The World in Six Songs Quotes

“No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms—the love between parents and children, between friends, love of God, love of one's way of life, and love of country. What all these forms of love have in common is intense caring (the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference), caring more about someone or something else than you care about yourself.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“Animals may perform rituals, even quite elaborate ones, but only humans commemorate and celebrate, and only humans tie these to a belief system.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“Vicarious musical pleasure by radio and phonograph, while it encourages listening to good music, seems to put a damper on musical self-expression. [In our childhood] we sang more. Children sang at school and in their play. Folks sang as they worked, indoors and out. Even drunks do not sing in the streets and buses as entertainingly as in [those] days.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“Today, music is produced by few and consumed by many. But this is a situation of such historical and cultural rarity that it should hardly be considered. The dominant mode of musicality throughout the world and throughout history has been communal and participatory.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“What you want for a communication medium is one in which honesty can be readily detected, what ethologists call an honest signal. For a number of reasons, it appears that it is more difficult to fake sincerity in music than in spoken language. Perhaps this is simply because music and brains co-evolved precisely to preserve this property, perhaps because music by its nature is less concerned with facts and more concerned with feelings (and perhaps feelings are harder to fake than supposed facts are).”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“[on sad songs] In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“These leaders—corporate heads, expert chess players, actors, writers, athletes—look at failure differently than everyone else. First, when they fail, they don’t assume that there is anything wrong with them (“I’m not good enough,” “I suck”), nor do they figure that this is a permanent state (“I’m never going to get better,” “I will always suck”). Rather, they look upon each failure as a necessary step toward reaching their ultimate goal. People who become successful see the progress toward a goal as involving a number of steps that will inevitably produce some minor setbacks. “This is something that I need to know in order to reach my goal,” they say to themselves. “And until now, I didn’t even know that I needed to know this. This setback is an opportunity to now go about acquiring the knowledge that is necessary to succeed.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“Children’s penchant for music seems to begin in infancy. By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks and can distinguish particular strains of Mozart they’ve heard versus very similar ones they haven’t, suggesting an innate—and evolutionary—basis for music perception and memory.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“Music has historically been one of the strongest forces binding together the disenfranchised, the alienated...People who do something together that is antisocial or somewhat off-center enjoy a bond...all misfits, but we are bound together in that.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“We create because we cannot stop ourselves from doing so. Because our brains were made that way.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

“If an artistic object represents the thing-itself perfectly, it is just another copy of that thing. The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others...”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature