• New York Times best-selling author and One of TED’s most popular speaker with over 8 million views
• Former record company executive with 14 gold and platinum album awards
• Lively presentation on how brain science can help us to age successfully, live happier, more creative and productive lives

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Levitin’s Topics:

How to Stay Calm When You Know You’ll be Stressed

You’re not at your best when you’re stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there’s a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded — the pre-mortem. “We all are going to fail now and then,” he says. “The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be.”

 

Working Smarter

Do you come home at night feeling that you didn’t get enough done at work? Have you ever felt that you have less leisure time now than you did 10 or 20 years ago, and less time to spend doing the things you love most? Building on his #1 best-selling book The Organized Mind, Levitin discusses strategies for increasing productivity and creativity based on the latest findings from neuroscience, and his interviews with a number of HSPs — highly successful people — including U.S. Cabinet members, congressmen, CEOs of Fortune 100 companies and Nobel prize-winners.

 

Unlocking Your Creativity

Daniel Levitin has spent a lifetime working with and studying some of the top names in music, from Stevie Wonder to Joni Mitchell to Sting. Combining his experiences on stage, in the recording studio, and in the laboratory, Dr. Levitin reveals some of the secrets that great artists use to unlock creativity using his characteristic humor and insightful anecdotes. The strategies are applicable to problem solving, leadership, and decision making. In Creativity and Constraints: Evolution, Not Revolution, Levitin shows how some of the most creative ideas come from careful iteration, not sudden inspiration using a set of surprising (and rare) musical recordings.

 

This Is Your Brain On Music is based on Levitin’s million-selling book of the same name.

In this talk, he shares what scientists have learned about how and why music moves us, why we like the music we like, how people become musical experts, and how music can improve health outcomes, all as a window into unlocking our own creativity. In Conversations with… Dr. Levitin joins with a marquis musical performer to explore songwriting, inspiration, and creative problem solving in a unique format that combines discussion and musical performance. Please call to inquire about current musician partners for this program. Past partners with Dr. Levitin have included Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Ben Folds, Bobby McFerrin, and Victor Wooten.

 

The Underlying Principles of Decision Making

Business decision making is difficult because of uncertainty — we usually don’t know exactly what the outcome will be and if we did, the decision would be easy. Decision making and interpreting complex information (and big data) are perhaps the most important parts of leadership today — executives have the ultimate responsibility for decisions, and these rest on properly interpreting the data we’re given. How rational are we? What factors bias our decisions and judgments? Neuroscientists and psychologists have uncovered principles of decision making that can help all of us to maximize the effectiveness of our decisions, and to minimize the likelihood of making bad ones. Drawing on two of his #1 best selling books, The Organized Mind and A Field Guide to Lies, Dr. Levitin uses humor and examples that will help everyone to make better decisions, not just in business but in daily life and medical/health decisions. A 12 minute version of this talk was given as a TED talk and received one million views in its first week. It now has more than 9 million views across platforms, making it one of the most successful TED talks of the year.

Videos: 

Dr. Daniel Levitin’s Bio:

Daniel J. Levitin is an award-winning neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author. His research encompasses music, the brain, health, productivity and creativity.

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 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.  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 TED talk is among the most popular of all time.

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. A popular public speaker, he has given presentations on the floor of Parliament in London, to the U.S. Congress, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He has consulted for a number of companies including Apple, Booz-Allen, Microsoft, the United States Navy, Sonos, Philips, Sony, Fender, and AT&T.

Dr. Levitin earned his B.A. from Stanford in Cognitive Science, his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology with a Ph.D. minor in Music Technology from the University of Oregon, and completed post-doctoral training at Stanford University Medical School and UC Berkeley in Neuroimaging and Perception.

As a musician (tenor saxophone, guitar, vocals and bass), he has performed with Mel Tormé, David Byrne, Rosanne Cash, Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Victor Wooten and Tom Scott. Levitin has produced and consulted on albums by artists including Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell and on the films Good Will Hunting and Pulp Fiction, and has been awarded 17 gold and platinum records. 

Levitin taught at Stanford in the Departments of Computer Science, Psychology, History of Science, and Music, and has been a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth, and UC Berkeley. He is currently the Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute, San Francisco, California, and James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Neuroscience and Music at McGill University.

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