From Our Neurons to Yours

"I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine" | Daniel Levitin

• Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, Nicholas Weiler, Daniel Levitin • Season 7 • Episode 13

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Most of us can agree: music is awesome. Regardless of which songs speak to you, music probably plays an important role in your life. The question is, what makes music so powerful? Why does a particular combination of sounds and rhythms grab us and affect us in the way that it does? And is it true that music can help heal patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, PTSD, chronic pain, and more? 

To help us understand what we're learning about the neuroscience of music and how it can heal and enrich our lives, we're speaking with Daniel Levitin. He's a musician and a producer as well as a neuroscientist and bestselling author. His newest book is "I Heard There was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine." 

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Nicholas Weiler (00:11):

Welcome back to From Our Neurons To Yours, from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, bringing you as always, to the frontiers of brain science. I'm your host, Nicholas Weiler.

(00:28):

Most of us can agree music is awesome. How else are you going to get together with a huge group of people and jump up and down and feel connected to people who you've never met before? How else can you sit in your room and feel transported into another world, another way of thinking? How else can you feel emotions you didn't know how to put words to? But somehow a set of sounds coming through your eardrums can attune you exactly to the thing that you wouldn't even be able to describe. Regardless of your taste, regardless of what music does it for you, there's probably a role for music in your life. But the question is, what makes music so powerful?

(01:11):

Why does this combination of sounds and rhythms and beats, why does it grab us and affect us in the way that it does? There's also increasing evidence that that power of music can be used to heal. To help people with Alzheimer's Disease reconnect with their memories and loved ones. To help people with Parkinson's Disease begin to move again. To treat chronic pain and to help people get through trauma.

(01:37):

To help us understand what we're learning about the neuroscience of music and how it can heal and enrich our lives, we're fortunate to be speaking today with Dan Levitin. He is a musician, a producer, also a neuroscientist, and a best-selling author. His newest book is, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine. Here's my conversation with Daniel Levitin.

(02:03):

So Dan, it's been nearly 20 years since you published This Is Your Brain On Music, and now with your new book, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord about music as medicine, I heard you say that this is the book you wanted to write back in 2005 or so, but the evidence wasn't quite there at the time. What's changed in that time?

Daniel Levitin (02:24):

Well, so I wear two hats, as it were. I have been a performing musician since I first played professionally at age 16 with Mel Tormé. I have had the wonderful experience of being on a stage and seeing how the process of playing music can transform the musicians on the stage for being a bunch of grouchy, impatient people to being better versions of themselves. Sometimes, and I've seen the transformation of audiences and people come up after a show and they say, "Oh, I was really depressed or I was trying to escape for a while. I'm in a better mood now. I had aches and pains. They disappeared during the music," all of that.

(03:05):

So when I set out to write Brain On Music, which I started in 2004, I wanted to talk about that. But as a scientist who had done my postdoc at Stanford University Medical School-

Nicholas Weiler (03:16):

Welcome back.

Daniel Levitin (03:17):

Thank you, and very concerned about not say things for which I lack scientific evidence, I couldn't write a book about medicinal and health effects of [music]. There just wasn't any solid research. There weren't randomized controlled trials, there weren't rigorous studies. But what changed is in the last 10 years in particular, thousands of articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals looking at music and medicine, broadly speaking, the way music can treat injuries, diseases, disorders, the way it can increase immune system function.

(03:51):

When I entered the field, I got my doctorate in the '90s from University of Oregon. We didn't even have neuroimaging yet. And so, the neuroimaging revolution, it was started by Peterson, Posner, Fox, and Raichle, with their first PET study where they captured the brain in the act of thinking, that opened up a whole new set of possibilities, and FMRI came soon after that. Vinod Menon and I at Stanford, along with Gary Glover, published one of the very first neuroimaging studies looking at people listening to music. And so, I think it was largely technology driven that we now had a way to take something that was kind of squishy and unscientific seeming, like emotion, and we had a way to get some objective biological evidence for what was happening.

Nicholas Weiler (04:41):

One of the things that you mentioned in the book is that the effects of music on people is incredibly individual, and we need to have some understanding, as you're saying, we need to be able to see what's going on in the brain to understand how different kinds of music affect different people, how you would design studies to do that. In your book, you go through a lot of different examples, and I very much appreciated the playlist that came along with the book. It was nice to be able to follow along and listen to the songs you were talking about.

(05:10):

I think as you mentioned, there is a tendency or a fear that people might see the idea of music therapy as somehow woo-woo. So, let's make the case. Maybe we can go through some of the key case studies. I mean, what examples convinced you that the science here was worth writing a book about now?

