In this episode, Daniel Levitin explores the concept of music as medicine and how rhythm and melody can transform wellness. Delving into the origins of music therapy, he uncovers its historical significance in ancient healing practices and its gradual resurgence in modern times. Daniel illustrates the connection between music and the human brain, emphasizing its ability to evoke deep emotional responses and aid in treating various neurological and psychological conditions.
Key Takeaways:
- Discover the transformative power of music for emotional expression and stress relief
- Explore the therapeutic potential of music for improving movement and coordination in individuals with movement disorders
- Uncover the profound impact of music in bringing comfort and joy to individuals living with dementia
- Learn how music can serve as a powerful tool for reducing and managing chronic pain
- Delve into the role of music in enhancing memory retention and cognitive function
Connect with Daniel Levitin: Website | Instagram | Facebook
Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, musician, and bestselling author. He is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at Minerva University in San Francisco, and James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. He is the author of five consecutive bestselling books: This is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, A Field Guide to Lies and Successful Aging. His newest book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine, hit bestseller lists in its first week of release.
If you enjoyed this episode with Daniel Levitin, check out these other episodes:
The Journey of Life Through Song with Frank Turner
Finding Courage in Life’s Daily Struggles with Kelly Corrigan
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Episode Transcript:
00:00:30 – Chris Forbes
Thanks for joining us on this episode. We have a returning guest, Daniel Levitin. He’s founding dean of Minerva University in California. He’s also the James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Neuroscience and Music at McGill University, Montreal. He’s the author of many books, including this Is yous Brain on Music, the World in Six Songs, and a new book discussed here with Eric called I Heard There Was a Secret Music as Medicine.
00:01:55 – Eric Zimmer
Hi, Daniel. Welcome to the show.
00:01:56 – Daniel Levitin
Thanks for having me back, Eric.
00:01:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s a real pleasure to have you on. When I saw the title of your latest book, I was like, all right, we definitely have to talk. Your latest book is called I Heard There Was a Secret Music as Medicine. And so we’ll be getting into that in a second. But before we do, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are all always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. And they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
00:02:48 – Daniel Levitin
Well, you know, we were together a few Years ago, talking about my book about fake news. And when you asked me the parable, I went back and I looked at my answer from back then. It’s interesting because in a different context, I have different thoughts, which is, I think, as it should be. Back then I said, well, I found the parable a bit simplistic because I think it can be healthy to feed fear. There are things you should be afraid of, like crossing a freeway when there’s traffic coming in both directions. That’s a good thing to fear. And people who are fearless often end up dead and for no reason other than that they didn’t have even a modicum of self restraint. And at the time I also said that I thought that although hate is an ugly word, I think it’s important to be able to hate things that are wrong. To hate injustice, to hate inequality, to hate people who are haters. There was an old get smart routine. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry had written this TV show from the 60s. And Maxwell Smart, who’s our inept hero and secret agent, encounters a psychiatrist who started a group with the acronym HATE And I forget what the H A T E stand for, but effectively they are trying to stamp out hate groups. And the guy says, we hate, hate, hate it. So now, where I’m more in a musical, artistic headspace, we are in a more polarized time than we were five years ago or whenever it was you and I spoke. I do think that it’s important to see the glass half full. And so naturally I want to feed in my own life that part of my nature that embraces things like kindness, bravery in the face of challenges. Being able to stand up against injustice takes some bravery, especially now. And of course, love, I think those are unimpeachable goals. But you don’t want to love things that are bad. You don’t want to love murder and pillaging. So I still find it a simplistic parable, but a valuable one because, look, we’ve been talking about it for three minutes here. There’s a lot to unpack there. Yeah, I try to approach every day with kindness and with love. I try to reserve fear and hate for when they are called for. And greed I have no use for in my own life or anybody else’s life. I don’t want to feed that one.
00:05:42 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. Well, I’m impressed that you went back and listened to what you said before. That’s more than a lot of people do.
00:05:48 – Daniel Levitin
Well, that was the love. That was the love of.
00:05:51 – Eric Zimmer
That was the love.
00:05:52 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, the love of Your show, the love of the ideas that you’re bringing.
