This Is Your Brain on Music Quotes

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“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 ve replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet that when B.B. King is playing the blues and when he is feeling the blues, the neural signatures are very similar. (Of course there will be differences, too, and part of the scientific hurdle will be subtracting out the processes involved in issuing motor commands and listening to music, versus just sitting on a chair, head in hands, and feeling down.) And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“And the fetus hears music, as was recently discovered by Alexandra LaMont of Keele University in the U.K. She found that children recognize and prefer music they were exposed to in the womb, a year after they are born.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“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.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“When they find out what I do for a living, many people tell me they love music listening, but their music lessons 'didn't take.' I think they're being too hard on themselves. The chasm between musical experts and everyday musicians that has grown so wide in our culture makes people feel discouraged, and for some reason this is uniquely so with music. Even though most of us can't play basketball like Shaquille O'Neal, or cook like Julia Child, we can still enjoy playing a friendly backyard game of hoops, or cooking a holiday meal for our friends and family. This performance chasm does seem to be cultural, specific to contemporary Western society. And although many people say that music lessons didn't take, cognitive neuroscientists have found otherwise in their laboratories. Even just a small exposure to music lessons as a child creates neural circuits for music processing that are enhanced and more efficient than for those who lack training. Music lessons teach us to listen better, and they accelerate our ability to discern structure and form in music, making it easier for us to tell what music we like and what we don't like.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? (The question was first posed by the Irish philosopher George Berkeley.) Simply, no—sound is a mental image created by the brain in response to vibrating molecules. Similarly, there can be no pitch without a human or animal present. A suitable measuring device can register the frequency made by the tree falling, but truly it is not pitch unless and until it is heard.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today’s truths become tomorrow’s disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d’art.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it. —Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, p. xii”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“(The research on the development of the first MRI scanners was performed by the British company EMI, financed in large part from their profits on Beatles records. “I Want to Hold Your Hand” might well have been titled “I Want to Scan Your Brain.”)”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession

“Music theorists have an arcane, rarified set of terms and rules that are as obscure as some of the most esoteric domains of mathematics.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Music is being used to manipulate our emotions, and we tend to accept, if not outright enjoy, the power of music to make us experience these different feelings.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“The number of combinations possible and hence the number of different thoughts or brain states each of us can have exceeds the number of known particles in the entire known universe.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music

“Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world. This”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer’s voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of “Green River” by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles’ “Mother Nature’s Son”; the oboes in Beethoven’s Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“And thank you to my favorite pieces of music: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony; “Joanne” by Michael Nesmith; “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Chet Atkins and Lenny Breau; and “The End” by the Beatles.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“A great deal of behavioral research is conducted on only a small number of people (“subjects” in the experiment), and with very artificial stimuli. In my laboratory we use both musicians and nonmusicians whenever possible, in order to learn about the broadest cross section of people. And we almost always use real-world music, actual recordings of real musicians playing real songs, so that we can better understand the brain’s responses to the kind of music that most people listen to, rather than the kind of music that is found only in the neuroscientific laboratory.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“My perspective is that, of the infinite number of experiments that are possible to do, the ones worth doing are those that can lead us to a better understanding of how and why.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“The point for me isn’t to develop a map of the brain, but to understand how it works, how the different regions coordinate their activity together, how the simple firing of neurons and shuttling around of neurotransmitters leads to thoughts, laughter, feelings of profound joy and sadness, and how all these, in turn, can lead us to create lasting, meaningful works of art.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Many people enter neuroscience from a background in biology or chemistry and their principal focus is on the mechanisms by which cells communicate with each other. To the cognitive neuroscientist, understanding the anatomy or physiology of the brain may be a challenging intellectual exercise (the brain scientists’ equivalent of a really complicated crossword puzzle), but it is not the ultimate goal of the work. Our goal is to understand thought processes, memories, emotions, and experiences, and the brain just happens to be the box that all this happens in. To return to the telephone analogy and conversations you might have with different friends who influence your emotions: If I want to predict how you’re going to feel tomorrow, it will be of only limited value for me to map the layout of the telephone lines connecting all the different people you know. More important is to understand their individual proclivities: Who is likely to call you tomorrow and what are they likely to say? How are they apt to make you feel? Of course, to entirely ignore the connectivity question would be a mistake too. If a line is broken, or if there is no evidence of a connection between person A and person B, or if person C can never call you directly but can only influence you through person A who can call you directly—all this information provides important constraints to a prediction. This perspective influences the way I study the cognitive neuroscience of music.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Not all neurons are equally active at one time, however—this would cause a cacophony of images and sensations in our heads (in fact, this is what happens in epilepsy).”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“At a deeper level, the emotions we experience in response to music involve structures deep in the primitive, reptilian regions of the cerebellar vermis, and the amygdala—the heart of emotional processing in the cortex.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Performing music—regardless of what instrument you play, or whether you sing, or conduct—involves the frontal lobes again for the planning of your behavior, as well as the motor cortex in the posterior part of the frontal lobe just underneath the top of your head, and the sensory cortex, which provides the tactile feedback that you have pressed the right key on your instrument, or moved the baton where you thought you did.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Listening to music starts with subcortical (below-the-cortex) structures—the cochlear nuclei, the brain stem, the cerebellum—and then moves up to auditory cortices on both sides of the brain.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

“Musical activity involves nearly every region of the brain that we know about, and nearly every neural subsystem.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession