Sean Bennett is an entrepreneur, neuroscientist, political commentator, and recording pianist of American origin.

Entrepreneur: Bennett has been a self-supporting and self-funding serial entrepreneur since age 17. After initial business successes in advertising sales, guide books, and rare books, and after brief affiliations with McKinsey & Co. and A.T. Kearney as a consultant, he is currently is the CEO of Bennett Arbitrage, a multinational arbitrage company using binomial asset pricing models and arbitrage theory optimizing a 4 million item product line offered across 25 e-commerce sites. Bennett is also working on a new organization that focuses the energies of the highly intelligent in developing off-the-grid technologies and inventions.

Neuroscientist: for the last decade, Bennett has been the world’s expert on the science behind how and why music sticks in peoples’ thoughts. He first studied Neuroscience at Harvard University with psychologist Richard Hackman as a USA Today All-USA College Team member and Target Scholar. After receiving his degree at Harvard, Bennett attended Cambridge University in the United Kingdom as a Gates Cambridge Scholarship recipient. There he was elected chair of the Gates Scholars Council by 73% of voting scholars, allowing him to work simultaneously with Bill Gates Sr. to promote Gates Foundation aims in addition to his continued studies on memorable music.

Bennett then taught extensively at Cambridge University as a psychologist, neuroscientist, and later as a Lecturer of Keyboard Studies and also of Music Analysis. He returned to Harvard in 2004 where he won the Bok Teaching Award recognizing the top student evaluation ratings for his neuroscience teaching with bestselling author Steven Pinker, and where he also investigated the neuroscience of teams for the Central Intelligence Agency and published the results with Richard Hackman and Stephen Kosslyn. While in the Boston area, he also worked as the Associate Director of the Multidisciplinary Institute for Neuropsychological Development (MIND), a center that used neuroscience research for the benefit of exceptionally gifted and learning disabled children.

Political commentator: Bennett is also a frequent participant on television, radio, and internet blogs regarding political issues, where he self-identifies as an “individual sovereignist,” an “anti-corporatocracy advocate” and also as a “libertarian-right socialist.” He worked directly with Noam Chomsky at MIT as one of his students of linguistics and cognitive science and then as a research assistant in the period from 2000-2001, and credits Chomsky with significantly influencing his formative political thought. Bennett has been additionally involved in LGBT politics, as a former President of the Illinois chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, where he lobbied heavily for the necessary bipartisan support to pass the Illinois Civil Unions bill and also the overturn of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. His media credits to date include appearances in the Windy City Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today, interviews with The Guardian and Reuters, on NBC news, in Business 2.0/CNN.com, and dozens of times on Bruce Dumont’s nationally-syndicated radio show “Beyond the Beltway” (also on WYCC 20 TV).

Pianist: Commonly regarded as a former child-prodigy, Bennett won a prize in a Disney song-arranging contest at 5, recorded Chopin’s Minute Waltz at 6 (video on YouTube), gave his debut concert at the age of 7 playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2, won national acclaim in the PTA Reflections composition contest at 10, and at 14, gained international attention after becoming the one of the youngest in the world to ever perform and record Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto, resulting in a Steinway B grand piano being gifted to Bennett by an ecstatic benefactor. This benefactor further enabled studies with Juilliard and Curtis Faculty, including John Browning, Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Jerome Lowenthal, Seymour Lipkin, Leon Fleisher, Dmitry Paperno, and Gary Graffman. Positive reviews by the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis Star, Ruth Laredo, Marvin Hamlisch, and John Bell Young, established him on the performing circuit through his teenage years.

At 19, after giving 400 solo concerts and performing with many orchestras, on NPR, regular radio, television, performing for the foreign consulates of 20 countries and Polish President Lech Walesa, and being named a winner in 50 local, national, and international competitions including the Kosciuszko National Chopin Competition and 7 awards from Steinway, Bennett retired from competitions. At this time, he set to study piano in isolation so he could release recordings directly to the public.

In 1998, his first recordings on MP3.com and on Vitaminic.com were downloaded by over 300,000 music enthusiasts, earning Bennett a rank in the top 10 classical artists among 240,000 on MP3.com and a translation of his page into 17 languages. In May and October of 2004, Bennett was ranked as the #1 most downloaded classical artist on the Internet by Download.com, and ranked in the Top Ten for downloads of songs from all musical genres. He remains to this day the only classical artist on Download.com to have had a Top Ten selection. On Vitaminic, until their closure, he was in the top ten classical artists continuously for nearly 2 years. In September 2006, he became the 11th most viewed music channel on Youtube.com for the week and the #1 most viewed classical channel. To date, his download and view count on Youtube is well over 1,000,000. His recordings are also available on 122 commercial download sites, cell phone mp3 providers, and coffeeshop music compilations, including many of the most well-known brands (iTunes, Napster, Starbucks, Rhapsody, RollingStone.com, eMusic, and others).

In 2002-2005 by ear, Bennett became one of the first to transcribe, record, and perform the set of the famed Vladimir Horowitz arrangements in a 25 concert tour throughout the UK. Artistically, Bennett now prepares for his next generation of transcriptions and arrangements to be released on video directly to the public. He releases many free recordings in order to encourage more individuals to understand, appreciate, and learn the art of music. These recordings while highly controversial have made and continue to make Bennett one of the most downloaded and fan-inspiring classical artists available on the Internet. Bennett currently is located in the Chicago area and teaches a few advanced and prodigy piano students in addition to his other activities.