There’s an ancient connection between movement and music. Most languages don’t make a distinction between the words ‘music’ and ‘dance.’ And we can see that in the brain. When people are lying perfectly still but listening to music, the neurons in the motor cortex are firing.

Music and dance have also always been a communal activity, something that everyone participated in. The thought of a musical concert in which a class of professionals performed for a quiet audience was virtually unknown throughout our species‘ history.

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.

I don’t think I’m always right, but I would like to empower people to come to sound conclusions using a systematic way of looking at things.

Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago.

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.

President Trump, when challenged on facts, says that many people feel the way he does. But feelings should not take the place of reason in matters of public policy.

Maybe instead of asking political candidates to submit tax returns, we really should be asking to see their brain scans.

Evolution doesn’t just look for things that are fun; if it did, we’d know how to fly.

When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.

Yes, there were piano bands and great rock pianists, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard to Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, and Elton John. But something about the electric guitar speaks of more than music – it epitomizes and gives voice to the rebellion, power, and sexuality of rock.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

The constant nagging in your mind of undone things pulls you out of the present–tethers you to a mind-set of the future so that you’re never fully in the moment and enjoying what’s now.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

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.

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.

Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.

I believe in an informed electorate, and we need to teach our children to become informed enough to have opinions on world issues or, at least, to understand what the major issues are and who the players are.

One big promise of the Internet was that it would be a great democratizing force, allowing us to become exposed to new ideas that we might not otherwise encounter in our town, workplace or social circle.

Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don’t bother reading footnotes or tracking down citations.

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.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Across a range of inferences involving not just language but mathematics, logic problems, and spatial reasoning, sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before.

People who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.

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.

I’m not a great guitarist, and I’m not a great singer.

Anything you care about, from vacation plans to exercise to the best Ethiopian restaurant, is going to be guided by your individual search history.

If we are to appropriate money for roads, we need statistics on how bad our roads really are and, moreover, where more roads will be beneficial – it would be irresponsible to just build them where our gut tells us to.

There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists – and the rest of us – must stop giving equal time to things that don’t have an opposing side.

That daydreaming mode turns out to be restorative. It’s like hitting the reset button in your brain. And you don’t get in that daydreaming mode typically by texting and Facebooking. You get in it by disengaging.

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

Getting new information through Web-surfing almost always feels more rewarding than having to generate new information in the work that is in front of us. It therefore takes increasing amounts of self-discipline to stay on task.

We need to blinker ourselves, to better monitor our attentional focus. Enforced periods of no email or Internet to allow us to sustain concentration have been shown to be tremendously helpful. And breaks – even a 15-minute break every two or three hours – make us more productive in the long run.

Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.

Information overload refers to the notion that we’re trying to take in more than the brain can handle.

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.

No other species lives with regret over past events, or makes deliberate plans for future ones.

Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.

If you hear on the weather report that it’s going to rain tomorrow, rather than reminding yourself to bring your umbrella, set the umbrella by the front door – now the environment is reminding you to bring the umbrella.

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.

Through studies of music and the brain, we’ve learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing, and perception – and production of sequences. They’ve told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there’s misinformation.

The electric guitar and its players hold a place of privilege in the annals of rock music. It is the engine, the weapon, the ax of rock.

Activities that promote mind-wandering, such as reading literature, going for a walk, exercising, or listening to music, are hugely restorative.

Most jobs require some degree of creativity and flexible thinking.

Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

We’re not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

One of the most important tools in critical thinking about numbers is to grant yourself permission to generate wrong answers to mathematical problems you encounter. Deliberately wrong answers!

If you’re studying from a book and trying to listen in on a conversation at the same time, those are two separate projects, each started and maintained by distinct circuits in the brain. Pay more attention to one for a moment and you’re automatically paying less attention to the other.

When it comes to snowing people, one effective technique is to get a whole bunch of verifiable facts right and then add one or two that are untrue.

The rest-seeking procrastinators would generally rather not exert themselves at all, while the fun-task procrastinators enjoy being busy and active all the time but have a hard time starting things that are not so amusing.

Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads.

Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we’ve all made.

Having learned something, we tend to cling to that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. New information comes in all time, and the thing we ought to be thinking about doing is changing our beliefs as that new information comes in.

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

I became a cognitive psychologist because I met a bunch of teachers I really liked.

Use the environment to remind you of what needs to be done. If you’re afraid you’ll forget to buy milk on the way home, put an empty milk carton on the seat next to you in the car or in the backpack you carry to work on the subway.

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.

Approximating involves making a series of educated guesses systematically by partitioning the problem into manageable chunks, identifying assumptions, and then using your general knowledge of the world to fill in the blanks.

If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it’s utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.

Although I don’t know Paul McCartney, a mutual friend told me that Paul was reading my book, This Is Your Brain on Music, and stopped after chapter two. McCartney said he was concerned that if he learned more about how he does what he does (as far as composing music), he may not be able to do it anymore!