Gary Marcus

Musicians are famous for their wild and often intoxicated lifestyles, but does a lack of inhibition in the brain actually make you a better musician?

Creativity is almost always associated with the arts, but Gary Marcus tells us how creativity takes on different forms in all aspects of life. 

For this week's Please Explain, guest host Manoush Zomorodi heads to the frontiers of neuroscience.

President Obama has proposed a brain mapping project to help us understand a bit better what's going on inside our noggins. Dr. Rafael Yuste is a neuroscientist at Columbia University...

Kurt Andersen talks with Gary Marcus about what science knows, and doesn’t know, about creativity. Marcus is the director of New York University’s Center for Language and Music, and ...

Kurt Andersen asks about the role of disinhibition — the brain loosening control of its output — as a component of creativity, noting alcohol and drug use among artists of all kinds...

The last time that cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus was on Soundcheck, he discussed his book “Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning." Today, he returns to Soundcheck to address further questions about how we become musical - and whether someone must be musical in order to make music.

You have to have an innate gift to be really musical. Right? Not so fast, says cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus. His new book, "Guitar Zero," looks at how anyone – even a 40-year-old cognitive psychologist with no apparent musical talent – can learn to make music.

Gary Marcus, professor of psychology and the director of the NYU Center for Language and Music and author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning, talks about how his day job as a scientist informed his efforts to learn the guitar at 40.  Have you learned a new language or musical instrument as an adult?

Event: What Does it Take to Become Musical? with special guests, Terre Roche of The Roches and Afro-Jersey. January 19, 2012, 7pm, 19 West 4th St Room 101, New York, NY 10003.

Is the human brain an elegant, sophisticated organ? Or is it a clumsy, haphazard construction? NYU psychologist Gary Marcus’s new book about how to adapt to the brain’s flaws is Kluge.

Event: Gary Marcus will be speaking
Tuesday, June 24 at 6:30 pm
American Museum of Natural ...