Levitin is James McGill Professor Emeritus of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at The Minerva Schools at KGI; and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. From 2000 to 2017, he was Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill. 

This video is about how to stay calm when you are stressed or faced with pressure. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations when your thinking becomes clouded. The pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be." This video targeted people who are in a stressful situation. Some people will confront medical decisions to make.  

This video was so valuable to watch. The part I remember most is practicing prospective hindsight. During high pressure or stressful situation, there are a lot of things you will do mistakes and forget important stuff or things. It might be forgetting to bring your passport, forgetting to pick up your son at school and things will go worse when your mind goes somewhere else. In a messed-up situation, you must look ahead and try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, to prevent those things from happening, or minimize the damage that could happen. Next, any kind of decision you must make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts like medical decision making, financial decision making, or even social decision making. All those decisions sometimes can make you have high cholesterol. The doctor will prescribe you drugs to lower cholesterol. The truth is that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. Which is 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug. For me, drugs are not the only solution to reduce your problem. One of the things that go out the window during those times of stress is rational and logical thinking. We need to think forward to face this kind of situation.