Quotes from Daniel J. Levitin

Ambiguity begets participation.

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 neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you're working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset

As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure.

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

Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly.

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

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.

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey truth for now--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will ve replaced by a new truth, because that is the way science advances.

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.

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact. with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential.

Be careful of averages and how they're applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as: On average, humans have one testicle.

a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)

Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations.

Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking.

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.

After you have prioritized and you start working, knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.

Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.

knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful.

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.

It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults.

A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine.

The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.