Daniel J. Levitin > Quotes

“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 J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new—the proverbial shiny objects”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you’re working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“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 ve replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“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 J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“It’s as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet that when B.B. King is playing the blues and when he is feeling the blues, the neural signatures are very similar. (Of course there will be differences, too, and part of the scientific hurdle will be subtracting out the processes involved in issuing motor commands and listening to music, versus just sitting on a chair, head in hands, and feeling down.) And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact. with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“Be careful of averages and how they’re applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as:
"On average, humans have one testicle.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

“a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: The Science of Preventing Overload, Increasing Productivity and Restoring Your Focus

“After you have prioritized and you start working, knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind

“[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out "More! More! Give me more!”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

“the constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present—tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you’re never fully in the moment and enjoying what’s now.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain an attentional set for an extended period. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy. Related to the manager/worker distinction is that the prefrontal cortex contains circuits responsible for telling us whether we’re controlling something or someone else is. When we set up a system, this part of the brain marks it as self-generated. When we step into someone else’s system, the brain marks it that way. This may help explain why it’s easier to stick with an exercise program or diet that someone else sets up: We typically trust them as “experts” more than we trust ourselves. “My trainer told me to do three sets of ten reps at forty pounds—he’s a trainer, he must know what he’s talking about. I can’t design my own workout—what do I know?” It takes Herculean amounts of discipline to overcome the brain’s bias against self-generated motivational systems. Why? Because as with the fundamental attribution error we saw in Chapter 4, we don’t have access to others’ minds, only our own. We are painfully aware of all the fretting and indecision, all the nuances of our internal decision-making process that led us to reach a particular conclusion. (I really need to get serious about exercise.) We don’t have access to that (largely internal) process in others, so we tend to take their certainty as more compelling, in many cases, than our own. (Here’s your program. Do it every day.)”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“If a song is a living, breathing entity, you might think of the tempo as its gait—the rate at which it walks by—or its pulse—the rate at which the heart of the song is beating.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“When they find out what I do for a living, many people tell me they love music listening, but their music lessons 'didn't take.' I think they're being too hard on themselves. The chasm between musical experts and everyday musicians that has grown so wide in our culture makes people feel discouraged, and for some reason this is uniquely so with music. Even though most of us can't play basketball like Shaquille O'Neal, or cook like Julia Child, we can still enjoy playing a friendly backyard game of hoops, or cooking a holiday meal for our friends and family. This performance chasm does seem to be cultural, specific to contemporary Western society. And although many people say that music lessons didn't take, cognitive neuroscientists have found otherwise in their laboratories. Even just a small exposure to music lessons as a child creates neural circuits for music processing that are enhanced and more efficient than for those who lack training. Music lessons teach us to listen better, and they accelerate our ability to discern structure and form in music, making it easier for us to tell what music we like and what we don't like.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music