The Fourth Annual World Science Fair gets under way in New York City today and runs through Sunday, June 5. Over the next few days, the world’s leading scientific minds will be joined by renowned artists and influential thinkers for a celebration of science through discourse and debate, dance and theater, film, music and the visual arts. Pat Metheny, whose latest Nonesuch album, What's It All About, is due out on June 14, will join the proceedings Saturday night for Music and the Spark of Spontaneity, a performance and panel discussion, moderated by John Schaefer, host of WNYC's Soundcheck, at The Great Hall at Cooper Union.

Saturday's event examines just what goes on inside the brain as music is made through improvisation and spontaneous creativity, offering a live tour of Metheny's masterful musical mind at work as he performs and engages in discussion with leading scientists who are also all musicians—Jamshed Bharucha, whose research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will serve to explore the biological centers of creativity; Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist, surgeon, and neuroscientist who uses fMRI to study musicians while they improvise; Gary Marcus, a developmental psychologist who taught himself to play guitar at age 40 in order to examine the process of learning music; and Aaron Berkowitz, author of The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment. Through performance and conversation, the program will explore the neurological processes underlying improvisation and what they tell us about human creativity and the structure of the brain.

For more information and tickets to this and other events in the World Science Festival, visit worldsciencefestival.com.

To pre-order Metheny's forthcoming album, What's It All About, on CD and vinyl, head to the Nonesuch Store, where orders include an instant download of the album track "Alfie," a limited-edition print signed by Metheny, and, starting release day, high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the album.