John Rehner Iversen
Associate Professor, Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour

John Rehner Iversen, PhD is a cognitive neuroscientist studying the interactions between music and the brain. He recently joined McMaster University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour after a decade at the University of California San Diego. He is a member of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind. His research focuses on perception and production in music and language including studies of the role of culture in rhythm perception, whether rhythm perception is uniquely human, and charting brain mechanisms involved in beat perception, emphasizing the role of the motor system in listening. Beyond music, he works on methods and research to study the brain in real-world contexts, using mobile brain/body imaging. He has directed teams describing the neural dynamics underlying real-world navigation, group interactions and complex motor learning. Iversen directs several studies of the impact of music training on development in childhood and adolescence funded by the National Institutes of Health and a National Endowment for the Arts Research Laboratory. These projects place the impact of music into a broader neurodevelopmental framework, in which researchers are charting the 'growth curves' of the developing brain to understand how brain development shapes the emerging skills of each individual. Iversen has championed the idea of leveraging existing large-scale developmental studies such as the NIH Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study by ‘nesting’ studies of music and arts within them. After undergraduate studies in Physics at Harvard, he received an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and a PhD in Speech and Hearing Science from MIT.