The William W. Sears Distinguished Lecturer at the annual AMTA conference in San Diego in November, 2009 was Aniruddh Patel, PhD. The William Sears Memorial Fund was established in memory of a National Association for Music Therapy leader whose membership dated back to the Association’s formative years in the early 1950s. The mission of the Sears Memorial Fund is to advance the knowledge of music therapy through distinguished speakers who are authorities in a field of interest to music therapy. This AMTA.Pro Symposium, a benefit exclusively for AMTA members, features “Building Bridges Between Music Neuroscience and Music Therapy,” Dr. Patel’s Sears Lecture at the 2009 AMTA annual conference  You may click to listen to the audio podcast or click to watch the vodcast of the 2009 Sears Lecture.

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In 1997, Dr. Ani Patel joined The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, where he is now the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow. His research focuses on how the brain processes music and language, especially what the similarities and differences between the two reveal about each other and about the brain itself. He has pursued this topic with a variety of techniques, including neuroimaging, neuropsychology, behavioral studies, theoretical analyses, acoustic studies, and comparative research with nonhuman animals. His research has appeared in numerous journals, including Nature, The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognition, Brain and Language, and Music Perception. Dr. Patel, the president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, is the author of the book Music, Language, and the Brain.

Dr. Patel’s paper, “Music, biological evolution, and the brain,” in the recently released book Emerging Disciplines, can be read in its entirety here:
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/patel/Patel_2010_music_evolution.pdf