Daniel Levitin (05:26):

Well, I think maybe the strongest case is Parkinson's Disease. Parkinson's, as we know, is a neurodegenerative disorder, is associated with destruction of cells in the basal ganglia, and affects voluntary movements. I'm saying voluntary because that's different than involuntary movements. If you hear a loud sound and you jump out of the way, that's an involuntary movement. Parkinson's patients can still do that. It's the voluntary movements, getting food from the plate to their mouth with a fork, trying to put one step after another, trying to speak and have the words come out smoothly. All of these require very precise timing, and the timing circuits in the brain are damaged in Parkinson's.

(06:07):

But what we've seen is that if you play music with the same tempo and a discernible beat, a strong beat, keeping pace with a person's walking speed, maybe like that, within about five seconds, there are entire populations of millions of neurons that automatically synchronize to that beat. Those neurons are intact and the brain can scaffold on them, finding this external clock, and then Parkinson's patients can walk, where before they couldn't. A Parkinson's patient who might freeze can start walking again. And through a rhythmic auditory stimulation program of therapy, say over a two-week period, 15 or 20 minutes a day with this kind of music going, Parkinson's patients after a couple of weeks don't even need the music anymore.

Nicholas Weiler (06:58):

Now, that's where I found this so fascinating because at first I was thinking when I was reading, oh, well, that's a metronome, right? We're giving an external timer and they can synchronize to that. But then the fact that it goes on, what do you think is happening there?

Daniel Levitin (07:12):

Well, so I'm glad you brought up the metronome, Nick, because the first question that any skeptic would have is, well, why not just use a metronome? And we tried that, and it doesn't work nearly as well. And so it led, William Ford Thompson, one of the great, great music cognition researchers in the world, has a theory about it, which is that music is unusually engaging, it's multidimensional. The metronome is basically one-dimensional, but the music has this compelling quality that draws you in. It's got chord changes and melodies and instruments that are changing what they're doing, maybe there's lyrics. And so you're engaging attentional systems of the brain more fully, which is why it works better than a metronome.

Nicholas Weiler (07:57):

Do you think patients are also able to bring that signal on board so that they can have music running in their own heads, rather than having it be external?

Daniel Levitin (08:06):

Yeah, we call it audiation. They can imagine the music playing and at some point, they're able to build up supplementary capacity. I mean, the thing to remember here, and this is kind of an old idea in cognitive neuroscience, the brain is massively redundant. There are lots of circuits that do the same thing. And just as a segue of another example that makes the case, you remember Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot.

Nicholas Weiler (08:32):

I was just about to bring that story up. Yeah, tell us about that.

Daniel Levitin (08:34):

So she was shot in the left temporal lobe by a would-be assassin, and she couldn't speak. She had expressive aphasia, the speech circuits in her brain were obliterated. But using melodic intonation therapy, which is a fancy name for saying they taught her to sing, she could speak again. And in many, many cases, not just Gabby Giffords, but in many we've seen, in fact, if I could back up a minute. Vinod Menon at Stanford and I showed this many years ago, that although there are music circuits in the brain that are separable from the speech circuits and language circuits. There are other circuits that can process both, but the neurons that are processing musical lyrics are operating in a different mode than when they're processing spoken words and speech.

Nicholas Weiler (09:24):

Okay, interesting.

Daniel Levitin (09:25):

So you've got some overlapping circuitry and some unique circuitry. And so it seems as though the intact circuitry of the lyrical system, tied into the music system, allows you to learn to say things like, "I need a glass of water," or, "Show me to the bathroom."

Nicholas Weiler (09:46):

Things that you couldn't say just in prose, but if you are saying it in music-

Daniel Levitin (09:49):

That's right, that's right.

Nicholas Weiler (09:50):

... you can do it's right.

Daniel Levitin (09:51):

Bob Knight has this wonderful demonstration, it's not a public demonstration, but Bob Knight up at UC Berkeley has a patient with expressive aphasia following a stroke, not a gunshot, and the person could not say the words, "Happy birthday." He's all tongue-tied, the expressive part isn't working, and he sounds something like this... But then he can sing, "Happy Birthday to you," just completely in the next breath. So they're separate circuits and by training the musical system, Gabby Gifford's learned to speak, and now you can see YouTube videos of her, she speaks perfectly normally.

Nicholas Weiler (10:27):

I love the metaphor that you use in describing this, that it's kind of like having a Swiss Army knife, right? And if one piece is broken, the brain is redundant, so it has other pieces. You can use a different tool to get the same job done. It may not work as well at first, but you can get there.

Daniel Levitin (10:42):

I wish I could take credit, Nick, for the Swiss Army knife metaphor, because it was Leda Cosmides and John Tooby who were in the lab with me when I was an undergraduate studying under Roger Shepard at Stanford at Jordan Hall, and they coined this metaphor of the brain being a Swiss Army knife. The idea was that to somebody who's never studied biology or neuroscience, just the naive thinking is, oh, well, we've got a speech system and it evolved for speech, and we've got a music system that evolved for music, and we've got a motor system that evolved to help us geo-navigate, but it didn't really work that way. And so you end up with duplication of function and some things being co-opted.

