THE NEED TO KNOW

The Need To Know

The Need To Know

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Histrory Fret

Cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin has spent almost three decades studying the power of the human brain — from how memory works to how we can make good decisions in an age of information overload. In his most recent book, Successful Aging, he discusses strategies for maintaining mental vitality in our old age. They include taking walks, getting better sleep, and trying new things. They don’t include constantly checking e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, which he describes as a “neural addiction.”

Before earning his degrees in the science of the brain, Levitin worked as a musician and record producer in his hometown of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, but he was interested in learning more about what lay beneath the creative process. He earned a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Oregon in 1996, and after completing his postdoctoral training in neuroimaging and perception at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University School of Medicine, he pioneered the field of “neuroaesthetics” — the study of how the brain delivers aesthetic experiences. His first two books, This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs, both became best sellers. He believes making musical sounds may have prepared our prehuman ancestors for using speech.

For many years Levitin ran the Laboratoryfor Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise atMcGill University in Montreal, Canada. He’s taught at Stanford and been a visiting professor at Dartmouth and UC Berkeley. In 2013 he became the founding dean of arts and humanities at the Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute in San Francisco (now Minerva University). He has performed with Sting, David Byrne, and Rosanne Cash, and worked on albums with Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, and Carlos Santana.

Now in his midsixties, Levitin lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Heather, and maintains friendships with colleagues in both science and the arts, including Nobel Prize–winner David Baltimore and musician Joni Mitchell. We talked by video chat, bonding over our mutual love of music before moving on to discuss psychology, brain science, and cultural history.



DANIEL J. LEVITIN

© Larry Moran
Mark Leviton: Let’s start with how the brain functions. Most laypeople think information reaches us through our senses, and then our brain sorts it and files it away as memory, but Roger Shepard, your teacher at Stanford, said a properly functioning brain is supposed to “distort the world we see and hear.” What did he mean? Are our senses untrustworthy?

Daniel Levitin: First let me say that all of us have what you might call folk theories about how things work, and in some cases those theories are borne out. My grandmother was always pushing chicken soup as a cure for any illness, and just in the last year experiments have shown that the combination of fats, salts, and liquid in chicken soup serves as a rehydration solution. So it’s often the case that scientists and doctors are playing catch-up.

The process of interpreting the information received by the senses is very complex. A lot of what used to be called psychology is now studied by neuroscience. Evolutionarily speaking, we need certain information in order to locate food and water and shelter and to find protection from predators, and we sort that information into categories to survive. But we also need to be aware that different objects can create nearly identical patterns of stimulation on our retinas, eardrums, or taste buds. The apple I saw on a tree yesterday may look like the one I’m holding in my hand today, but they are different apples. In addition, our brain must integrate seemingly disparate images: an elephant looks different from the side and from behind, but we recognize it as the same animal from both angles.

Seeing and hearing are selective. We register what is needed at the moment and unconsciously ignore other input. It may seem that our eyes are like a camera and our ears are like microphones, objectively recording everything, but we know from fifty years of experiments that our senses are not at all like those devices.

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