Daniel J. Levitin

“Successful Ageing: Getting the Most Out of the Rest of Your Life” (2020)

What if the best was yet to come? Recent studies show that our happiness levels peak at age 82, and that our decision-making skills improve as we age. As more of us live past the age of 80, in this ground-breaking book, Dr Daniel Levitin uses cutting-edge research from neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate the benefits of getting older. Packed with engaging interviews with individuals who thrived far beyond the conventional age of retirement, this book also reflects on challenges many readers will recognize. Levitin offers a realistic personal plan full of practical, cognitive enhancing tricks for everyone to follow over the years.Successful Ageing is a radical exploration of what we all can learn from those who age joyously. This book will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens of a society in which the average life expectancy continues to rise.

“Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives” (2020)

Author of the iconic bestsellers This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin turns his keen insights to what happens in our brains as we age, why we should think about health span, not life span, and, based on a rigorous analysis of neuroscientific evidence, what you can do to make the most of your seventies, eighties, and nineties today no matter how old you are now.   Successful Aging uses research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences to show that sixty-plus years is a unique developmental stage that, like infancy or adolescence, has its own demands and distinct advantages. 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, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age.   The book is packed with accessible and discussable takeaways, providing great material for reading groups and media coverage.   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.

“A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking with Statistics and the Scientific Method” (2019)

Winner of the National Business Book AwardFrom 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!   

“Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era” (2017)

“The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature” (2009)