00:05:55 – Eric Zimmer
And thank you. So let’s turn our attention to music. I wanted to start with a line that you said that really just caught my eye very early on. And you say art, science and medicine trade in doubt and in its remedy, improvisation. Talk to me about how improvisation is a remedy for doubt.
00:06:18 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah. When we doubt ourselves, we aren’t able to be our authentic selves. We aren’t able to speak freely, move freely. Doubt comes from self consciousness. A certain amount of doubt is sort of a good thing. You know, getting back to this crossing traffic. I mean, am I going to make it or not? Well, good to doubt yourself there if there’s a chance you get hit by a bus. But when it comes to art, doubt is the enemy of creativity. We’ve done brain studies on this. Most famously, my colleague Charles Lim found that when master improvisers or trying to come up with something new musically, they don’t engage a part of the brain that’s not normally engaged. You might think, oh, well, there’s this improvisation module in the brain, and improvisation is really hard and it requires a lot of resources. So they got to tap into that. No, no, sir. They had to shut down the little school marm in the brain, wagging the finger and saying, you’re no good. Who told you to play that note? That sounds terrible. Who do you think you are? So improvisation and creativity, I think, only flourish when we trust ourselves. Now, you can go back later with the power of editing and you can say, well, that idea wasn’t so great. I’m not going to keep that one. But in the moment, in the heat of the moment of generating ideas, whether it’s for music or a novel or a painting, for dance, just for a conversation you’re having with a friend or a new product, in any domain where you’re trying to be creative, just let the ideas flow and trust yourself to come back later and prune out the bad ones.
00:08:01 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. So let’s talk about healing and music. You said it’s a recent feature of Western society that we’ve separated healing in music and that they have traditionally gone together. Say a little bit more about that.
00:08:14 – Daniel Levitin
Well, from what we know, for tens of thousands of years, music was a staple in the healing arts. It was used for everything from treating injuries and wounds to depression and sleep disturbances. And you think of ancient drumming and drumming circles and shaman and faith healers, music was almost always a part of those indigenous people’s traditions, and then it kind of fell away. With the age of enlightenment and rationality, because we didn’t have an evidence base for it. And we’re just coming back around now in modern times. Starting In World War II, the Army sent music therapists into VA hospitals. And around the year 2000, my lab and others started doing brain imaging studies that showed what was going on in the brain when people listened to music or performed and used it not just for healing, but just for pleasure. And it was through that kind of biological inquiry and discovery that we were able to make the foundation of an evidence base. This is what’s happening. This is why it works. This is how it works, and it’s amenable to scientific inquiry.
00:09:24 – Eric Zimmer
One of the things that you mention in the book that you talk about that scientists like you believe is part of the benefit of music, is that it brings lots of different networks of the brain together at the same time. It’s not working only on, say, a section of the brain. It actually brings whole networks together.
00:09:48 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, that’s really, you know, you’ve said it better than I do. I don’t actually have that phrase in the book, but I like that. I’m going to steal that. It does. So it binds together different processes and patterns of thought in the brain. And because of that, it can bring you to tears of joy or tears of sadness. It can have a great emotional impact, and it can be used to treat diseases and most notably movement disorders, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, stuttering, which is a movement disorder also. I mean, we don’t think of stuttering as a movement disorder, but it is, because you have got to move your tongue and your lips and your jaw in order to speak fluently. And that’s what goes awry, the motor system, the movement system. And it’s what allows music to help treat things like intractable depression and post traumatic stress disorder, marshaling the cognitive, the emotional and the movement centers connecting these different regions, as you say.
00:10:48 – Eric Zimmer
You also mentioned that there are separate brain circuits for integrating and binding music together. What does that mean, integrating and binding?
00:10:59 – Daniel Levitin
Well, this is getting a bit down in the weeds, but if you’ll allow me a digression.
00:11:03 – Eric Zimmer
Sure.
00:11:04 – Daniel Levitin
This is long form radio, isn’t it?
00:11:07 – Eric Zimmer
It is.
