Daniel Levitin

Of the thousands of ways that humans differ from one another, turns out there's this one cluster of traits called conscientiousness that predict a whole host of positive life outcomes, such as longevity over our health, life satisfaction. ”

Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music. ”

Neurons are living cells with a metabolism. And they need glucose in order to function. Glucose is the fuel of the brain, just like gasoline is the fuel of your car. ”

We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren't problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They'd get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response. ”

We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing. ”

Many people say some of their best ideas come from dreams. Arguably the greatest Beatles song, 'Yesterday,' came to Paul McCartney in a dream. ”

If you aren't taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won't benefit from that extra cup of coffee. ”

Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done. ”

Google is a company whose very existence depends on innovation - on inventing things that are new and didn't exist before - and on refining existing ideas and technologies to allow consumers to do things they couldn't do before. ”

There are a lot of books about how to get organized and a lot of books about how to be better and more productive at business, but I don't know of one that grounds any of these in the science. ”