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Quote by Daniel Levitin

“Although I don't know Paul McCartney, a mutual friend told me that Paul was reading my book, This Is Your Brain on Music, and stopped after chapter two. McCartney said he was concerned that if he learned more about how he does what he does (as far as composing music), he may not be able to do it anymore!”

Quote by Daniel Levitin

Author

Daniel J. Levitin is a neuroscientist born on December 27, 1957. He is known for his research in music psychology and cognitive neuroscience, contributing significantly to our understanding of how music affects the brain and how the brain processes musical information. more

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“The mammalian brain evolved exquisite place memory because that was essential for survival. This is why squirrels have such a good memory for where they buried their nuts.”

Memories Brain Essentials Survival Buried Nuts Exquisite Good Memories Squirrels

Author:Daniel Levitin

“The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.”

Book Numbers Philosopher Abundance Distraction Wasting Time Peers Good Book Time And Money Tutor Nero Roman Philosophers

Author:Daniel Levitin

“The brain has an attentional mode called the "mind wandering mode" that was only recently identified. This is when thoughts move seamlessly from one to another, often to unrelated thoughts, without you controlling where they go. This brain state acts as a neural reset button, allowing us to come back to our work with a refreshed perspective. Different people find they enter this mode in different ways: reading, a walk in nature, looking at art, meditating, and napping. A 15-minute nap can produce the equivalent of a 10-point boost in IQ.”

“Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking.”

“In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.”

Needs Persons Order Bits Process Information

Book:The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Source: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“Although it is easier to find information these days, it is easier than ever before to find misinformation, pseudo-facts, unsupported and fringe opinions, and the like. Children should be taught at an early age what constitutes evidence, how to detect biases or distortions in newspaper accounts, and that there exist hierarchies of information sources. In the medical field, for example, a controlled experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal is a better source than a blog by the Ginseng Growers Association, promoting the health benefits of their own product.”

“In order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that if you put in 10,000 hours that you will become an expert, but there aren't any cases where someone has achieved world-class mastery without it! So the time spent at the activity is indeed the most important and influential factor.”

Ifs World Needs Mean Art Important Order Hours Class Practice Cases Drama Activity Factors Experts Mastery Minimum Influential Gymnastics Time Spent World Class

Author:Daniel Levitin

“Librarians are more important than ever before ... are uniquely qualified to help all of us separate the digital wheat from the chaff, to help us understand the reliability of the data we encounter.”

Important Helping Data Encounters Digital Qualified Librarian Wheat Reliability

Author: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.”

World Mind Forget Brain Principles Losing Fundamentals Burden Critical Organized Fundamental Principles Losing Things Organized Mind

Author:Daniel Levitin

“For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.”