(11:23):

The famous example of co-opting is that if you haven't studied biology, you probably think that birds have feathers for flight, but they don't. The evidence is they evolved feathers to keep warm, and once they had them, they became co-opted through evolution for flight. So, we don't know which of the systems were intended for what, but thank goodness we have this Swiss Army knife. And the metaphor is apt, because if you've got a little, oh, say a screwdriver and it's broken, you can use the bottle opener as a screwdriver.

Nicholas Weiler (11:54):

Yeah, and I want to come back to all of this neuroscience in a moment. Let's get a couple more examples of some of the results that are coming out about ways in which music can potentially heal. Another one that I thought was really moving, you talked about patients with Alzheimer's Disease who have lost many of their memories. They're perhaps deep in dementia and they tend to collapse in on themselves or turn in on themselves. What's the effect that people have seen with music therapy for Alzheimer's Disease?

Daniel Levitin (12:21):

Yeah, so to back up a bit, often with profound memory loss due to Alzheimer's or for other reasons, people no longer in this condition, they don't recognize where they are. They don't remember how they got to this place. It doesn't look like their house. They're in a facility but they don't remember ever coming there. Nobody looks familiar, they don't recognize their loved ones. They may not even recognize themselves in a mirror. You're talking about profoundly disorienting events. And so, the brain in a kind of protective mode has them fold in on themselves and stop paying attention to an outside world that makes no sense. But it is a principle of memory that the earliest memories in are the ones that are most resilient to damage, and they're the ones that stay intact the longest.

(13:05):

So if you play music from somebody's youth who has no memory of anything recent, that can reignite in them a sense of who they are. It reconnects them with a self they thought they had lost. Suddenly, they're 13 years old again or 20 years old again, they come back to memories that they had lost access to. And part of the story there is that many of us believe everything you've ever experienced is in your memory somewhere. The problem is, memory is not like a computer where you can just type in a search term and find it.

Nicholas Weiler (13:39):

Yeah, there's no random access, really.

Daniel Levitin (13:41):

Yeah, it's more like, well, in my youth, there was a cartoon called Tennessee Tuxedo, and there was Mr. Whoopie's Closet, and he would open this closet and it had all kinds of junk in it and it would all fall out and he'd have to dig through it. But it's really more like Roger Shepard's office when I was an undergrad, he was just super messy and there were things piled on the floor to the ceiling and things were on chairs and falling over. And he happened to know where things were most of the time, but nobody else could find anything, and your memory's kind of like that. So what you need is a unique cue, what can access that memory and nothing else. And music is really good at accessing memories that were associated with a particular time and place. So, that's what a memory neuroscientist wants in a stimulus, something that's uniquely associated with a particular set of circumstances.

Nicholas Weiler (14:31):

And so, what have you seen or the folks who are doing these experiments, when one of these patients who, as you said was folded in on themselves, you play them some music from their youth. How does that affect them?

Daniel Levitin (14:42):

Well, in many cases, they relax, they become animated, alive. They can start talking and become loquacious, they may not have spoken for months. Again, they know who they are, at least momentarily. And the effects can last for hours, sometimes days, of having been pulled out of themselves. Sometimes they revert, sometimes they're able to make small connections to what's going on around them. But what it does is it brings some humanity back to them and it helps their loved ones to see a glimpse of who they had lost.

Nicholas Weiler (15:16):

And there are so many other examples. You mentioned chronic pain, you mentioned depression and trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia. I don't think we can go into all of these examples, but it seems that music has many unique abilities to access some part of us that is deeply human to restore something that is central to us. One of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading the book, you made a comment at one point that it's wrong to think of music as being valuable because it can heal. It's valuable because it's music and it's wonderful, and it's something that brings out our humanity.

(15:53):

So, I'd love to spend a minute talking about our relationship to music more broadly. I think you wrote a whole book on this, the human history with music. You wrote in the book, "We have archeological evidence of musical instruments that go back 60,000 years. Cultures all around the world use music." You argue at one point that singing may have predated speech. So, how does this deep human history with music help us understand why music is so powerful for us?

Daniel Levitin (16:21):

Yeah, so as you point out, some of the oldest artifacts found in human and Neanderthal burial sites are musical instruments. Music has been around for a long time. We've co-evolved with music, and the question about what it can teach us about humanity is an important one and I would frame it in terms of art in general. As my colleague Mike Gazzaniga has written and others, Semir Zeki, what is it that the arts do for us? Why do we spend so much energy and resources pursuing them, either as practitioners or as audience members? What is the evolutionary advantage of music, you might ask, and how has it come to mean something to us?

