Daniel Levitin is James McGill Professor Emeritus of psychology and behavioural neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
All five books of his books are international bestsellers: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006), The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (2014), A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (2016) and Successful Aging (2020).
He is also a music producer and sound designer with contributions to recordings that have sold over 30 million copies.
There is a real worldliness to his writing with many a quotable quote.
Here is one.
The internet delivers one who will help you and the other who will hurt you.
Sharp and insightful this one. The internet will either help or hinder and the responsibility to choose falls on the consumer of the information.
That’s you and me.
A ubiquitous and accessible internet is life-changing. We get all the information we need with a few clicks.
Knowledge is power but with power comes responsibility for ourselves. In everyday web use, it’s in the decision to value or trash the information that the internet coughs up in a millisecond.
In other words, it is not the fault of information access and free speech that we get trolls, alternate facts, deception, and lies. Bad stuff is a consequence of an open platform.
It is what we do with information that matters.
Do we take the time to choose?
Hero image from photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash
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