Music is one of humanity's oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.

In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

Levitin is not your typical scientist--he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today's most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music--its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it--and the human brain.

Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, he reveals:

- How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world
- Why we are so emotionally attached to the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre
- That practice, rather than talent, is the driving force behind musical expertise
- How those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our head

A Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist, This Is Your Brain on Music will attract readers of Oliver Sacks and David Byrne, as it is an unprecedented, eye-opening investigation into an obsession at the heart of human nature.

New York Times bestselling author and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin shifts his keen insights from your brain on music to your brain in a sea of details.

The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we're expected to make more--and faster--decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.

But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel--and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.

With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.

INSTANT TOP 10 BESTSELLER *New York Times *USAToday *Washington Post *LA Times

Debunks the idea that aging inevitably brings infirmity and unhappiness and instead offers a trove of practical, evidence-based guidance for living longer and better.
--Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive

SUCCESSFUL AGING delivers powerful insights:
- Debunking the myth that memory always declines with age
- Confirming that health span--not life span--is what matters
- Proving that sixty-plus years is a unique and newly recognized developmental stage
- Recommending that people look forward to joy, as reminiscing doesn't promote health

Levitin looks at the science behind what we all can learn from those who age joyously, as well as how to adapt our culture to take full advantage of older people's wisdom and experience. Throughout his exploration of what aging really means, using research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive- enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age.

Successful Aging inspires a powerful new approach to how readers think about our final decades, and it will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens within a society where the average life expectancy continues to rise.

Music is one of humanity's oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.

In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

Levitin is not your typical scientist--he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today's most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

Winner of the National Business Book Award

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind and This Is Your Brain on Music, a primer to the critical thinking that is more necessary now than ever

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process--especially in election season. It's raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports, revealing the ways lying weasels can use them.

It's becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, and distortions from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories--statistical information and faulty arguments--ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren't. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning--not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin's charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren't so. And catch some weasels in their tracks

The author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music's role in the evolution of human culture in this thought-provoking book that will leave you awestruck (The New York Times).

Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history.

Here he identifies six fundamental song functions or types--friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love--then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these six songs work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species.

Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved--right up to the iPod.

Smart, important, and, as always, exquisitely written. --Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
Readers of Daniel J. Levitin's two previous New York Times bestsellers have come to know and trust his unique ability to translate cutting edge neuroscience into an informative and entertaining narrative. Now Levitin turns his attention to an issue that affects everyone in the digital age: organization. It's the reason that some people are more adept than others at managing today's hyper flow of data. The Organized Mind explains the science behind their success and--with chapters targeted specifically to business readers--shows how all of us can make small but crucial changes to regain mastery over our lives.

Musik ist eine uralte, ewig junge menschliche Leidenschaft. In unserem Leben kann sie eine prägende Rolle spielen, selbst wenn uns dies gar nicht immer bewusst ist. Doch woher beziehen Melodien ihre Macht, ihre Magie? Daniel Levitin, der die Neugier des Neurowissenschaftlers mit der Erfahrung des erfolgreichen Musikproduzenten verbindet, erkundet in diesem Buch die vielfältigen Beziehungen zwischen Musik, Gefühl, Gehirn und Geist. Er schlägt damit Brücken zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft - zwischen dem Komponieren, Spielen, Hören und Genie en von Musik und den damit einhergehenden Vorgängen im menschlichen Gehirn sowie den Wirkungen auf unsere Psyche. Indem er auch neueste Forschungsergebnisse aus Psychologie und Neurobiologie aufarbeitet und zur Veranschaulichung zahlreiche Musikbeispiele heranzieht - von Mozart bis Metallica, von Ella Fitzgerald bis U2, vom Kinderlied bis zur Zwölftonmusik -, liefert er Antworten auf eine ganze Reihe spannender Fragen:

• Werden unsere musikalischen Vorlieben schon im Mutterleib geprägt?
• Warum bleiben wir emotional der Musik verbunden, die wir als Teenager gehört haben?
• Was verraten moderne bildgebende Verfahren über die Verarbeitung von Musik im Gehirn?
• Ist Virtuosität weniger eine Sache des Talents als vielmehr das Ergebnis von 10.000 Stunden Übung?
• Wie nutzen Komponisten die Mechanismen, mit denen unsere Gehirne die Welt mit Sinn versehen?
• Unterscheidet sich musikalischer Genuss von anderen Freuden, die wir empfinden?
• Warum gehen uns eingängige Melodien - Ohrwürmer - nicht mehr aus dem Kopf?

Der Ansicht etlicher Wissenschaftler, wonach Musik nur eine evolutionsbiologisch nutzlose Begleiterscheinung ist, stellt Levitin die Überzeugung entgegen, dass Musik geradezu eine der grundlegenden Fähigkeiten unserer Art ist, vielleicht sogar noch vor der Sprache. Melodien für Neuronen ist nicht nur ein faszinierender Bericht von der vordersten Front der Forschung, sondern zugleich eine Hommage an die Schönheit der Musik selbst. Der lockere Schreibstil und eingestreute Anekdoten aus dem Musikbusiness machen das Buch zudem zu einem Lesevergnügen. So wird Ihnen die Lektüre Augen und Ohren öffnen - egal, ob Sie lieber Bach oder Bono auf Ihren iPod laden.