Quotes from Daniel Levitin

People who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.

Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.

The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

If you're studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you're automatically paying less attention to the other.

People have different styles: Some are filers and some are pilers. The people who pile things often know exactly where things are, and they're often just as organized as the people who file things.

Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species' history.

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.

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.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.