(17:02):

There are a lot of different possible answers, but I think the loftiest one, which may be the most compelling, is that art in general and music in particular, can increase empathy. Now, it does so in behavioral ways and in neurochemical ways. We know that when people listen to music together, they tend to release oxytocin, the neuropeptide associated with bonding and trust, social salience. In addition to those feelings of belonging, we experience more compassion, sensitivity, tolerance, understanding. Art can help us to view the world differently than we viewed it before, to see it through another person's perspective.

(17:45):

Literature can do things that a newspaper article can't. You can read about a conflict in the world in the newspaper in dry facts. No matter how well it's written, it feels abstract. It's happening halfway around the world, it's not me, or these people are all different than me. But great art, literature, plays, dance, painting, sculpture, and music can represent the experience of people whose lives are different from yours. And through that can come an understanding of the pressures they face, the similarities between you and they in terms of hopes and dreams. And through art, which is an act of imagination, we can imagine a world better than the one we're in. And only by doing that can we actually build the world that's better than the one we're in.

Nicholas Weiler (18:32):

So, let's get into talking about the brain. This is a show about the frontiers of neuroscience. So, can you take us on a journey into what we are starting to understand about what is going on in the brain when we listen to music or when we make music? I want to think about both sides of this.

(18:48):

Let's give an example. Let's say I'm listening to a song by Jon Batiste, one of my favorite artists, he has a new album that just came out. Fundamentally, we have a bunch of vibrations in the air coming out of my speakers, which my inner ear somehow incredibly decomposes into a set of pitches or notes, and then something else happens. How is it that that song, those notes or chords, can give me the shivers or make me feel like crying or dancing? That's the thing that is so mysterious about how music impacts the brain. So, what are we learning about that?

Daniel Levitin (19:19):

Well, it's pretty complicated. As you point out. All sound starts with some movement. It's something being hit or plucked or air moving through a column like vocal chords or a trumpet. There's some movement that causes a molecular disturbance in the atmosphere. The molecules bounce your eardrums in and out, they wiggle back and forth. And from that wiggling, the brain has, as you say, decomposed or reconstruct really, what it is that was in the original stimulus. And it does that through a bunch of special processing circuits. One circuit just extracts the pitches, the frequencies. Another circuit extracts the durations. Another brings those two together, the durations and the frequencies, and creates a sense of timbre. Timbre is what makes your voice and my voice sound different. Even when we're saying the same words at the same speed and the same pitch. We have a different tonal color as a trumpet does from a piano.

(20:17):

Those pitch representations are bound up into representations of melody and harmony and chordal structure. The durations are bound up into representation of rhythmicity, meter, accents come in because the brain is tracking loudness differentials. So, these are all independent circuits operating in parallel to some degree and in serial in others. Some of them depend on earlier stages, some of them are happening in parallel. And we know that this is true because we've seen people with brain damage, focal brain lesions from a stroke or a tumor or some other injury, where they no longer can recognize pitch, but they can recognize rhythm or vice versa, or they can recognize pitch and rhythm but not tell one instrument apart.

(21:01):

And it's well known to people who study vision that the same thing's happening in the visual system. Color is processed separately from location or movement or edges, boundaries, contrast. And so, this miraculous reconstruction happens so quickly though, within tens of milliseconds, that you don't realize, maybe 40 thousandths of a second, it's done. All you hear is Jon Batiste. You hear the piano, you hear the drums, the bass, but your brain is putting it together a piece at a time.

Nicholas Weiler (21:33):

One of the things I thought was, I don't want to dwell on this, but I thought it was so fascinating. You had a long section about, how can we tell these different instruments apart? These different instruments playing the same notes sometimes, and somehow our brains are able to separate those through slight differences in timing, differences in timbre.

Daniel Levitin (21:51):

So one of the world experts on timbre is Steve McAdams, who I recruited to McGill from Arcom in France. He's still at McGill. And he and Vinod and I worked on a study where we did brain mapping of people listening to different timbres, and we found that there's actually a timbre map in the brain, and timbres three to six unique dimensions.

Nicholas Weiler (22:13):

So this is like we've got a map of trumpets, trombones, tuba, all the guitar, piano, all that stuff. That's great.

Daniel Levitin (22:19):

And if you were to unwrap the auditory cortex, there's a portion of that looks like a piano keyboard, really.

Nicholas Weiler (22:24):

That's amazing.

Daniel Levitin (22:24):

It goes from low notes to high.

Nicholas Weiler (22:26):

So in the motor and the somatosensory cortex, we have the homunculus, which maps the human body. In the auditory cortex, we need to come up with a name for this, the musical instrument-unculus, of some kind.

