© FRANK ROGOZIENSKIWhen he was a toddler, John Iversen made his first drum set out of pots and pans. But he soon joined his family of percussionists to play real drums and, as a teenager, founded his own rock band. Iversen became curious about the impact of music on humans and animals while studying physics as a Harvard University undergrad.
“You do find many people studying [the] neuroscience of music are musicians, and I’m no different,” he says.
Auditory physiologist Nelson Kiang in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory at Harvard/MIT helped Iversen chart his career path. In 1992, Iversen started his PhD research in the lab of Harvard auditory researcher Christian Brown. But he interacted a lot with Kiang, who studied how the ear transmits auditory signals to the brain and the neural processing that follows. “Most graduate students in science nowadays do research really organized and thought through by their supervisors, but John actually researched [his own idea],” Kiang says. “That was an early indication that he would be a creative scientist, rather than someone who just goes through the motions.”
In 2001, Iversen’s study of ...
