American cognitive psychologist (1957- )
Serendipity is important for discovery. The scientific experiments I've designed were nearly all inspired by an article that I just happened to come across while I was looking for something else. The way we get that in the digital world is by building artificial intelligence-based recommendation systems. Of course, this is what Pandora is. I've been telling them for years that they should add a serendipity knob, a virtual knob that you turn to increase how adventuresome you're feeling. This translates into how far away from your core preferences you're willing to let them take you, because that can change from day to day and hour to hour.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
"The Organized Librarian: An Interview with Daniel J. Levitin", Library Journal, August 6, 2014
No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
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.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
"From Musician to Neuroscientist: An Interview with Daniel Levitin, PhD, author of This Is Your Brain on Music", American Academy of Audiology
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
The Organized Mind
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
The Organized Mind
Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Observer, January 18, 2015
Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy. Indeed, as the Four Wise Ones once said, it may be all you need.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The World in Six Songs
In order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that if you put in 10,000 hours that you will become an expert, but there aren't any cases where someone has achieved world-class mastery without it! So the time spent at the activity is indeed the most important and influential factor.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
"From Musician to Neuroscientist: An Interview with Daniel Levitin, PhD, author of This Is Your Brain on Music", American Academy of Audiology
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
The Organized Mind
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
The mammalian brain evolved exquisite place memory because that was essential for survival. This is why squirrels have such a good memory for where they buried their nuts.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
"The Organized Librarian: An Interview with Daniel J. Levitin", Library Journal, August 6, 2014
Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Organized Mind
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
The Organized Mind
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
The World in Six Songs
Although it is easier to find information these days, it is easier than ever before to find misinformation, pseudo-facts, unsupported and fringe opinions, and the like. Children should be taught at an early age what constitutes evidence, how to detect biases or distortions in newspaper accounts, and that there exist hierarchies of information sources. In the medical field, for example, a controlled experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal is a better source than a blog by the Ginseng Growers Association, promoting the health benefits of their own product.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Observer, January 18, 2015
The brain has an attentional mode called the "mind wandering mode" that was only recently identified. This is when thoughts move seamlessly from one to another, often to unrelated thoughts, without you controlling where they go. This brain state acts as a neural reset button, allowing us to come back to our work with a refreshed perspective. Different people find they enter this mode in different ways: reading, a walk in nature, looking at art, meditating, and napping. A 15-minute nap can produce the equivalent of a 10-point boost in IQ.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
The Observer, January 18, 2015