Daniel Levitin on Art

"Miller and his colleague Marty Haselton at UCLA have shown that creativity trumps wealth, at least in human females."

"Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species."

"The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities."

"The point of art is to emphasize some elements at the expense of others."

"You’d think people would realize they’re bad at multitasking and would quit. But a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great."

"Creative brains became more attractive during centuries of sexual selection because they could solve a wider range of unanticipatable problems. ...Humans who just happened to find creativity attractive may have hitched their reproductive wagons to musicians and artists, and... conferred a survival advantage on their offspring."

"Music combines the temporal aspects of film and dance with the spatial aspects of painting and sculpture, where pitch space takes the place of three-dimensional physical space... frequency maps in the auditory cortex... function much the way that spatial maps do in the visual cortex."

"When a musical piece is too simple we tend not to like it, finding it trivial. When it is too complex, we tend not to like it, finding it unpredictable—we don't perceive it to be grounded in anything familiar. Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity..."