What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.

Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.

We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren't problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They'd get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response.

If you're making a bunch of little decisions - like, do I read this email now or later? Do I file it? Do I forward it? Do I have to get more information? Do I put it in the spam folder? - that's a handful of decisions right there, and you haven't done anything meaningful. It puts us into a brain state of decision fatigue.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

Information overload refers to the notion that we're trying to take in more than the brain can handle.

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.

You're entitled your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own facts.

We need to blinker ourselves, to better monitor our attentional focus. Enforced periods of no email or Internet to allow us to sustain concentration have been shown to be tremendously helpful. And breaks - even a 15-minute break every two or three hours - make us more productive in the long run.

I've always been interested in peak performance, why some people do better in life than others.

We've always known that music is good for improving your mood.

I'm not a great guitarist, and I'm not a great singer.

Music has got to be useful for survival, or we would have gotten rid of it years ago.

I actually became a producer because I saw the producers getting all the babes. They were stealing them from the guitarists.

I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.

We've learned that musical ability is actually not one ability but a set of abilities, a dozen or more. Through brain damage, you can lose one component and not necessarily lose the others. You can lose rhythm and retain pitch, for example, that kind of thing.

Through studies of music and the brain, we've learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing, and perception - and production of sequences. They've told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation.

In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.

The electric guitar and its players hold a place of privilege in the annals of rock music. It is the engine, the weapon, the ax of rock.

If everything in the environment is utterly predictable, you become bored. If it's utterly unpredictable, you become frustrated.

People have different styles: Some are filers and some are pilers. The people who pile things often know exactly where things are, and they're often just as organized as the people who file things.

The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you've got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they're competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you're actually trying to do, like getting your work done.

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.

If you don't get a good night's sleep, the events of the day are not properly encoded in memory.