Music education advocates have been fighting back against school budget cuts by claiming that that learning music makes kids better at learning other things. Numerous studies have found that students who play an instrument tend to do better in school across a wide range of subjects, but not everyone agrees that music instruction is the […]

Chris Berdik
Chris Berdik is a science journalist who has written about a wide variety of topics, including the intersection of science with ethical issues and the peculiarities of the human brain. (“Why Our Brains Make Us Laugh,” for the Boston Globe, for example.)
His book, Mind Over Mind: The Surprising Power of Expectations, was published by Current, an imprint of Penguin, in 2012. A Harvard graduate with a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University, Mr. Berdik has been a staff editor at The Atlantic and Mother Jones. His freelance articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and Boston Magazine, among others, and his radio and multimedia stories have appeared on Smithsonian.com, WBUR (Boston’s NPR station) and Sciencestage.com, among others.