Indre Viskontas

Dr. Indre Viskontas, MM, PhD, is a neuroscientist, musician, and leader at the intersection of the arts, creativity, and the brain. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Director of the Creative Brain Lab at the University of San Francisco. Dr. Viskontas has published more than 50 scientific papers and chapters related to the neural basis of memory and creativity and recently served as the President of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. She has written and filmed over 100 lectures for the public, hosted several TV shows and more than 450 podcast episodes with more than 15 million downloads. ‘Dr Dre’ has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, PBS NewsHour, and major radio stations across the US and internationally. Her first book, How Music Can Make You Better, was published by Chronicle and, within a week, became an Amazon bestseller; her second book is currently under contract with Flat Iron Press at MacMillan for release in 2027. She has also recently created a LinkedIn Learning course titled “Building Creativity from the Brain Up,” which has been viewed by more than 25,000 professionals. 

• Neuroscience
• Creativity
• Memory
• Arts and health

• Learning and memory
• Arts and health
• Creativity
• Music
• Neurodegenerative diseases

• President, Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity (2024-2026)
• Chair, Scientific Advisory Board, NeuroArts BluePrint (2023-2026)
• Director of Communications, Sound Health Network (2021-2025)

• PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience, University of California - Los Angeles
• MM, San Francisco Conservatory of Music
• BSc, University of Toronto

• Professor of Sciences and Humanities, San Francisco Conservatory of Music

• Osher Fellow, California Academy of Sciences, 2023
• Davies Chair, University of San Francisco, 2022
• Hellman Fellow, University of California, San Francisco
• Cermak Post-Doctoral Award, Memory Disorders Research Society
• Dissertation Prize, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

• Daker, R. J., Viskontas, I. V., Porter, G. F., Colaizzi, G. A., Lyons, I. M., & Green, A. E. (2023). Investigating links between creativity anxiety, creative performance, and state-level anxiety and effort during creative thinking. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 17095.
• Hartley, I., & Viskontas, I. (2023). How Technology Is Changing Creativity. In Creativity, Innovation, and Change Across Cultures (pp. 391-412). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
• Slayton, M. A., Romero-Sosa, J. L., Shore, K., Buonomano, D. V., & Viskontas, I. V. (2020). Musical expertise generalizes to superior temporal scaling in a Morse code tapping task. Plos one, 15(1), e0221000.
• Viskontas, I. (2019). How music can make you better. Chronicle Books.
• Slayton, M., Bristol, A. S., & Viskontas, I. V. (2019). Factors affecting group creativity: lessons from musical ensembles. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 27, 169-174.