Quotes from Daniel J. Levitin

Animals may perform rituals, even quite elaborate ones, but only humans commemorate and celebrate, and only humans tie these to a belief system.

Understanding how the brain's attentional and memory systems interact can go a long way toward minimizing memory lapses.

Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms—the love between parents and children, between friends, love of God, love of one's way of life, and love of country. What all these forms of love have in common is intense caring (the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference), caring more about someone or something else than you care about yourself.

Just because someone quotes you a statistic or shows you a graph, it doesn't mean it's relevant to the point they're trying to make. It's the job of all of us to make sure we get the information that matters, and to ignore the information that doesn't.

Children's penchant for music seems to begin in infancy. By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks and can distinguish particular strains of Mozart they've heard versus very similar ones they haven't, suggesting an innate—and evolutionary—basis for music perception and memory.

account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

Steel identifies what he calls two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success.

Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. Once

As a group, we realized—just as the organizers had hoped—that much of what impeded true progress in the field was that we were using different terminology to mean the same things, and in many cases, we were using a single word (such as timing) to mean very different things, and following very different elementary assumptions.

Ideally, friends are people with whom we can be our true selves, with whom we can fearlessly let our guard down. (Arguably, 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 our different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)

making a bootable disk image and checking on your old machine

We all want to believe that we can do many things at once and that our attention is infinite, but this is a persistent myth.

This has to be what we teach our children: how to evaluate the hordes of information that are out there, to discern what is true and what is not, to identify biases and half-truths, and to know how to be critical, independent thinkers.

Online daters are significantly more likely to admit they're fat than that they're Republicans.

he turned Kennedy into an in-group member For an experimental replication of this, see Experiment 2 in Rothbart, M., & Hallmark, W. (1988). In-group-out-group differences in the perceived efficacy of coercion and conciliation in resolving social conflict. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(2), 248–257.

we can hear music under water or in other fluids if the water (or other fluid) molecules are caused to vibrate. But in the vacuum of space, with no molecules to vibrate, there is no sound. (The next time you're watching Star Trek and hear the roar of the engines in space, you'll have some good Trekkie Trivia to share.)

Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough.

The common neural mechanisms that underlie perception of music and memory for music help to explain how it is that songs get stuck in our heads. Scientists call these ear worms, from the German Ohrwurm, or simply the stuck song syndrome. There

Even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life.

The common neural mechanisms that underlie perception of music and memory for music help to explain how it is that songs get stuck in our heads. Scientists call these ear worms, from the German Ohrwurm, or simply the stuck song syndrome.

Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system. Increasingly, we demand that our attentional system try to focus on several things at once, something that it was not evolved to do.

Ambiguity begets participation.