Diana Deutsch (born 15 February 1938) is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She's a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitches in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch (perfect pitch), which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages. Deutsch is the author of Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain (2019), the Psychology of Music, and also the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003). Early life, education, and career Diana Deutsch was born Diana Sokol, on 15 February 1938, in London, England, to Max and Iska Sokol. Her father was a sculptor of the expressionist school, and she attributes her strong interest in relationships between art, science and philosophy to her many conversations with him in childhood. Deutsch was educated at Christ's Hospital in Hertford. She entered St Anne's College, Oxford in 1956, and obtained a First Class Honors degree in psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology in 1959. When at Oxford, she was particularly influenced by debates concerning the philosophy of mind, and relationships between reality and illusion. In 1957, while an undergraduate at Oxford, she met and married J. Anthony Deutsch, a lecturer there, and they moved to the U.S. in 1959. Together they wrote the textbook Physiological Psychology (1st edition 1966; 2nd edition 1973), edited the book Short Term Memory (1975) and wrote several articles, including Attention: Some Theoretical Considerations (1963), which was cited as a Current Contents Citation Classic in 1981. Deutsch received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1970 from the University of California, San Diego, was appointed Research Scientist in 1971, and Professor of Psychology in 1989, both at the University of California, San Diego. Research and theory Illusions of music and speech Deutsch has discovered a number of illusions of music and speech related to sound perception and memory. They show that there are remarkable variations in how people perceive music. Some of these variations relate to differences in brain organization, and others