Skip to content

Quotes from This is Your Brain on Music — Daniel Levitin

born 1957 United States

← All quotes by Daniel Levitin

24 quotes

And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Musical novelty attracts attention and overcomes boredom, increasing memorability.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

As a tool for the activation of specific thoughts, music is as good as language. The combination of the two—as best exemplified in the love song—is the best courtship of all.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

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.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Consonant intervals and dissonant intervals are processed via separate mechanisms in the auditory cortex.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

The coming together of rhythm and melody bridges our cerebellum and our cerebral cortex.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

We can say that speaking French "runs in families," but I don't know anyone who would claim that speaking French is genetic.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

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.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Mozart had extensive training from his father, who was widely considered the greatest living music teacher in all of Europe at the time.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

On average, successful people have had many more failures that unsuccessful people.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Contour refers to the pattern of musical pitch in a melody—the sequence of ups or downs that the melody takes—regardless of the size of the interval.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Your brain on music is all about... connections.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

In songbirds, it is generally the male of the species that sings, and for some species, the larger the repertoire, the more likely it is to attract a mate.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

The emerging picture from... studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of master associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Studies of violin players by Thomas Elbert have shown that the region of the brain responsible for moving the left hand... increases in size as a result of practice.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Collective music making... may have historically served to promote feelings of group togetherness and synchrony, and may have been an exercise for other social acts...

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

It involves a precision choreography... between logical prediction systems and emotional reward systems.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Daniel Levitin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.