No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!.

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

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

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (….

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-adrenalin….

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 ….

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility nec….

In order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hour….

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful….

I have never seen a proton or electron spinning around it. I have never actually seen a chromosome. I trust that they exist because people who I trus….

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….

The brain has an attentional mode called the "mind wandering mode" that was only recently identified. This is when thoughts move seamlessly from one ….

Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.

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 i….

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 t….

Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of ….

Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting ….

Our bodies like rhythm and our brains like melody and harmony..

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the b….

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along ….

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made informa….