Daniel Levitin Quotes

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

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.

Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from... from... wait, what was I saying?

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

The brain is constantly adapting.

I am an apologist for the reading brain. It represents a miracle that springs from the brain's unique capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

As a college student, what really interested me was the human brain and human intelligence.

The thing you realize when you get into studying neuroscience, even a little bit, is that everything is connected to everything else. So it's as if the brain is trying to use everything at its disposal - what it is seeing, what it is hearing, what is the temperature, past experience.

I suspect that pleasure is mainly used to turn off parts of the brain so you can keep fresh the memories of things you're trying to learn. It protects the short-term memory buffers. That's one theory of pleasure.

I re-read the books I assign to my students. Each time I do, I learn something new.

I think I was always a little sponge as a kid, and I was always looking for more information constantly.

Repetition doesn't create memories. New experiences do.

As an ex-programmer, I'm still just curious about how the brain functions, how that flow of information really happens.

No one knows the complete function of sleep. Is it to reset the brain or give it more of a rest period? Is it for cleaning the brain of all the garbage protein? For me, talking about these things as a non-biologist is fascinating.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.

Human brains - in terms of cognition and emotion and consciousness - are essentially the same as they were at the time of Shakespeare or Jesus or Cleopatra or the Stone Age. They are not evolving with the pace of change.

I do love the way the brain looks. I love the way it's shaped.

The brain sure as hell doesn't work by somebody programming in rules.