Quotes from Daniel Levitin

There are people from lots of different fields in my department. In my lab, they come from computer science, education, psychophysics, psychology, music - and we all work together, and it feels very comfortable. All the careers I've had have been interdisciplinary; working in a studio is like being an engineer and a musician and a therapist.

Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.

One big promise of the Internet was that it would be a great democratizing force, allowing us to become exposed to new ideas that we might not otherwise encounter in our town, workplace or social circle.

Through studies of music and the brain, we've learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing, and perception - and production of sequences. They've told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation.

I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.

If you aren't taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won't benefit from that extra cup of coffee.

The obvious rule of efficiency is you don't want to spend more time organizing than it's worth.

The phrase 'fake news' sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.

One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!

What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.

I have never seen a proton or electron spinning around it. I have never actually seen a chromosome. I trust that they exist because people who I trust tell me they do.

We can be skeptical, suitably skeptical, and we can trust news outlets, some more than others.

Most jobs require some degree of creativity and flexible thinking.

Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.

I don't think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.

We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren't problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They'd get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response.

Many people say some of their best ideas come from dreams. Arguably the greatest Beatles song, 'Yesterday,' came to Paul McCartney in a dream.

We need to blinker ourselves, to better monitor our attentional focus. Enforced periods of no email or Internet to allow us to sustain concentration have been shown to be tremendously helpful. And breaks - even a 15-minute break every two or three hours - make us more productive in the long run.

Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads.

Our to-do lists are so full that we can't hope to complete every item on them. So what do we do? We multitask, juggling several things at once, trying to keep up by keeping busy.

President Trump, when challenged on facts, says that many people feel the way he does. But feelings should not take the place of reason in matters of public policy.

What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.

That daydreaming mode turns out to be restorative. It's like hitting the reset button in your brain. And you don't get in that daydreaming mode typically by texting and Facebooking. You get in it by disengaging.

The human brain long ago evolved a mechanism for rewarding us when we encountered new information: a little shot of dopamine in the brain each time we learned something new. Across evolutionary history, compulsively seeking information was adaptive behavior.