Daniel J. Levitin Quotes & Sayings

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don't matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient. — Daniel J. Levitin

Be careful of averages and how they're applied. One way that they can fool you is if the average combines samples from disparate populations. This can lead to absurd observations such as:
"On average, humans have one testicle. — Daniel J. Levitin

Ambiguity begets participation. — Daniel J. Levitin

Alternative medicine is simply medicine for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. Once — Daniel J. Levitin

Making a bootable disk image and checking on your old machine — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer's voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of "Green River" by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son"; the oboes in Beethoven's Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

It turns out that having a best friend during adolescence is an important part of becoming a well-adjusted adult. Those without one are more likely to be bullied and marginalized and to carry these experiences into becoming disagreeable adults. — Daniel J. Levitin

The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you're working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset — Daniel J. Levitin

The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (tutor to Nero) complained that his peers were wasting time and money accumulating too many books, admonishing that "the abundance of books is a distraction." Instead, Seneca recommended focusing on a limited number of good books, to be read thoroughly and repeatedly. — 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, — Daniel J. Levitin

Nicotinic receptors are so named because they respond to nicotine, whether smoked or chewed, and they're spread throughout the brain. For all the problems it causes to our overall health, it's well established that nicotine can improve the rate of signal detection when a person has been misdirected - that is, nicotine creates a state of vigilance that allows one to become more detail oriented and less dependent on top-down expectations. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

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). — Daniel J. Levitin

Aligning your body clock to the new environment requires a phase shift. It takes one day per time zone to shift. Advance or retard your body clock as many days before your trip as the number of time zones you'll be crossing. Before traveling east, get into sunlight early in the day. Before traveling west, avoid sunlight early by keeping the curtains drawn, and instead expose yourself to bright light in the evening, to simulate what would be late afternoon sun in your destination. Once you're on the plane, if you're westbound, keep the overhead reading lamp on, even if it is your home bedtime. When you arrive in the western city, exercise lightly by taking a walk in the sun. That sunlight will delay the production of melatonin in your body. If you're on an eastbound plane, wear eye shades to cover your eyes two hours or so before sunset in your destination city, to acclimate yourself to the new "dark" time. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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 different modes of attention without feeling awkward.) — Daniel J. Levitin

Then there are the metabolic costs of switching itself that I wrote about earlier. 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. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviors. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain's need for glucose. — Daniel J. Levitin

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 J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans. — Daniel J. Levitin

It's as though our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can't make any more, regardless of how important they are. — Daniel J. Levitin

Many families amass more objects than their houses can hold. The result is garages given over to old furniture and unused sports equipment, home offices cluttered with boxes of stuff that haven't yet been taken to the garage. Three out of four Americans report their garages are too full to put a car into them. Women's cortisol levels (the stress hormone) spike when confronted with such clutter (men's, not so much). Elevated cortisol levels can lead to chronic cognitive impairment, fatigue, and suppression of the body's immune system. — Daniel J. Levitin

Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new - the proverbial shiny objects — Daniel J. Levitin

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

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%. — 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. — Daniel J. Levitin

We live in a world of illusions. We think we're aware of everything going on around us. We look out and see an uninterrupted, complete picture of the visual world, composed of thousands of little detailed images. We may know that each of us has a blind spot, but we go on day to day blissfully unaware of where it actually is because our occipital cortex does such a good job of filling in the missing information and hence hiding it from us. Laboratory demonstrations of inattentional blindness (like the gorilla video of the last chapter) underscore how little of the world we actually perceive, in spite of the overwhelming feeling that we're getting it all. — Daniel J. Levitin

Former secretary of state George Shultz, reflecting on forty years of United States foreign policy from 1970 to the present, said, When I think about all the money we spent on bombs and munitions, and our failures in Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the world . . . Instead of advancing our agenda using force, we should have instead built schools and hospitals in these countries, improving the lives of their children. By now, those children would have grown into positions of influence, and they would be grateful to us instead of hating us. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot smoking. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

[We] have a tendency during meetings to let our minds run wild and cycle through a plethora of thoughts about the past and the future, destroying any aspirations for Zen-like calm and preventing us from being in the here and now: Did I turn off the stove? What will I do for lunch? When do I need to leave here in order to get to where I need to be next?
What if you could rely on others in your life to handle these things and you could narrow your attentional filter to that which is right before you, happening right now? ... A professional musician friend ... describes this state as "happily lost." He doesn't need to look at his calendar more than a day in advance, allowing each day to be filled with wonder and possibility. — Daniel J. Levitin

