This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

As an audiobook discussing music, this book does a good job of including relevant snippets of music as examples. The author started with a background in music, then moved to study psychology. The psychology of music was a logical field.

Music is made up of many components. The pitch and the volume are psychological interpretations of the waves received by the ear. Similar to color, it is not an inherent trait of waves, but rather our interpretation of it. Timbre can be even more difficult define. It is the "sound" that is made up of different things. Different instruments sound differently, even when playing the same notes. There are overtones and various harmonics that contribute to this.

The author has expertise and passion for both music and psychology and it shows. In addition to covering the psychology of music, he takes time for his personal journey (including meeting famous musicians as well as the scientist Francis Crick). He entered psychology later in life and credits this as an advantage that let him take a fresh look at things rather than be stuck in his ways.

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

This title has gone through a few title changes in the last five years. From A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age to Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-truth Era, before settling on A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking With Statistics and the Scientific Method. The core is similar to other books that explain in detail how statistics, charts and numbers are used to manipulate. Sometimes the manipulation is done to knowingly mislead. Many times, both the reader and writer are complicit in the poor understanding of what they are presenting. Covid-19 and politics have brought even more statistical lying out in the world.

The first part of the book focuses on how statistics and graphs can be used to mislead us. Then it goes on to cover other ways that we can be misled in a narrative fashion. Understanding bayesian probability can be extremely helpful in making sense of things. Slight differences in expressing inclusion and exclusion can trigger vastly different responses in our perception. News coverage tends to focus on the more rare, colorful events. This leads people to become more worried about the least probably things they hear more about. Science news coverage can be even worse. A new exciting research study makes the news. However, this could just as easily have been random noise. Once it is repeated multiple times and analyzed over different populations can we start to draw accurate conclusions. Alas, these meta-analysis do not get the great coverage. 

In analyzing media coverage, Bayes theorem can help us. We can use the 4-way table to analyze the difference from the current understanding. It is often more likely that extreme results are just flukes. The conventional analysis is more likely to be true. However, with more evidence, we have a greater likelihood of the "new" solution supplanting the current.

This book is loaded with examples of many ways that people "lie" (either intentional or accidentally) with the data they are presenting. There are plenty of tools to help us overcome these lies. Information is readily available today. It is now up to us to do the analysis.

The Organized Mind

Today we have easy access to orders of magnitude more information than we could process. How to best utilize the wonderful computer that is our mind? We may get hoodwinked into thinking we can multitask, but that usually just means we are doing a whole bunch of things poorly. True work happens when we can get into a flow state that is unimpeded by other thoughts. However, creative solutions often happen when we let our mind wonder off on its own. Sleep is an important part of the equation and serves as the "sorting" time where our brain processes and organizes everything. Without enough sleep, our brain will not remember or work as well as it should.

The Organized mind is primarily a science book that explains how our mind works. It also provides some useful information on how we can maximize the efficiency and use of our mind. There are also some stories shared with Levitin's other books. As a book talking about organization, it at times felt a little disorganized, but still kept interesting.

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

Despite being out for only a few months, this book has already been re-issued as Weaponized Lies. (Do you think the current political climate could have anything to do with this?) The book provides readers with the tools needed to critically analyze information to discern the veracity. The nefarious could also read it as an instruction manual on how to get people to believe what you want, even when truth is against you. Many tricks rely on understanding how the mind will jump to conclusions. (Merely framing things with different language can make them appear different.) With abundant published science out there, it is easy to find some study that will validate a point. People will rarely check the actual papers, so merely quoting something will make it appear legitimate, even when it is not. Statistics and graphs can also be great tools of manipulation. Scales can be altered to make the graph tell different stories. The "best" statistic can be chosen to prove a point (a mean and median are both averages but can tell very different stories.)
The trick to understanding the "lies" is to dig a little deeper. Sometimes a story can be quickly identified as being impossible. (If something doubles every year for a few decades, it will end up in the millions or billions, even starting with a base of 1. If we are starting with a few people doing something and saying their numbers have double for a few decades, we could easily exceed the world's population.) Other times we have supporting evidence that is not really supporting. Or perhaps the "lie" may be burried a few layers deep.
The Field Guide repeats many items from the author's much more lengthy works, but does it in a concise way that helps us to understand the "truth" in the sea of manipulative information.