This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

A musician, cognitive scientist, and author, Daniel Levitin used his experience in academia and the music industry to inform This Is Your Brain on Music. The work is written from Levitin’s perspective, focusing on his research areas and incorporating personal anecdotes and recollections of his own experiences in both cognitive science and music.

Levitin is one of the most successful and well-known researchers currently studying music perception and cognition. His discovery, “the Levitin effect,” has had a lasting impact on the study of auditory memory by showing that even untrained listeners remember songs in the correct key, meaning that such information is not lost in the encoding process, as previously thought. His work was included in The Millennium Project’s list of “Top 100 Papers in Cognitive Science,” and his paper earned the European Acoustics Association Award for Outstanding Scientific Results in 2008. Levitin earned an undergraduate degree in cognitive science from Stanford University in 1992 and a master’s degree and PhD in cognitive psychology (with a PhD minor in music technology) from the University of Oregon. Since then, he has trained, worked, and lectured in some of the most prestigious academic institutions in North America. He currently works as the founding dean of arts and humanities at Minerva University in California and as the James McGill professor emeritus of psychology, neuroscience, and music at McGill University.