40 Quotes by Daniel J. Levitin

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%–85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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