Quotes from Daniel J. Levitin

It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly

Most brain energy is used in synaptic transmission, that is, in connecting neurons to one another and, in turn, connecting thoughts and ideas to one another.

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.

Spend time with people younger than you. See your doctor regularly, but not obsessively. Don't think of yourself as old (other than taking prudent precautions). Appreciate your cognitive strengths—pattern recognition, crystallized intelligence, wisdom, accumulated knowledge. Promote cognitive health through experiential learning: traveling, spending time with grandchildren, and immersing yourself in new activities and situations. Do new things.

Org charts represent reporting hierarchies very well, but they don't show how coworkers interact with one another; and although they show business relationships, they do not show personal relationships.

Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.

Booker T. Washington wrote that "character, not circumstances", makes the person. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character." While character makes for a good story or poem, in reality we are less shaped by character traits than we think, and more than we realize by the circumstances that life deals us - and our responses to those circumstances.

Anger, hatred, and fear are very bad for our health. . . . Passing through life, progressing to old age and eventually death, it is not sufficient to just take care of the body. We need to take care of our emotions as well.

Music is being used to manipulate our emotions, and we tend to accept, if not outright enjoy, the power of music to make us experience these different feelings.

It no longer makes sense for teachers to consider their primary function to be the transmission of information. As the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik put it, nowadays, by the time a professor explains the difference between elegy and eulogy, everyone in the class has already Googled it.

Similarly with pitch: From a one-dimensional continuum of molecules vibrating at different speeds, our brains construct a rich, multidimensional pitch space with three, four, or even five dimensions (according to some models). If our brain is adding this many dimensions to what is out there in the world, this can help explain the deep reactions we have to sounds that are properly constructed and skillfully combined.

Recall that being organized and conscientious are predictive of a number of positive outcomes, even decades later, such as longevity, overall health, and job performance.

Music theorists have an arcane, rarified set of terms and rules that are as obscure as some of the most esoteric domains of mathematics.

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The Greek physicians Herophilus and Erasistratus discovered the nervous system in 322 BC, placing the seat of thought in the brain. It might be fair to say that they were the first neuroscientists. Previously, Aristotle and others thought the brain's function was simply to cool the blood, due to it's many folds and creases.

When we do one thing—uni-task—there are beneficial changes in the brain's daydreaming network and increased connectivity. Among other things, this is believed to be protective against Alzheimer's disease. Older adults who engaged in five one-hour training sessions on attentional control began to show brain activity patterns that more closely resembled those of younger adults.

Even the word computer is outdated now that most people don't use their computer to compute anything at all—rather, it has become just like that big disorganized drawer everyone has in their kitchen, what in my family we called the junk drawer.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

Create different desktop patterns on them so that the visual cues help to remind you, and put you in the proper place-memory context, of each computer's domain.

Relieved of all these stressors, including the pressure of actually being evaluated, and fears that they might come up short, the older adults performed as well as younger controls.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

on sad songs] In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.

Today, music is produced by few and consumed by many. But this is a situation of such historical and cultural rarity that it should hardly be considered. The dominant mode of musicality throughout the world and throughout history has been communal and participatory.

Vicarious musical pleasure by radio and phonograph, while it encourages listening to good music, seems to put a damper on musical self-expression. [In our childhood] we sang more. Children sang at school and in their play. Folks sang as they worked, indoors and out. Even drunks do not sing in the streets and buses as entertainingly as in [those] days.