Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin is an American-Canadian writer, cognitive neuroscientist and musician. Levitin originally enrolled to study music at Berklee College of Music in Boston but left his studies to join various bands and work as a music producer. He returned to academia in his thirties to study cognitive psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University, where he earned his BA, and subsequently went on to obtain a Master’s degree and a PhD from the University of Oregon.

Levitin’s scientific work focuses on the neuroscience of music perception and cognition – the topic which he explored in his first, chart-topping This is Your Brain on Music (2006). It was followed by The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), The Organized Mind (2015), A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics (2017), and The Changing Mind (2020).