The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. 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. — Daniel J. Levitin

If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet that when B.B. King is playing the blues and when he is feeling the blues, the neural signatures are very similar. (Of course there will be differences, too, and part of the scientific hurdle will be subtracting out the processes involved in issuing motor commands and listening to music, versus just sitting on a chair, head in hands, and feeling down.) And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"
to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will ve replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances. — Daniel J. Levitin

Make no mistake: E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction. — Daniel J. Levitin

As the old saying goes, a man with one watch always knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure. — Daniel J. Levitin

Conscientiousness comprises industriousness, self-control, stick-to-itiveness, and a desire for order. — Daniel J. Levitin

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 — Daniel J. Levitin

Knowing that what you are doing is the most important thing for you to be doing at that moment is surprisingly powerful. — Daniel J. Levitin

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.) — Daniel J. Levitin

Part of our primate heritage is that most of us want to feel that we fit in somewhere and are part of a group. Which group we're part of may matter less to some of us than others, as long as we're part of a group and not left entirely on our own. Although there are individual differences, being alone for too long causes neuro-chemical changes that can result in hallucinations, depression, suicidal thoughts, violent behaviors, and even psychosis. Social isolation is also a risk factor for cardiac arrest and death, even more so than smoking. — Daniel J. Levitin

We make a number of reasoning errors due to cognitive biases. — Daniel J. Levitin

In the last few years, we've learned that the formation and maintenance of categories have their roots in known biological processes in the brain. 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. The number of possible brain states that each of us can have is so large that it exceeds the number of known particles in the universe. The implications of this are mind-boggling: Theoretically, you should be able to represent uniquely in your brain every known particle in the universe, and have excess capacity left over to organize those particles into finite categories. Your brain is just the tool for the information age. — Daniel J. Levitin

A big part of the problem here is that the human brain often makes up its mind based on emotional considerations, and then seeks to justify them. And the brain is a very powerful self-justifying machine. — Daniel J. Levitin

A bowl of pudding only has taste when I put it in my mouth - when it is in contact. with my tongue. It doesn't have taste or flavor sitting in my fridge, only the potential. — Daniel J. Levitin

People who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not. — Daniel J. Levitin

The four Gricean maxims are: Quantity. Make your contribution to the conversation as informative as required. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Quality. Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Manner. Avoid obscurity of expression (don't use words that your intended hearer doesn't know). Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. Relation. Make your contribution relevant. — Daniel J. Levitin

The amount of scientific information we've discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language. — Daniel J. Levitin

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones. — Daniel J. Levitin

But there is a critical point about differences between individuals that exerts arguably more influence on worker productivity than any other. The factor is locus of control, a fancy name for how people view their autonomy and agency in the world. People with an internal locus of control believe that they are responsible for (or at least can influence) their own fates and life outcomes. They may or may not feel they are leaders, but they feel that they are essentially in charge of their lives. Those with an external locus of control see themselves as relatively powerless pawns in some game played by others; they believe that other people, environmental forces, the weather, malevolent gods, the alignment of celestial bodies
basically any and all external events
exert the most influence on their lives. — Daniel J. Levitin

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

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

You'd think people would realize they're bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great. — Daniel J. Levitin

Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

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. — Daniel J. Levitin

[Texting] discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting's hyperimmediacy. E-mails take some time to work their way through the Internet, through switches and routers and servers, and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you've got a recipe for addiction: You receive a text, and that activates your novelty centers. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you fifteen seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out More! More! Give me more! — Daniel J. Levitin

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don't know it. — Daniel J. Levitin

Things that need to be dealt with right away. This might include correspondence from his office or business associates, bills, legal documents, and the like. He subsequently performed a fine sort of things to be dealt with today versus in the next few days. Things that are important but can wait. We called this the abeyance pile. This might include investment reports that needed to be reviewed, articles he might want to read, reminders for periodic service on an automobile, invitations to parties or functions that were some time off in the future, and so on. Things that are not important and can wait, but should still be kept. This was mostly product catalogues, holiday cards, and magazines. Things to be thrown out. — Daniel J. Levitin