00:11:07 – Daniel Levitin
I think it makes the most sense if we use an analogy, which of course your opening parable was, when you look out at the world around you, I’m looking at a computer and a monitor and a microphone, and I’ve got a painting on the wall and a lamp and a window and a tree outside the window. I’m taking in the world around me with my eyes. And so I’d invite the listeners to just take a moment and look at the world around you. Now, what are some features of what is being transmitted to you, assuming that you are sighted? Not all of us are sighted. For one thing, the world is out there. It’s not inside your head. Of course. It’s out there in the world. And the information that you have about it from a physics and biological standpoint is just a bunch of photons bouncing off of objects and impinging on your sensory receptor, your retina. And from that, your retina has to pull together these perceptions. Now, the retina is not a camera. It doesn’t see the way a camera does. And the photons are just individual packets of light. So you’ve got brain circuits that extract from that signal that hits the retina the different attributes of what you see. The color is processed in one area of the brain. Whether something’s moving or not is in another area of the brain. Movement centers of the visual system. And then we’ve got parts of the brain that process edges and shapes and shading and contrast. These are all different circuits. They evolved separately. And it all comes together later, where later in brain terms is like 40,000ths of a second, not very long. But you then get a perception of the world that’s out there component by component. I didn’t even mention depth. You’ve got depth perception that has to take the signal from the two eyes and integrate it. People who only have vision in one eye, or if you close one eye, you lose all depth perception. It’s binocular disparity that gives you depth. I went into this great analogy because I think it underscores how complicated perception is. It’s a constructive process. Your brain is constructing inside your head some representation of the outside world. We do the same thing, Eric, with sound. The only information you have about the auditory world comes from your eardrums wiggling in and out in response to molecules hitting them because they’re vibrating for some reason. So the loudness of an object or a sound is processed separately from its pitch or its duration. And special processing modules have to extract that information. And then the different pitches are pulled together into representation of melody and harmony and the different durations into rhythm and meter and tempo. And it all comes together about 40,000ths of a second later. And you hear either a cat meowing or you hear a symphony, or you hear a door creaking. And your brain has to assign those interpretations of the world and the other interesting thing is that for sound feels like it’s coming from inside your head for most of us, not like it’s outside, which is different than vision. It feels more intimate. Now, we’ve seen patients who have disruptions in these systems. There are people with various visual disorders who can see the color of an object, but not where it is. You put an apple in front of them and a banana, and let’s say, well, I see something red and I see something yellow, but I don’t know where they are, or vice versa. They see disembodied color, and they see that there’s a banana and apple, but they don’t know which is which color because there are red bananas and there are yellow apples. So, I mean, it’s very confusing for them. And we see people with auditory disorders where they can track the rhythm of something but not the melody. Of course, most of them become drummers. Just kidding.
00:15:14 – Eric Zimmer
A music joke.
00:15:17 – Daniel Levitin
Just kidding drummers. But, yeah, you see where this is going.
00:15:21 – Eric Zimmer
If you’re a drummer listening to this show, ignore Daniel and call me, because I’m in need of a good drummer.
00:15:26 – Daniel Levitin
So just.
00:15:27 – Eric Zimmer
It’s a public service announcement. The reason I wanted to go into those weeds is because of how miraculous that is, that it’s doing those things in multiple different parts of the brain, and then it’s bringing them all together almost instantaneously into what seems to be a unified whole thing. Now, as we listen to music, we can tweeze it apart. We can go the opposite direction, right? I can say, oh, let me pay attention to what’s happening rhythmically. Let me pay attention to what’s happening melody or harmony wise. So we can deconstruct. But that’s not how it appears to us initially.
00:16:08 – Daniel Levitin
And that’s exactly right. So we can will our attention. We can direct our attention and say, okay, I’m in the concert hall. I want to just listen to the oboes for a minute. And if you know what an oboe sounds like and the oboes are playing at that moment, you can do that. It might be harder, if you’re not experienced, to pick out the first violins from the second, but you can do that. And when you’re at an outdoor concert listening to Fish or the Grateful Dead, you can decide to ignore the planes flying overhead and the birds chirping. And, you know, we call this selective attention. You can direct your attention. And similarly, you can say, and we musicians do this. We’ll listen just to the chord progression or just to the lyrics or just to the Little filigrees, the vocalist putting in his or her performance.
00:16:59 – Eric Zimmer
And this also answers a long, famous koan. You answered a famous Zen koan in your book, which is, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? And the answer, you have informed us, is that no, it does not.
