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

The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…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.

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.

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

We're making more and more decisions every day. I think a lot of us feel overloaded by the process.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.