118 Quotes by Daniel Levitin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

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

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