Daniel Levitin Quotes

The brain has about ten thousand parameters for every second of experience. We do not really have much experience about how systems like that work or how to make them be so good at finding structure in data.

We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos.

All the different ways we know the world all come from the brain, and they all depend on each other to make sense.

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works.

The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer.

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

I can explain how a person with autism thinks. I am very, very interested in how people think. It's been a gradual process of learning more and more about how my thinking process is different. You know it's bottom up - you take specific examples to make concepts and then I put them in categories.

I respond well to what I read of Immanuel Kant's idea that the world as we see it is absolutely a function of the way our brain works. In the modern parlance, it's an evolved machine that we carry with us.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.

At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer.

In my view, while the single neuron is the basic anatomical and information processing-signaling unit of the brain, it is not capable of generating behaviors and, ultimately, thinking. Instead, the true functional unit of the central nervous system is a population of neurons, or neural ensembles or cell assemblies.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

Current psychological priesthoods ignore the fact that the profession of psychology was originated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist who recognized that the key to understanding human nature was the relationship between external stimuli and the brain.

There's a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they've all fallen short.

As Daniel Levitin writes, our brain is a "giant pattern detector." If we read something that coincides with what we already believe we're more likely to give it credence, while the opposite is not true.