Daniel Levitin (22:36):

Yeah, the conductor-unculus or something.

Nicholas Weiler (22:38):

The conductor-unculus. Okay, we'll work-

Daniel Levitin (22:39):

The condunculus.

Nicholas Weiler (22:40):

We'll workshop that. But I want to get from there, representing, what is the sound? What are the instruments? What is actually happening in the world? How does that turn into the fact that it gives me shivers?

Daniel Levitin (22:52):

Yeah, so that's a great question. And I don't know that we have a definitive answer, but we have some notions, some hypotheses. Vinod and I did a study where we looked at an area of the brain called Brodmann area 47, which is a small sliver of tissue on either side of your temples, right behind your eyes. And it appears as though its job is to figure out what's going to happen next in the world in some sort of temporal sequence. It's a pattern detector, it's trying to predict what's going to come next.

(23:24):

So, it had been known to work with vision and with speech. So if I were to say, "Nick, the pizza was too hot to?"

Nicholas Weiler (23:31):

Eat.

Daniel Levitin (23:32):

Yeah, you would've predicted what I was going to say. Now, if I were to say, "The pizza was too hot to sleep," your Brodmann 47 would go, oh, well, that's not what I expected. And to the extent that you can make sense out of something like that, you've learned something new about the world or about language, and so that's amusing or interesting. And so, Vinod and I showed for the first time that Brodmann 47 was predicting what happens next in music.

(24:00):

The power of that finding, and there have been now dozens of replications, is that whether you know it or not, or whether you're a musician or not, your brain's trying to figure out what's going to happen next in a musical sequence. And it's got a lot of information to work from, a lifetime of listening, just as we do with the sentences. Even if we're not musicians, we have an operational understanding of what to expect in music. So if I go, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da, eh, you know that that wasn't expected. Or I could go, bom-bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom-bom, [inaudible 00:24:36], you know that doesn't come next, so your expectations have been violated. Now, the trick of the composer is to meet your expectations enough of the time that you feel like what's going on, but they have to violate those expectations enough of the time to hold your interest. So if I had a melody that went like this, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you're done with me after five repetitions, it's going nowhere. But if I were to go da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, bom-

Nicholas Weiler (25:08):

Right, I'm following you somewhere, you're leading me.

Daniel Levitin (25:11):

And I'm going somewhere you didn't expect with that last da-da-da, bom, and you expect me to land on bom. So, this is all baked into your brain from listening to music. You don't have to know that I dropped an octave and came up a fourth or that I was leading you to a cadence or a resolution. You feel it.

(25:30):

And so when the composer and the performer is working in tandem, can finish a musical idea better than you could predict, in a novel way that you never would've guessed but somehow sounds just right to you. That's when you get that chill or that shiver. And that appears to be connected to the dopaminergic system and novelty seeking and our innate human desire to learn about the world. We are all descended from ancestors who were curious enough to go out and explore the world at least long enough and well enough to find a mate. It goes without saying, none of us are descended from an ancestor who failed to reproduce.

Nicholas Weiler (26:15):

Yeah. Fair enough.

Daniel Levitin (26:16):

So there was a certain amount of exploratory nature there, and that's what we're doing with music. Music is a great playground for the exploring mind.

Nicholas Weiler (26:23):

I love that, music is a great playground for the exploring mind. I wanted to get back, you've been mentioning some of the great work that you've done with Vinod Menon here at Stanford, and unfortunately we have not had him on the show yet, but I would love to change that.

Daniel Levitin (26:35):

Oh, he's the brains of the outfit here. He's one of the top cognitive scientists, system neuroscientists in the world.

Nicholas Weiler (26:42):

Exactly. Well-

Daniel Levitin (26:43):

And he and I were post-docs together. I wouldn't have a career if it weren't for him, and he would certainly have one if it weren't for me. So, you have to have him on the show.

Nicholas Weiler (26:52):

Absolutely. No, he's at the top of my list. So one of the things that you talk about in the book, and this gets back to some of this power that music has over us. One of the things that he's best known for is identifying these brain networks that correspond to a kind of reflective or daydreaming state, which he's called the default mode network. And you have a beautiful description of this in the book, which I'll quote you write, "When we listen to music, really listen, give into it, allowing it to take us over, we often find our minds drift to thoughts of who we are, where we've been in our lives, and where we're going." Is that one of the things that helps with this idea of music as medicine, music is a therapy?

Daniel Levitin (27:33):

Very much so. Music is a more immersive art than painting for many people. People enjoy paintings, they can be moved by them. Music feels more immersive, more immersive than sculpture, than literature. I think part of the reason is because music has this built-in tempo, this thing that is moving it forward, whether you want it to move forward or not. I can set down a book after a sentence, and unless I actually get up out of my chair and hit the stop button, I can't stop the music. It's going on without me, and our brain knows that that's what's happening. And as you say, to the extent we're willing to relinquish control of our thoughts and let ourselves daydream, music can enhance and evoke guided imagery and a kind of exploratory daydreaming mode where our thoughts are only loosely connected. It's called daydreaming because it's like dreaming but while you're semi-conscious and not in bed snoring, and that's a healthful and restorative mode for the brain.