00:17:15 – Daniel Levitin
I suppose this is a rather pedantic point, but to me and to neurobiologists, sound is a mental construct. The physics of the world is that there are molecules being disturbed. That tree falls, and it’s going to displace molecules that will then be flying out from the source of the fall. And if they don’t hit an eardrum, all they are is a molecular disturbance. You can register them on a meter or an instrument of some sort. But like I say, it’s a pedantic, semantic, definitional point that sound is something that is heard and interpreted by some sort of organism. So, you know, look, if there’s a squirrel there that jumps out of the way, I would say the squirrel heard the sound. No squirrel, no bird, no human, no organism, no sound.
00:18:06 – Eric Zimmer
Right? And, you know, we could say it’s a pedantic point, but it also talks about something that I think is really important in general, which is the fact that what’s happening in here, in our brains, that seems so real, and it is on one hand, but on the other hand, it is constructed, right? It is constructed by the brain. We are going from moving molecules vibrating to what we hear as sound. And the brain is filling in that, you know, everything after that piece. And I think that’s fascinating to know. And it shines a light, I think, on how so many aspects of the brain work.
00:18:47 – Daniel Levitin
Perception is a constructive process. That is what we teach and it’s what we believe. The reality that you hold in your head, your mental model of the world, visual, auditory, smells, tastes, touch, they are constructed by your brain. And the reason it’s important to understand that is because I like the word you use. Filling in the information stream that we get is often degraded or incomplete. You’re blinking several times a minute, many times a minute. And so you’re missing some information. You’re not getting every piece of audio information. And so our brains are giant pattern detectors whose job is to fix, fill in missing information and make inferences. And we often make the wrong inference, which is why you might misunderstand a conversation. I don’t mean that you misunderstand the person’s intent. You hear a different word than they said, because part of it was obscured and you’re filling it in wrong. Or I think we’ve all had the experience. You’re reading something and you go by a word and by the end of the sentence, the sentence didn’t make sense. And so you go back and oh, I misread that word. What does that mean? It meant you blinked over it, your eyes were moving too fast and your brain filled in the wrong thing. And that happens all the time. It happens to us hundreds of times a day that your brain is filling in the wrong thing. Most of the time it’s inconsequential, so you don’t notice.
00:20:36 – Eric Zimmer
Lots of neuroscientists talk about our brains as prediction machines, that they are predicting what they are going to receive. And if the top down signal of what my brain predicts it’s going to get and the bottom up signal of what is actually being sent to me, if those match, everything’s fine and we just go on. Does that align with what you understand about neuroscience? And if so, how does that affect our experience of music?
00:21:07 – Daniel Levitin
Well, that’s actually the key to music. That’s why music works and it’s why humor works. This top down process, you refer to expectations. We’re making informed predictions about what’s going to happen next. We can’t help but do it. We evolve that way. I would say at above a certain level, I’m trying to think of the right term. Certainly all mammals need to be able to predict what’s going to happen next to avoid dangers and hazards, predators, humans need to do it. I don’t know how far down the phylogenetic tree it goes. Fish make predictions, birds make predictions to some extent, worms do. But that’s a product of having brains. Brains evolved in order to predict what will happen next. That’s one of their primary functions. And a secondary function, I would say equal, is to have some, some form of memory of what’s happened before to inform those predictions. Predictions are based on past patterns. I said at the outset, the brain is a pattern detector. Why? Well, it needs to know and understand patterns in order to predict the future, which is an adaptive thing. It allows you to get out of the way of something coming towards you or to know that this food isn’t going to poison you and to know that if you drink, you won’t be dehydrated to do all of that. I mean, drink water, not things like alcohol, which dehydrate. But the beauty of music within all of this is that whether you know it or not and whether you’re a Musician or not, your brain’s trying to figure out what’s going to come next in the music. And when those top down expectations are rewarded, when you’re correct, that helps you to follow along with the music and get more engaged and immersed in it. If every single one of your predictions were met, you’d find the piece boring. The piece has to surprise you to capture your attention. We only learn something when our expectations are violated and learning is exciting to us as a species. We are a learning species. And so when the composer and the performers of a piece can surprise you just enough of the time to hold your interest, that’s when the magic happens. Music can’t be all surprise or you have no foothold, you have no idea what’s going on. And I think of Schoenberg’s 12 Tone Music, which is effectively random sequences, at a certain point you have no idea what’s going on and it becomes unappealing. But then on the other extreme, you have things like baby shark da da da da da da, Baby shark da da da da. You know, just there’s no surprise there and it becomes annoying. Finding that perfect balance is tough and it’s not the same for everybody. But when composers hit it for you, as I say, that’s when the magic happens, right?
