logic problems, and spatial reasoning, sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before.

We need to take a step back and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don’t want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don’t want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.

I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.

Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads.

I became interested in structure when I was in graduate school. How is it that the brain perceives structure in a sometimes disorganized and chaotic world? How and why do we categorize things? Why can things be categorized in so many different ways, all of which can seem equally valid?

Our brains are very, very good at self-delusion. What happens is, it releases the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which leads to foggy thinking, so you’re not even able to judge well whether you’re working well or not.

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.

The phrase ‘fake news’ sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.

Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.

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.

I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.

I believe in an informed electorate, and we need to teach our children to become informed enough to have opinions on world issues or, at least, to understand what the major issues are and who the players are.

In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.

Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don’t bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.

I don’t think I’m always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.

Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.

President Trump, when challenged on facts, says that many people feel the way he does. But feelings should not take the place of reason in matters of public policy.

When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.

We’ve always known that music is good for improving your mood.

People who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.

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.

The obvious rule of efficiency is you don’t want to spend more time organizing than it’s worth.

Our to-do lists are so full that we can’t hope to complete every item on them. So what do we do? We multitask, juggling several things at once, trying to keep up by keeping busy.

If you aren’t taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won’t benefit from that extra cup of coffee.

If we are to appropriate money for roads, we need statistics on how bad our roads really are and, moreover, where more roads will be beneficial – it would be irresponsible to just build them where our gut tells us to.

What it turns out is that we think we’re multitasking, but we’re not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we’re doing is doing all these things at once.

There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists – and the rest of us – must stop giving equal time to things that don’t have an opposing side.

We need to blinker ourselves, to better monitor our attentional focus. Enforced periods of no email or Internet to allow us to sustain concentration have been shown to be tremendously helpful. And breaks – even a 15-minute break every two or three hours – make us more productive in the long run.

That walk around the block, that fresh air, is going to help you work more quickly and effectively when you get back.

Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinion.

The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you’ve got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they’re competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you’re actually trying to do, like getting your work done.

If you hear on the weather report that it’s going to rain tomorrow, rather than reminding yourself to bring your umbrella, set the umbrella by the front door – now the environment is reminding you to bring the umbrella.

One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!

There’s an ancient connection between movement and music. Most languages don’t make a distinction between the words ‘music’ and ‘dance.’ And we can see that in the brain. When people are lying perfectly still but listening to music, the neurons in the motor cortex are firing.

Through studies of music and the brain, we’ve learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing, and perception – and production of sequences. They’ve told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there’s misinformation.

When you’re at work, be fully at work. And let your leisure time be what it’s meant to be – restorative and fun.

Maybe instead of asking political candidates to submit tax returns, we really should be asking to see their brain scans.