Daniel J. Levitin
Daniel Joseph Levitin was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up to pursue an unusually broad range of professional activities spanning music, science, and writing. A citizen of the United States, he is described as an American-Canadian polymath whose work has moved across the boundaries of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the music industry. His education took him through several institutions, including Palos Verdes High School, California State University Fresno, the University of Oregon, Berklee College of Music, Stanford University, and Stanford University School of Medicine.
Before establishing himself as a neuroscientist, Levitin worked as a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, accumulating direct professional experience in the music industry. He has contributed written work to scientific journals as well as to music trade publications including Grammy and Billboard, reflecting the dual nature of his career. That earlier period in studios and on stages would later inform the research questions he brought to academic science, though he has since built a formal institutional home for that inquiry.
Levitin runs the Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and holds the Bell Chair in the Psychology of Electronic Communication at that institution. He is the author of four New York Times best-selling books, among them This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, which has sold more than one and a half million copies. His contributions to scholarship and public understanding of science have been recognized through election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also received the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction.
As a cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, musician, record producer, and writer working primarily in English, Levitin continues to hold his research and teaching position at McGill University. His work spans laboratory science, published books, and contributions to trade publications, and his research group at McGill remains his primary institutional base. The Bell Chair he occupies at McGill University anchors his ongoing engagement with the psychology of communication and music.
Quotes by Daniel J. Levitin
As the American Library Association presciently concluded in their 1989 report Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, students must be taught to play an active role in knowing, identifying, finding, evaluating, organizing, and using information.
Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.
The great tennis player John McEnroe used this to his advantage on the courts. When an opponent was performing especially well, for example by using a particularly good backhand, McEnroe would compliment him on it. McEnroe knew this would cause the opponent to think about his backhand, and this thinking disrupted the automatic application of it.
The lie that terrorists want you to believe is that you are in immediate and great peril.
Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload.
That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming.
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.
A steady flow of complaints about the proliferation of books reverberated into the late 1600s. Intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books, polluting their minds with useless, fatuous ideas.
Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.
It’s the central executive in your brain that notices that the floor is dirty. It forms an executive attentional set for “mop the floor” and then constructs a worker attentional set for doing the actual mopping.