Daniel Levitin Quotes

American psychologist

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Daniel Joseph Levitin, PhD, FRSC, (born December 27, 1957, San Francisco) is an American cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, best-selling author, musician and record producer. He is James McGill Professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with additional appointments in music theory, computer science, and education; Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill, and Dean of Arts and Humanities at The Minerva Schools at KGI. He is an elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science and the Royal Society of Canada.

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Native Name: Daniel Joseph Levitin

Alternative Names: Daniel J. Levitin

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Cosmides and Tooby argue that music's function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. ...Mother-infant interactions involving music almost always entail both singing and rhythmic movement...

Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.

The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.

For language to be generative, children must not be learning by rote. Music is also generative. For every musical phrase I hear, I can always add a note... to generate a new musical phrase.

Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

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.

The argument is that there may be a cluster of genes that influences both outgoingness and musicality. If this were true, we would expect to find that deviations in one ability co-occur with deviations in the other, as we do in WS and ASD.

Myelin is a fatty substance that coats the axons, speeding up synaptic transmission. Myelanation... is generally completed by age twenty. Multiple sclerosis is one of several degenerative diseases that can affect the myelin sheath...

When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity...

As a tool for the activation of specific thoughts, music is as good as language. The combination of the two—as best exemplified in the love song—is the best courtship of all.

Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space (or frequency space) takes the place of three-dimensional physical space... frequency maps in the auditory cortex... function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex.