Daniel Levitin Quotes

Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice.

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.

So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of the fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.

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.

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.

Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience. ...If I'm playing an instrument I like, and whose sound pleases me in and of itself... caring leads to attention, and together they lead to measurable neurochemical changes. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with emotional regulation, alertness, and mood, is released, and the dopaminergic system aids in encoding the memory trace.

The best estimates are that it takes a minimum of fifty thousand years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome. This is called evolutionary lag... Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle...

Anyone who wants to understand human nature, the interaction between brain and culture, between evolution and society, has to take a close look at the role that music has held in the lives of humans.

Music has been a shaping force... music has been there to guide the development of human nature.

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.

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.

Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.

Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. ...Joni will talk compellingly and passionately about alternate tunings for hours, comparing them to different colors that van Gogh used in his paintings.

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.

We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.