Daniel Levitin Quotes

I have the attention span of a mosquito from multitasking and all the things that have affected my poor little brain.

I would not encourage children or teens to multitask because we don't know where those efforts may lead.

As every divided kingdom falls, so every mind divided between many studies confounds and saps itself.

I am constantly distracted by my own brain when I've completed a paragraph, realized I don't know what comes next, and start opening a browser tab without even realizing it.

What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

Your conscious brain cannot multitask. If I'm speaking to you and checking my I-Phone at the same time, I'm doing neither. This is why our society is frazzled; this misconception that we can consciously do more than one thing at a time effectively.

When you think you're listening to several conversations at once, they tell me, you may really simply be time sharing - that is, listening a little bit to this one, a little bit to that one.

I find it really hard to even read another script while shooting.

Serial tasking is hard because switching tasks is hard, even when the tasks are easy and similar. In some experiments, bilingual speakers are asked to read out numbers, first in one language and then midway in another language. They often stumble at the switch, taking many tries before they hit their stride again.

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption - similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the '70s and '80s.

When you multitask, you believe you're being exceptionally productive, but really, you're fooling yourself. Each time you switch tasks, you have to backtrack a little and remind yourself where you are in the process and what's next. Invariably. you are spending twice as much time on parts of the task.

I have a constitutional weakness in which I am very easily distracted by flashing lights. If there is a TV on in the room, I can't have a conversation with you. I won't eat, I won't sleep, I'll just meld with my couch.

In the modern desktop environment, with multitasking and alerts and constant activity, there are always more distractions. When you're at a computer, your hands are always on the controls.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Task switching is hard because we do not control what is on our mind. Despite our efforts, the original task continues to occupy our mental bandwidth. Although we can control where our time goes, we cannot fully control how our bandwidth is allocated.

I kind of think too much, I try do too many things at once.

Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from... from... wait, what was I saying?

Texting is addicting. Once you get emotionally involved with constant outside stimulation assaulting your brain, it is hard to stop looking at your machine every two minutes. Without rapid fire words appearing on a screen, you feel bored, not part of the action.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

Experts say you can't concentrate on more than one task at a time.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

If I could read while I was driving, showering, socializing or sleeping, I would do it.

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.