(28:34):

Vinod calls it the default mode because it's the brain's default when it's overtaxed, overworked and tired, it wants to go there. It wants to default to not being in charge. The opposite is what Mike Gazzaniga calls the central executive, the thing that's forcing you to focus, keep your eyes on the road, finish this project that you started. That's exhausting to do. And so when we relax our brain's wander, and that can recharge our circuits to the extent that one version of the Pomodoro method for workplace efficiency is you work for 40 minutes, you take a 10-minute break and listen to music. And then when you get back, it can be as restorative as having had another hour of sleep the night before.

Nicholas Weiler (29:17):

Well, I want to connect that to something you just said. You were talking about art and how art is essentially a way of accessing empathy. I wonder if that might help explain why music might be a more healthful way of daydreaming than other kinds of daydreaming. I find when I'm in my default mode network, some of the time it's self-critical or thinking about, it's a little uncontrolled and somehow it's unpleasant and it's not necessarily productive. But somehow listening to music can bring us to, I don't know if I want to call it a higher state, but it can bring us to a state we want to be in.

Daniel Levitin (29:53):

Part of that is that we select the music we want to hear. I imagine you could find some music that would make you feel worse about yourself rather than better. We all could, or music that you just don't like and you feel aversion. I mean, we haven't talked about that, but we've seen evidence that when people listen to music they dislike, it spikes their cortisol levels, adrenaline starts rushing, the amygdala gets involved, it hits the fear center of the brain. So, this is what drove Manuel Noriega out of his compound in Panama, was adverse of music. Van Halen blasted at 140 decibels. The US Army tried to get him out by cutting off all his water and electricity, but it was Van Halen that caused him to surrender.

Nicholas Weiler (30:34):

I had forgotten that story, that's great. I mean, the thesis that you state pretty clearly towards the end of the book is music as an emotional intervention, music as a way of accessing aspects of ourselves, our empathy, and so on, in a way that we can actually direct, here's how I want to feel. And we all have the intuition for what music we want to listen to to bring ourselves to a particular place or to match the mood that we're in. And so, one thing I wanted to ask about along those lines is, how much of that is purely cultural, just the music we've been brought up with, music as sort of a language we can learn any language? Are there universals in certain kinds of sounds, certain kinds of musical movements make humans everywhere feel sad or happy or excited?

Daniel Levitin (31:25):

It's not as clean a story as one might like. So here again, we're at a frontier because we just, there's so much conflicting information.

(31:34):

Bill Thompson, who I mentioned earlier, William Forde Thompson from now at Macquarie University, I had met him when he was at University of Toronto. He and Laura-Lee Balkwill, one of his students and others have gone to far-flung cultures bringing the Mozart. And the idea was, well, if there's one kind of music that has the best chance at sounding godlike or universal among Western music, may be it's Mozart. And so they bring it to people in the Ural Mountains or in Papua New Guinea, or people have been cut off from Western music and say, "Gee, don't you find this beautiful?" And no, they don't. And then if you play Chinese opera to most Western listeners, they don't know whether, they have no idea what's going on in the story. If somebody's angry, if it's happy, if it's triumphant, if there was a murder. I mean, you just can't tell from the music, but the Chinese can.

(32:24):

So there's this huge cultural overlay, this component of having been exposed to music in the womb, because by the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system of the developing infant in the womb is fully functional. So it's filtering all the music that it hears in the environment and train stations and television commercials and such, and not to mention the family playing music in the home or in the car. And then we see associations in movies and cartoons, and we learn that this is culturally happy.

(32:57):

One of the old suggestions was, well, minor keys are sad. We say here that minor key is sad, but Klezmer music is all minor and it's not all sad. And the so-called gypsy music of Django Reinhardt is a lot of minor keys, but that's quite joyful. So, there aren't any rules, but generally, slower music tends to be more reflective, faster music tends to be more rousing. Stepwise movement in a melody tends to be more relaxing. Big leaps, especially leaps outside a key or a chord are more stimulating. Certain sounds can be more associated with fear. Distorted guitars, an instrument that might sound like an animal in pain. Some violin sounds can remind people of crying, human crying. A great opera singer can sound like they're crying or laughing. And so even without words, we pick up on these somewhat universal cues about human expression, but there's limit to the universality.

