Daniel Levitin Quotes
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.
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).
The constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present--tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you're never fully in the moment and enjoying what's now.
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.
No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.
What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.
Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.
Librarians are more important than ever before ... are uniquely qualified to help all of us separate the digital wheat from the chaff, to help us understand the reliability of the data we encounter.
In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.
The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.
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.
We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process.
It's getting harder and harder to know, when you find things on the Internet, what you can believe and what you can't.
When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.
I don't think I'm always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.
I like a world where each of us has the tools to be able to make able to make our own decisions.
I agree with the sentiment that it's probably more dangerous to believe some things that aren't so than to not believe something - you know, to believe in a lie.
We can be skeptical, suitably skeptical, and we can trust news outlets, some more than others.
The kind of people who become graphic artists may not be mathematically inclined. They're artists, artistically inclined.
When we have learned something, there's this thing called belief perseverance. Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I have never seen a proton or electron spinning around it. I have never actually seen a chromosome. I trust that they exist because people who I trust tell me they do.
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.
The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.