Top 147 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Levitin - Page 3

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 be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.

Another possibility is that evolution selected creativity in general as a marker of sexual fitness.

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

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

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

Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs

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.

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.

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.

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.

The kind of people who become graphic artists may not be mathematically inclined. They're artists, artistically inclined.

I like a world where each of us has the tools to be able to make able to make our own decisions.

We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process.

We need to take a step back, and realize that not everything we encounter is true. You don't want to be gullibly accepting everything as true, but you don't want to be cynically rejecting everything as false. You want to take your time to evaluate the information.

Most of what we know we don't really know first hand. I've never seen a cancer cell. But I trust this community of experts who have, so I believe that cancer exists. But we trust these experts, and we trust that the experts have a system of checks and balances and self-correction. And we have to insist that experts have certain certifications. They're not perfect. Every once in awhile there's an engine falls off the wing of a plane, or a tax audit happens and you find out your expert made a mistake. But it's a pretty good system. It's the best system we've got.

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

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.

People are trying to build a society where they can talk across the aisle so to speak, and have civil discourse. At the same time we're trying to inform ourselves about what's really true so that we can make evidence based decisions that is better than superstition or rumor. But the fact is that people who use evidence based decision making have much better life outcomes, greater life satisfaction, they live longer, they make better personal and medical decisions, better financial decisions. But parallel to that is you can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

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).

We can be skeptical, suitably skeptical, and we can trust news outlets, some more than others.

It's getting harder and harder to know, when you find things on the Internet, what you can believe and what you can't.

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.

Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integrality, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process.

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.

Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

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.