This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

He has consulted for a number of companies including Apple, Booz-Allen, Microsoft, the United States Navy, Sonos, Philips, Sony, Fender, and AT&T.ĭr. A popular public speaker, he has given presentations on the floor of Parliament in London, to the U.S. He is the author of four New York Times bestselling books: This Is Your Brain On Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind and Successful Aging, as well as the international bestseller A Field Guide to Lies. His TED talk is among the most popular of all time. He is a frequent guest on NPR and CBC Radio and has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, and CNN. His research has been featured over 1800 times in the popular press, including 17 articles in The New York Times, and in The London Times, Scientific American, and Rolling Stone. Levitin has published more than 300 articles, in journals including Science, Nature, PNAS, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. His research encompasses music, the brain, health, productivity and creativity. Levitin is an award-winning neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author. (I really need to get serious about exercise.) We don’t have access to that (largely internal) process in others, so we tend to take their certainty as more compelling, in many cases, than our own. We are painfully aware of all the fretting and indecision, all the nuances of our internal decision-making process that led us to reach a particular conclusion. Why? Because as with the fundamental attribution error we saw in Chapter 4, we don’t have access to others’ minds, only our own. I can’t design my own workout-what do I know?” It takes Herculean amounts of discipline to overcome the brain’s bias against self-generated motivational systems.

“My trainer told me to do three sets of ten reps at forty pounds-he’s a trainer, he must know what he’s talking about. This may help explain why it’s easier to stick with an exercise program or diet that someone else sets up: We typically trust them as “experts” more than we trust ourselves.

When we step into someone else’s system, the brain marks it that way. When we set up a system, this part of the brain marks it as self-generated. Related to the manager/worker distinction is that the prefrontal cortex contains circuits responsible for telling us whether we’re controlling something or someone else is. This allows us to get more done and finish up with more energy.

“efficiently means providing slots in our schedules where we can maintain an attentional set for an extended period.

This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin