If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a balance between predictability and unpredictability is essential for engagement and satisfaction in life.
In this quote, Daniel Levitin expresses the idea that human psychology requires a certain amount of both predictability and unpredictability to thrive. If everything around us is completely predictable, we experience boredom; conversely, when everything is unpredictable, it leads to frustration. The balance between these two extremes is crucial for maintaining interest and emotional well-being, highlighting the complex nature of our experiences in relation to our environment.
In practice
During a lecture on psychology, one can use this quote to illustrate the importance of balance in human experience.
As soon as you hear a proposition, the creative brain in humans assumes for the moment that it's true, and starts trying to find evidence. It's what computer scientists in the old days used to call 'Fifo:' first in, first out. The first piece of information that gets in has a privileged position, even if it's misinformation.
What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.
Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.
That walk around the block, that fresh air, is going to help you work more quickly and effectively when you get back.
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.
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.
He who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.
It seems kosher and OK to treat women as objects because the business of cinema is about images and when you have fragmented images of a woman's bosom and her swiveling hip and her twisting navel, it robs the woman of all autonomy and subjects her to the male gaze.
Every sensation shares the same characteristic: it arises and passes away, arises and passes away. It is this arising and passing that we have to experience through practice, not just accept as truth because Buddha said so, not just accept because intellectually it seems logical enough to us. We must experience sensation’s nature, understand its flux, and learn not to react to it.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.
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