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Daniel Levitin
71 quotes
“Both poetry and lyrics and all visual arts draw their power from their ability to express abstractions of reality. ...that is a feature of the musical brain.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Memory is fallible... not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's not just that we remember things wrongly, but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. ...If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition... leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes... leaving you with nothing.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evolution doesn't design things... The brain is... like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. ...Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior ...we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, “When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world . . . Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Multitasking is a myth. ...What's actually happening in the brain is sequential tasking. ...the brain is rapidly shifting ...so quickly and seamlessly that you don't really notice... What you end up with is attention that's been fractionated into little... bits and you're not able to actually sustain attention on any one thing. ...You're not saving time. You're wasting time.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The brain is very good at self-delusion.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good rule of thumb is every couple of hours take fifteen minutes off. Naps are also very helpful, short naps. Even a ten or fifteen minute nap in the middle of the day can be the equivalent of an hour and a half of extra sleep the night before, and it can raise your effective IQ by ten points.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This mind wandering mode turns out to be very different from the task engagement mode, because it's where thoughts that are loosely connected seamlessly flow into one another like in a dream. ...And you begin to see connections between things that you didn't see as connected before. ...non-linear kinds of thinking ...This is the mode of thinking where your most creative acts are likely to occur and where problem solving is apt to occur.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Paul McCartney may be the closest thing our generation has produced to Franz Schubert -- a master of melody, writing tunes anyone can sing, songs that seem to have been there all along. Most people don't realize that "Ave Maria" and "Serenade" were written by Schubert (or that his "Moment Musical in F" so resembles "Martha My Dear"). McCartney writes with similar universality. His "Yesterday" has been recorded by more musicians than any other song in history. Its stepwise melody is deceptively complex, drawing from outside the diatonic scale so smoothly that anyone can sing it, yet few theorists can agree on exactly what it is that McCartney has done.”
Daniel Levitin (born 1957) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Washington Post (June 1, 2007)