Daniel Levitin

Daniel Levitin (born in San Francisco in 1957) is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist, best known for his research on how the brain perceives, remembers and responds to music. He belongs to the tradition of contemporary cognitive psychology, and his work has reached well beyond academia because it connects laboratory findings with everyday experience. He is also a musician and record producer, a career he pursued for much of his youth.

After studying applied mathematics at MIT, he left college to play in bands, produce records and work as a consultant. He returned to university as an adult, earning a bachelor's degree at Stanford and a PhD from the University of Oregon in 1996, followed by postdoctoral work at Stanford, Berkeley and Interval Research. He is now professor emeritus at McGill University, where he directs a laboratory devoted to music perception and cognition.

His research has changed how scientists think about auditory memory. Through what is known as the Levitin Effect, he showed that long-term memory keeps many details of musical experience that earlier theorists assumed were lost during encoding. He has also drawn attention to the role of the cerebellum in tracking the beat and in telling familiar music from unfamiliar music. His popular books, above all This Is Your Brain on Music (2006), became international bestsellers and brought his ideas to a wide readership, later extending to attention, critical thinking and aging.