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.
I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
But why do some people support [the heretics]?" "Because it serves their purposes, which concern the faith rarely, and more often the conquest of power." "Is that why the church of Rome accuses all its adversaries of heresy?" "That is why, and that is also why it recognizes as orthodoxy any heresy it can bring back under its own control or must accept because the heresy has become too strong.
I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions.
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