Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin on the Therapeutic Power of Music

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine (Allen Lane, August 27, 2024)

Daniel Levitin, Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Managemet

Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals how the deep connections between music and the human brain can be harnessed for healing.
Music is perhaps one of humanity’s oldest medicines as well as its most universal: from China to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and pre-colonial South America, cultures have developed rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, spur healing, and calm the mind. Despite this history, musical therapy has long been considered the remit of ancient practice and alternative medicine, if not outright quackery and pseudoscience. In the last decade, however, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has emerged that persuasively argues music can offer profoundly effective treatment for a whole host of ailments, from Alzheimer’s to PTSD, depression, pain, and cognitive injury. It is, in short, one of the most potent and remarkably promising new therapies available today.
A work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and joyful celebration of the human mind, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord explores the critical role music has played in human evolution, illuminating how the story of the human brain is inseparable from the creative enterprise of music that has bound cultures together throughout history. Music insinuates itself into our earliest memories; it is intimately connected to our emotional regulation and cognition; its shared rhythms and sounds are essential to our social behaviors. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin demonstrates in this mind-expanding follow-up to This Is Your Brain on Music—which revolutionized our understanding of the neuroscience of song—medical researchers are now finding that these same deep connections can be harnessed to create profound benefits for those both young and old.

Daniel J. Levitin is the New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, Successful Aging, and the international bestseller A Field Guide to Lies. Levitin is James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Neuroscience and Music at McGill University, and Founding Dean of Minerva University in San Francisco. He is also a musician and composer who has worked with artists including Roseanne Cash, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, and Joni Mitchell, and has been awarded seventeen gold and platinum records. He divides his time between Montreal and California.

This event is available to attend IN-PERSON ONLY.

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The event will be hosted in Desautels Hall at the Rotman School of Management (105 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3E6).

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Questions: [email protected], Mandi Gosling

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Rotman School of Management, 105 Saint George Street, Toronto, Canada