Nicholas Weiler (34:01):

It does strike me as being quite a lot like language. It's a culturally learned thing, it's something that we have to be exposed to from an early age, and then ultimately, we can express really any idea through words. Whereas with music, it's like a language for emotion. I'm getting a little bit abstract here, but it feels like it can access the emotional parts of our lives. It can access all kinds of different emotional ideas through the kinds of sounds that we've learned to associate with those emotions in the past.

Daniel Levitin (34:37):

And I think it's more than that, even. So let's turn to psycholinguistics for a moment. So I mean, just as an aside, I studied psycholinguistics from Herb Clark at Stanford, and he was very influential on my way of thinking about the world and about music. He's also a fine musician, Herb is. And I took classes from Bill Poser and Ivan Sag in the linguistics department, Fred Dretske is another professor. What I took from the philosophy of language and from the psycholinguistics readings was that as soon as you try to describe an experience in words, you cheapen it and you lessen it. Heidegger talks about this in Sein Und Zeit. John Locke talked about the problem of trying to describe a smell to someone who has never smelled it. Language is a very poor substitute for the experience.

(35:28):

And so, with that as a diving board, I'd like to say that our emotions are indescribable, really. We can say, "I'm happy," we can say, "I'm sad." Those cheapen the experience because seldom are any of us purely happy or purely sad. There's always a mixture of emotions and the words put them into a little box. But the right piece of music can come on and you can go, oh my God, that is how I feel. I didn't have the words for it, but yeah, that is it.

(36:00):

I had it just this morning. I was listening to Honeysuckle Rose by Fats Waller and I went, oh, that is exactly how I feel. The joyful, the bullions, the abandon, the irreverence. It was a whole mixture of things and the words are making it worse, and you just have to hear the song.

Nicholas Weiler (36:17):

I've been feeling that a lot. It's been a great experience because I've been reading the new book on John and Paul: A Love Story, at the same time as I was reading your book and preparing for this interview. And they're very aligned in just like, how do you get these emotions? How do you get the sort of genius of channeling either the emotions of a whole generation or of some very particular idiosyncratic and sometimes troubled individuals into these beautiful pieces of art? I didn't mean to go onto that, that's that tangent.

Daniel Levitin (36:48):

Well, to your point though, about how there's culture here. Lennon and McCartney were very, very well steeped in and educated in the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, the Great American Songbook. They wanted to be writers of Broadway shows. That's what they wanted. And then the rock and roll revolution came along, and so they did their best to take those ambitions and put them into a three-minute pop song, or eventually five, six, eight minute rock songs.

Nicholas Weiler (37:24):

But they were so conversant in this musical language of emotion that they were incredibly effective.

Daniel Levitin (37:29):

The idioms of it. Just as one example, I just started learning to play Martha My Dear on the piano, which is a Paul song from the White album, and it has a ninth chord in it, which is a chord that no rock and roller had ever used before, that I'm sure. And it's not a dominant ninth, it's an open nine, it has a very special sound. They knew what to reach for.

(37:51):

And I was talking to Scarlet Keys, who is a songwriting professor at Berklee College of Music, about what the Beatles managed to do. Their songs on the surface sound simple. And it's only when musicians start to learn to play them that they realize, where did that chord come from? That is a weird chord, and that's not something found in Chuck Berry and The Everly Brothers and the predecessors. You got to go back to Louis Jordan to find that stuff. Louis Prima, the jazz guys, Glenn Miller. But one of the elements of genius of Lennon and McCartney is that they could write melodies that were so compelling that your ear followed the melody and didn't notice how sophisticated the chord was underneath it. That's the trick.

Nicholas Weiler (38:35):

There was a line about Paul writing Penny Lane sounding like a song that has always existed.

Daniel Levitin (38:39):

Yeah.

Nicholas Weiler (38:40):

So, let's talk about what this means for our everyday lives. I'm going to be more sensitive to the value of music as medicine for myself and for my loved ones. We've been talking about how music can enrich our lives and connect us to our emotions and other people. As we've been talking, this thought has been growing in my mind. We've talked about how central music is to cultures around the world, and this feels strange in a world where we're suffused with radio and streaming music and so on. But I wonder if we're somehow cut off from music in modern society, at least in the ways that music had surrounded us in earlier phases of history. And I wonder if this helps at all in thinking about why using music as therapy can be so powerful. Do you think there's anything to that, or would you frame that a different way?

Daniel Levitin (39:25):

Well, we are cut off from music in a couple of fundamental ways. One is that music used to be for tens of thousands of years woven into the fabric of everyday life. There were basket weaving songs and child rearing songs and going getting ready for the hunt songs and staying up half the night by the campfire to ward off predators songs, and everybody knew all the same songs, and everyone participated. There wasn't a special group of tribes, people who were the singers and drum players, and then everybody else sat quietly with their hands folded in their laps. Everybody joined in.

