Top 72 Levitin Quotes
#1. Daniel Levitin takes the most sophisticated ideas that exist about the brain and mind, applies them to the most emotionally direct art we have, our songs, and makes beautiful music of the two together.
Adam Gopnik
#2. The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything, writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin.
Malcolm Gladwell
#3. Daniel Levitin has more insights per page than any other neuroscientist I know. The organized Mind is smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written.
Daniel Gilbert
#4. Through my writing, I have made new friends and continued to learn about this world of ours in all its wonder, with all its challenges.
Sonia Levitin
#5. Stories are my art and my solace. They could also be my weapons. Stories give more than facts. Stories touch the conscience and stimulate action. That is my motive and my goal, to put research and study and feeling into that cauldron called the novel.
Sonia Levitin
#6. 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
#8. It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly,
Daniel J. Levitin
#9. Until 1600, the typical European home had a single room, and families would crowd around the fire most of the year to keep warm. The
Daniel J. Levitin
#10. Even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life.
Daniel J. Levitin
#11. A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.
Daniel J. Levitin
#12. We all want to believe that we can do many things at once and that our attention is infinite, but this is a persistent myth.
Daniel J. Levitin
#13. The work of artists and scietists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth is its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths becomes tomorrow's disproven hypotheses of forgotten objet d'arts.
Daniel J. Levitin
#14. No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!
Daniel J. Levitin
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.
Daniel Levitin
#18. The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.
Daniel J. Levitin
#20. 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
#21. As the American Library Association presciently concluded in their 1989 report Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, students must be taught to play an active role in knowing, identifying, finding, evaluating, organizing, and using information.
Daniel J. Levitin
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. No other tissue in the body relies solely on glucose for energy except the testes. (This is why men occasionally experience a battle for resources between their brains and their glands.)
Daniel J. Levitin
#25. 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
#26. My entire adult life has been devoted to family and career, each adding to the other in many rewarding ways. I have never felt that I had to set a pattern for my writing and teaching.
Sonia Levitin
#27. 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 Levitin
#28. Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%.
Daniel J. Levitin
#29. Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world. This
Daniel J. Levitin
#30. Online daters are significantly more likely to admit they're fat than that they're Republicans.
Daniel J. Levitin
#31. Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs
Daniel Levitin
#32. When I was only eleven years old, I decided to become a writer. I told this ambition in a letter to Laura Ingalls Wilder; the die was cast. How could I go back on my word?
Sonia Levitin
#33. In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.
Daniel J. Levitin
#34. The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.
Daniel J. Levitin
#35. Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.
Daniel Levitin
#36. Conscientiousness comprises industriousness, self-control, stick-to-itiveness, and a desire for order.
Daniel J. Levitin
#37. What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.
Daniel Levitin
#38. Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony.
Daniel Levitin
#39. Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don't waste time on decisions that don't matter, or more accurately, when we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.
Daniel J. Levitin
#40. 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
#41. Steel identifies what he calls two faulty believes: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.
Daniel J. Levitin
#42. It's the central executive in your brain that notices that the floor is dirty. It forms an executive attentional set for "mop the floor" and then constructs a worker attentional set for doing the actual mopping.
Daniel J. Levitin
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. 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.
Daniel Levitin
#49. Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. Once
Daniel J. Levitin
#50. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking.
Daniel J. Levitin
#51. The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business - all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).
Daniel J. Levitin
#52. Librarians and other information specialists have developed user's guides to evaluating websites. These include questions we should ask, such as "Is the page current?" or "What is the domain?" (A guide prepared by NASA is particularly helpful.)
Daniel J. Levitin
#53. Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.
Daniel Levitin
#54. Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process.
Daniel Levitin
#55. the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or have a strong emotional component.
Daniel J. Levitin
#56. No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.
Daniel J. Levitin
#57. 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
#58. The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships, compared to a fraction of that in the decade before.
Daniel J. Levitin
#59. Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance
Daniel J. Levitin
#60. 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.
Daniel Levitin
#61. Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.
Daniel J. Levitin
#62. Create different desktop patterns on them so that the visual cues help to remind you, and put you in the proper place-memory context, of each computer's domain.
Daniel J. Levitin
#63. He would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones forever changed the way I listened to music.
Daniel J. Levitin
#64. When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.
Daniel J. Levitin
#65. The childlike sense of wonder that we had as children, the sense that there is adventure in each activity, is partly what gave us such strong memories when we were young - it's not that we're slipping into dementia.
Daniel J. Levitin
#66. You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.
Sonia Levitin
#67. Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.
Daniel Levitin
#68. A masterfully written text for the M&A student and professional: clear, concise, comprehensive, practical, and insightful.
Lloyd Levitin
#69. We are off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer.
Daniel J. Levitin
#70. Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.
Daniel J. Levitin
#71. Even the word computer is outdated now that most people don't use their computer to compute anything at all - rather, it has become just like that big disorganized drawer everyone has in their kitchen, what in my family we called the junk drawer.
Daniel J. Levitin
#72. 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
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