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New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin shifts his keen insights from your brain on music to your brain in a sea of details. The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up. But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those p...
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music—its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it—and the human brain. Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, he reveals: • How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world • Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre • That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise • How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our head A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.
From the author of The Changing Mind and The Organized Mind comes a New York Times bestseller that unravels the mystery of our perennial love affair with music ***** 'What do the music of Bach, Depeche Mode and John Cage fundamentally have in common?' Music is an obsession at the heart of human nature, even more fundamental to our species than language. From Mozart to the Beatles, neuroscientist, psychologist and internationally-bestselling author Daniel Levitin reveals the role of music in human evolution, shows how our musical preferences begin to form even before we are born and explains why music can offer such an emotional experience. In This Is Your Brain On Music Levitin offers nothin...
'Thought-provoking and practical ... Good advice based on sound neuroscientific principles' Sunday Times In The Organized Mind, New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin offers solutions for the problems of information overload. ___________________________________________________ Overwhelmed by demands on your time? Baffled by the sheer volume of data? You're not alone. Even the smartest mind can't beat the organized mind - when we're unable to make sense of it all, our creativity plummets, our decision making suffers and we grow absent-minded. Nowadays, we drown under emails, forever juggle six tasks at once and try to make complex decisions ever m...
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Music is a vast genre that can be defined as organized sound. It can be traditional, like the great masters, or it can be avant-garde, like Francis Dhomont, Robert Normandeau, or Pierre Schaeffer. #2 The muscial terms I’ll be using are pitch, rhythm, tempo, and contour. Pitch is a purely psychological construct related to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. Rhythm is the durations of a series of notes, and the way they group together into units. #3 The five attributes of music are pitch, loudness, timbre, reverberation, and melody. These attributes are separable, and can be changed without altering the others. When these basic elements combine and form relationships with one another in a meaningful way, they create higher-order concepts such as meter, key, and melody. #4 The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the importance of relationships between elements, exists in visual art and dance as well. The most critical aspect of a work of art is not the objects themselves, but the space between objects.
The author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music’s role in the evolution of human culture in this thought-provoking book that “will leave you awestruck” (The New York Times). Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. Here he identifies six fundamental song functions or types—friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love—then sho...
INSTANT TOP 10 BESTSELLER • New York Times • USA Today • Washington Post • LA Times “Debunks the idea that aging inevitably brings infirmity and unhappiness and instead offers a trove of practical, evidence-based guidance for living longer and better.”—Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive SUCCESSFUL AGING delivers powerful insights: • Debunking the myth that memory always declines with age • Confirming that "health span"—not "life span"—is what matters • Proving that sixty-plus years is a unique and newly recognized developmental stage • Recommending that people look forward to joy, as reminiscing doesn't promote health Levitin looks at the science behind what w...
Previously Published as A Field Guide to Lies We're surrounded by fringe theories, fake news, and pseudo-facts. These lies are getting repeated. New York Times bestselling author Daniel Levitin shows how to disarm these socially devastating inventions and get the American mind back on track. Here are the fundamental lessons in critical thinking that we need to know and share now. Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. Wordy arguments on the other hand can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way. The steps we ca...
NATIONAL BESTSELLER One of Smithsonian’s 10 Best Science Books of the Year “No one else in the universe could have written this book.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist Neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals the deep connections between music and healing. Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind. In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levi...
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