Quotes from Daniel J. Levitin

The work of artists and scietists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth is its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths becomes tomorrow's disproven hypotheses of forgotten objet d'arts.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

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.

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.

And the fetus hears music, as was recently discovered by Alexandra LaMont of Keele University in the U.K. She found that children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb, a year after they are born.

If a song is a living, breathing entity, you might think of the tempo as its gait—the rate at which it walks by—or its pulse—the rate at which the heart of the song is beating.

Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.

Fending off Alzheimer's, he says, involves five key components: a diet rich in vegetables and good fats, oxygenating the blood through moderate exercise, brain training exercises, good sleep hygiene, and a regimen of supplements individually tailored to each person's own needs, based on blood and genetic testing.

Critical thinking doesn't mean we disparage everything; it means that we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without.

It's the central executive in your brain that notices that the floor is dirty. It forms an executive attentional set for "mop the floor" and then constructs a worker attentional set for doing the actual mopping.

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.

The number of combinations possible and hence the number of different thoughts or brain states each of us can have exceeds the number of known particles in the entire known universe.

The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business—all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

Librarians and other information specialists have developed user's guides to evaluating websites. These include questions we should ask, such as "Is the page current?" or "What is the domain?" (A guide prepared by NASA is particularly helpful.)

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky said that the problem with making decisions is that we are often making them under conditions of uncertainty.

No other tissue in the body relies solely on glucose for energy except the testes. (This is why men occasionally experience a battle for resources between their brains and their glands.)

the best-remembered experiences are distinctive/unique or have a strong emotional component.

Until 1600, the typical European home had a single room, and families would crowd around the fire most of the year to keep warm. The

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don't waste time on decisions that don't matter, or more accurately, when we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world. This

The lie that terrorists want you to believe is that you are in immediate and great peril.

As the American Library Association presciently concluded in their 1989 report Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, students must be taught to play an active role in knowing, identifying, finding, evaluating, organizing, and using information.

satisficing is a tool for not wasting time on things that are not your highest priority. For your high-priority endeavors, the old-fashioned pursuit of excellence remains the right strategy.