Daniel Levitin Quotes

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second.

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

It appears that the media filters we carry in our heads are like computers: they've been forced to get faster in order to keep up with the demands our high-speed society puts on them.

If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you're typing faster than your mind is working.

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you've got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they're competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you're actually trying to do, like getting your work done.

In my mind, the speed of the game is mental.

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time.

Apparently there are three levels of brain activity. Level 1 is the lowest level - the amount of concentration required to, say, delete emails or serve in congress.

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

Part of you just has to be in service of processing things and getting them out.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

It turns out your conscious mind - the part you think of as you - is really the smallest part of what’s happening in your brain, and usually the last one in line to find out any information.

Human beings do not relate to written words in the same way that they will relate to spoken words. They do not relate to music in the same way that they do to pictures. It's all different parts of our head, different parts of our minds processing this.

I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling.

It's a skill that people are born with. Either you're a focuser or you're a multitasky person. I am a full-focus person.