00:23:54 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I think that there’s certainly some element of some of us preferring more familiarity versus more surprise, depending on what you like to listen to.
00:24:03 – Daniel Levitin
The BBC has this show called Desert Island Discs. It’s been one of the longest running shows. I think it’s been going since the 40s really. It’s really extraordinary. And people come on, they say, oh well, you’re going to Desert island, you get to choose eight pieces of music. And my friend Dan Gilbert and I were talking about this. Dan Gilbert’s an immensely talented and fun psychologist who studies happiness. And he’s the happiest person I know. And he was saying everybody answers the question wrong on that show because what they do is. And they’ll have people on, they’ll have actors and statesmen and musicians and writers and you know, they’ll talk about pieces that were formative in their development or pieces that are their favorites. But if you think about it, if you’re stuck on a desert island disc for the rest of your life and you only have eight pieces, you’re going to rapidly grow tired of Bebopaloola or Maybelline by Chuck Berry.
00:25:00 – Eric Zimmer
Anarchy in the uk.
00:25:01 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, you’re going to grow tired of it. What you really want is a piece that has Some complexity and some room to move in. You want Mahler’s ninth. Even if you don’t like Mahler’s ninth, you know, after a few years of listening to it, its secrets will become unlocked. Maybe you’ll never like it, but, you know, I think I would load it up with a couple of comfort food kinds of things, but then I’d want to put in some difficult stuff that would grow with me or that I would grow into.
00:25:32 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, that’s a fascinating way of thinking about it. I’ve reflected on that also. Like, how would I balance wanting to hear stuff that I know I love but is simple enough to your point, that there wouldn’t be much to explore after a certain amount of time? All right, so now let’s talk in more detail about music and healing. And you talk in the book a fair amount about music therapy. And you say that music therapy falls into two broad. Passive or active. So first, share a little bit about that distinction, and then we’ll go into some of the specific applications of music for healing.
00:26:16 – Daniel Levitin
So passive is you listening to music and maybe not really attending to it. Like, you and I were talking earlier about how, as musicians, we might study a piece. We might come actively listening, but just, you know, passively listening. It’s on in the background, or you’re. You’re using it for meditation. Active music is music making. Being in a drum circle, writing a song, playing an instrument. Those are different. And another distinction I would make is music therapy versus music interventions. Music therapy is a kind of reserved term. It involves a certified music therapist, which is a specialty and a certification in most countries. Usually a dyadic relationship between a therapist and a patient or perhaps a therapist in a group, such as group therapy. But it involves a qualified professional helping you to achieve therapeutic goals either through music listening or music making.
00:27:13 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.
00:27:13 – Daniel Levitin
And then we have music interventions, which are like when you go to your dentist’s office and they put on music, you know, headphones while they’re drilling at you. You know, that’s not a music therapist. The music hasn’t been designed specifically for you. They’re just guessing what will relax you. My dentist puts on music that makes me stabby, and so I have to bring my own music.
00:27:35 – Eric Zimmer
Okay, thank you for making that distinction. Let’s talk about music therapy for now, which is where a therapist is trying to bring about some sort of clinical result by using music with their patients. And there’s a few different areas. You alluded to movement disorders before. Share a little bit about what some of the Common movement disorders that music can help with. And how do we think it’s helping, or in what ways is it helping?
