Daniel J. Levitin in conversation with Larry Vincent

This talk took place September 8, 2016, at the the theatre at United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, CA as part of Live Talks Los Angeles series. 

Dr. Daniel J. Levitin is the author of three #1 bestselling books: This is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind.  He is also the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, where he runs the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Perception and Expertise. 

Larry Vincent is the founder of UTA Brand Studio and serves as Chief Branding Officer at UTA. Over the last two decades, Larry has worked with globally beloved brands including Barbie, Disney, MasterCard, Microsoft, the NFL, Oakley, Playstation, Fisher-Price, and the Four Seasons. He is an award-winning writer and speaker whose last book, Brand Real, was selected by strategy+business magazine as one of the best business books of 2012.

Misinformation is a bigger problem than ever before as we’re bombarded with distortions, pseudo-facts and jibber-jabber, all masquerading as the truth.  It’s nothing new—especially when it comes to politicians— but we’ve created more human-made information in the last five years than in all of human history before then. And right along with it has come a proliferation of errors, lies, and manipulations that cross social and educational classes like never before. How do we separate the wheat from the digital chaff?

Levitin’s new book, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age is an indispensable and funny primer on how to recognize misleading announcements, graphs, and written reports, and how to think critically about the stories and statistics we encounter on a daily basis.