(40:01):

And then in the great heyday of popular music in the post Edison cylinder era, from about 1920 to about 2000, maybe 2005, there were these songs that everybody knew. There were fewer ways to find music, and so we had these common pieces of music that an entire society knew. My friend, Weird Al Yankovic just said the other day that the reason he doesn't write parodies anymore like he used to isn't because he doesn't want to, but there's no one song that everybody knows that he could parody. And so, that's a kind of disconnect.

(40:37):

The other disconnect is that music was immersive in a way that it isn't now. Millennials tend to see music as sonic wallpaper. It's just sort of there, like a painting at a Holiday Inn bedroom wall. It's not really there to enjoy, it's just filling up space. It's a very different approach. I don't mean all millennials and in all cases, but that's a generational trend. In my generation and I imagine in yours, you knew the names of the artists, you knew the names of the songs, or if you didn't know the name of the song, you could at least go, that's the song, on a Dark Desert Highway. I don't remember what it's called, but something about wind in my hair. We had a common ground that we lack now.

Nicholas Weiler (41:18):

Well, let's end. I'd love to hear you talk about the study that you did in 2016 about families listening to music, and see if there's anything that we can draw from that for our listeners that maybe can help us enrich our relationship with music.

Daniel Levitin (41:36):

Yeah, so this is a study in which we wanted to understand the role that music can play in a household. And we set up a controlled experiment where we took away people's stereo systems for a week or we gave them a bunch of stereo equipment, and it was counterbalanced. So one group started without and then had it and vice versa. And everybody had a smartwatch, and then there were these GPS beacons around the house. And we were able to tell because of the smartwatch, we were able to tell what their heart rate was, the respiration rate. Because of the GPS, we could tell how close they were in proximity to one another using the smartwatches as GPS locators or beacons.

(42:19):

And a number of surprising things happened. When there was music playing in the home, for romantic couples, married or unmarried, gay or straight or non-binary, the romantic couple tended to have 30% more sex when music was playing out loud in the home in a week. If there were children in the home, the children tended to spend more time helping to prepare the meals and clean up after. And everybody in the family sat closer together or stood closer together. They were in closer proximity.

Nicholas Weiler (42:49):

And this was music they were selecting, presumably?

Daniel Levitin (42:51):

Yes, they self-selected.

Nicholas Weiler (42:53):

Yeah. So, what do you take away from this? I mean, we've talked a little bit about the power that music has, the history of humans with music. We've talked about all the things, the experiences that music can bring us. I mean, what's one or two things an audience member could do to enrich their relationship with music to get some of these effects?

Daniel Levitin (43:10):

Well, I think the biggest thing, and we haven't talked about this, but I think the best thing somebody can do is if you've never played an instrument, learn one. This whole idea that music should be reserved for those who are super-duper talented or those who are going to make a living at it, is crazy. There's no city in the United States where kids won't join a basketball game if they have the opportunity to on a corner or at school. Nobody says, "I'm no Steph Curry, so I'm not going to play basketball." And you don't hear people say, "Well, I'm no Martin Luther King, so I'm not ever going to talk. I'm not going to be a great orator, so to hell with it." But we do say it about music, and I think it's unfair to our evolutionary heritage and it's unfair to ourselves. I think music making is joyful, and it's not a competition. It doesn't matter how good you are, nobody really cares.

(44:03):

And so, I say it partly because in my previous book, Successful Aging, I gathered evidence of the neuro-protective effects of learning an instrument, especially later in life. But musicians tend as a group to be longer lived than non musicians, we don't exactly know why, so it's a finding without a mechanism, but it does involve a lot of eye-hand coordination. It involves being aware of what, if you're playing others, it requires you stepping outside yourself well enough to be able to coordinate what you play with what they're playing, engenders a sense of selflessness. And it also allows you to feel some sense of agency in the world to create something.

Nicholas Weiler (44:45):

Well, for all of these reasons and more, I hope we can all make more music together. So Dan Levitin, thank you so much for coming on From Our Neurons To Yours. It's been a pleasure.

Daniel Levitin (44:54):

Thanks for having me, Nick.

Nicholas Weiler (44:57):

Thanks so much to our guest, Daniel Levitin. Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist, musician and the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including This Is Your Brain On Music. He's Dean Emeritus at Minerva University, Professor Emeritus at McGill University, an adjunct professor at UCLA, David Geffen School of Medicine.

(45:17):

Thanks so much for listening to From Our Neurons To Yours. If you are enjoying the show, please give us a shout-out on your streaming platform of choice. Leave us a comment or send us a note, we're always interested in getting your feedback. We want to hear what works for you about the show. What are some topics in neuroscience you'd like to hear? You can reach us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu. The show is produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Sound design by Ally Arizola. I'm your host, Nicholas Weiler, until next time.