Your Brain on Music - quote collection

A series of postings with quotes from This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin evolutionary lag effective controlled study jumping to conclusions down-beat, back-beat song and dance 10,000 hours My review of this book is scheduled for posting as part of the Love Affair with Books coming during March on the Joyful Jubilant Learning blog. Check out the full line up of books currently scheduled for the month here. brain music ear worms

effective controlled study

From This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin I find this quote worthy: ... an ongoing problem that plagues all of empirical science: the tension between rigorous experimental control and real-world situations. The trade-off is that in achieving one, there is often a compromise of the other. The scientific method requires that we control all possible variables in order to be able to draw firm conclusions about the phenomenon under study. Yet such control often creates stimuli or conditions that would never be encountered in the real world, situations that are so far removed from the real world as to not even be valid. The British philosophy Alan Watts, author of The Wisdom of Insecurity put it this way: If you want to study a river, you don't take a bucketful of water and stare at it on the shore. A river is not its water, and by taking the water out of the river you lose the essential quality of river, which is its motion, its activity, its flow. good food for thought!

jumping to conclusions

From This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin I find this quote worthy: ... Our perceptual system completes or "fills in" information that isn't there. Why does it do this? Our best guess is that it was evolutionary adaptive to do so. Much of what we see and hear contains missing information. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have seen a tiger partially hidden by the trees, or heard a lion's roar partly obscured by the sound of leaves rustling much closer to us. Sounds and sights often come to us as partial information that has been obscured by other things in the environment. A perceptual system that can restore missing information would help us make quick decisions in threatening situations. Better to run now than sit and wait to figure out if it those two separate, broken pieces of sound were part of a single lion roar. We need to be aware of our senses and brain processing to provide a "complete" story when in fact it may be based upon incomplete data that has been "filled in". One could jump to a conclusion that would not be valid if the information had been filled in.

down-beat, backbeat

From This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin I find this quote worthy: When people clap their hands or snap their fingers with music, they sometimes quite naturally, and without training keep time differently than they would do with their feet: They clap or snap not on the down-beat, but on the second beat and on the fourth beat. This is the so-called backbeat that Chuck Berry sings about in his song "Rock and Roll Music". This may also help to explain why sometimes you get out of sync if you try to watch another to keep the beat. Don't follow, just listen to the music. They may be on the "backbeat" or another beat altogether.

Song and dance

From This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin I find this quote worthy: Singing and dancing were a natural activity in everybody's lives, seemlessly integrated and involving everyone. The Sesotho verb for singing (ho bina), as in many of the world's languages, also means to dance; there is no distinction, since it is assumed that singing involves movement. I find this intriguing as it falls in line with my own Fire Circle Story.

10,000 hours

... ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert -- in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn't address why some people don't seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery. Yes, 10,000 hours! What have you done for this long? From This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. I am continuing to work my way through this book which is full of such thought provoking quotes as noted here.