Daniel Levitin
Quotes
Thinking about one memory tends to activate other memories. ...If you are trying to retrieve a particular memory, the flood of memories can cause competition... leaving you with a traffic jam of neural nodes... leaving you with nothing.
An organized mind leads effortlessly to good decision-making.
Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information.
Fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.
Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space (or frequency space) takes the place of three-dimensional physical space... frequency maps in the auditory cortex... function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex.
The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.
Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.
Music has been a shaping force... music has been there to guide the development of human nature.
Human process music using both absolute and relational processing... we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species... These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.
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.
Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by... Herbert Simon... to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. ...Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior ...we don't waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.
The information age has off-loaded a great deal of work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us.
