Aniruddh (Ani) Patel is a Professor of Psychology at Tufts University, where he studies the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of musicality.  His areas of emphasis include music-language relations (the topic of his 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford Univ. Press), rhythmic processing, and cross-species studies of music cognition.  He and his colleagues have shown that parrots share the otherwise uniquely-human tendency to spontaneously move in synchrony with the beat of music, which offers clues to the evolutionary basis of this ability. Dr. Patel is a Fellow in the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and is the writer and presenter of the “Music and the Brain” lecture series for The Great Courses. Recently Renée Fleming invited him to contribute a chapter on musicality, evolution, and animal responses to music to her 2024 book Music and the Mind: Harnessing The Arts for Health and Wellness, to be published on April 9.