Quotes from Daniel J. Levitin

A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.

We are off-loading a great deal of the processing that our neurons would normally do to an external device that then becomes an extension of our own brains, a neural enhancer.

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

He would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones forever changed the way I listened to music.

Before traveling east, start advancing your body clock as many days before your trip as the number of time zones you'll be crossing. Get into sunlight early in the day, or use a sunlight lamp. Once you're on the plane eastbound, wear eyeshades to cover your eyes two hours or so before sunset in your destination city, to acclimate yourself to the new "dark" time.

But the remembering is imperfect; the instructions for which neurons need to be gathered and how exactly they need to fire are weak and degraded, leading to a representation that is only a dim and often inaccurate copy of the real experience. Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just replaying, but a rewriting.

Curiosity, Openness, Associations (as in sociability), Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices are the five lifestyle choices that have

Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We've literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance.

Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing more. Consequently

We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It's no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote.

Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function, and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep reduction or a departure from a set sleep routine (for example, going to bed late one night, sleeping in the next morning) can produce detrimental effects on cognitive performance for many days afterward.

Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%.

The childlike sense of wonder that we had as children, the sense that there is adventure in each activity, is partly what gave us such strong memories when we were young—it's not that we're slipping into dementia.

The moral: keep your own data." Back to planning for failure: You've backed up your files, but what if you upgrade your system and they won't open?! Cook advises having a plan for migrating files. File migration refers to the process of making readable files that are no longer readable due to system, software, and hardware updates—basically, many computer file formats become obsolete. This follows from the rapid developments in the

As with many concepts, "information" has a special and specific meaning to mathematicians and scientists: It is anything that reduces uncertainty. Put another way, information exists wherever a pattern exists, whenever a sequence is not random. The more information, the more structured or patterned the sequence appears to be.

The biggest change in dating between 2004 and 2014 was that one-third of all marriages in America began with online relationships, compared to a fraction of that in the decade before.

Neurons are living cells, and they can connect to one another in trillions of different ways. These connections don't just lead to learning—the connections are the learning.

Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance

We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive biases.

At every turn, this provocative work unlocks deep secrets about how nature and nurture forge a uniquely human obsession

Spend time with people who encourage you to grow, to explore new things, and who take joy in your successes.

Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain;

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

Music is organized sound.