00:28:06 – Daniel Levitin
I think one of the easiest cases to wrap our heads around is Parkinson’s. When it reaches the point where individuals with Parkinson’s can no longer walk continuously and smoothly. So what’s happening there is that the disease degrades those circuits in the brain that are responsible for maintaining gait. G a I t gait. And, you know, we’re bipedal, we’re inherently unstable. You’ve got to coordinate putting one foot in front of the other. You have to put it down when the other foot is up. You can’t have both feet up at the same time. It seems rather obvious, but, you know, infants can’t do it. You have to learn. And when those circuits become degraded, Parkinson’s individuals might freeze and be unable to start walking. Or once they start, they may freeze and be unable to continue. And if you play music for them that has a tempo that’s approximately at their gate, after a few seconds, supplementary circuits in the brain that are not damaged begin to synchronize with that tempo. Neurons fire in synchrony with it, and they act as an external timekeeper that allows the Parkinson’s patient to move and walk without a walker and without assistance. And therapy that employs that technique can allow, over time, for somebody with Parkinson’s to just think about music and not actually have to hear it and then be able to walk. And that’s a game changer. We take mobility for granted, those of us who can move. And if you’ve ever broken your leg in a ski accident or something, I mean, you realize, oh, mobility is pretty great, and when you lose it, it leads to a lot of quality of life complications. And so music and Parkinson’s is a big deal.
00:30:03 – Eric Zimmer
Does this just work in certain cases? Like, are there any variables about who this works for and who it doesn’t?
00:30:10 – Daniel Levitin
Well, it doesn’t work for everybody with Parkinson’s, but it does work for most people that we’ve seen. It wouldn’t work if you were hearing impaired, obviously, Although it might work if we could put a vibrotactile vest on you that gave you the beat. That hasn’t been explored, but it’s worth exploring. It seems to work also for movement disorders that are non Parkinson’s related, like for multiple sclerosis and other central nervous system problems.
00:30:39 – Eric Zimmer
And the principle is the same, that you’re using the rhythm of music to bring in other brain circuits that are not the compromised ones.
00:30:50 – Daniel Levitin
Exactly.
00:30:50 – Eric Zimmer
By you’re sort of going around those and saying, hey, okay, so now the next one is fascinating to me, partially because I lost a father about a year and a half ago and my partner’s mother passed about two years ago, both of them from dementia. So some of this research and how music is helping dementia and Alzheimer’s patients is really fascinating. Tell us about some of it.
00:31:16 – Daniel Levitin
So there’s two parts to the story. One is, I think the more well known case. People with advanced memory impairment may no longer recognize their loved ones. Sometimes they don’t even recognize themselves in a mirror. And they’ll start trying to have a conversation with the mirror image. They don’t recognize where they are. And this can of course, lead to profound disorientation. And with that comes typically one of two responses. Patients either become very violent and angry because nothing makes sense, then they need to be sedated, or they fold in on themselves and become somewhat catatonic. The world is not making sense and they don’t know who they are. And it’s just very disturbing for them and for anybody who cares about them. But memory works on a first in, last out basis. In other words, that’s a term from computer science, but from the old days when we would load up tapes and hard drives with data. But the idea is that the memories that are formed earliest in life are the last ones to go. They’re more resilient to decay and disease and injury. And so if we play dementia patients music from their youth, typically from say, the ages of 10 to 16, they recognize it, they can sing along, and it allows them to reconnect with a piece of themselves they had lost. And the effects can last for weeks, just playing them that music of their youth, and it leads to great improvement in quality of life. They can engage again in conversation, often mood change. And that’s a very powerful demonstration of music’s effect. I alluded to two parts to the story of dementia. The other is that and if you play a musical instrument or sing, if you’re a musician, even an amateur musician, that ability is often resistant to the disease. And we’ve seen lots of now with on Instagram and YouTube, there are a lot of cases of elderly individuals who don’t know what’s going on, but they can still play pieces on the piano they learned when they were 20 or that they learned recently. It’s never too late to learn an instrument. 60, 70, 80 year olds can learn an instrument and it’s neuroprotective to do so. And it doesn’t mean that you won’t get Alzheimer’s, but it means you’ll still have a way of connecting with the world if you do.
00:33:46 – Eric Zimmer
Right. You mention performers like Glen Campbell and Tony Bennett who were still able to perform with Alzheimer’s because the music part of their brain appeared to be to some degree unaffected.
00:34:00 – Daniel Levitin
That’s exactly right. Yeah. These are very well practiced circuits. And the other aspect of music is that it carries along with it the seeds of its own instructions and its own structure. So once you get started in a song, songs tend to be repetitive in some way, so it kind of carries you along.
00:34:25 – Eric Zimmer
Elsewhere in the book, you talk about how remarkable our memory for music is, and it really is striking. Like, I do not have a good memory in general, a particularly episodic memory of things that happened, you know, at different points in my life. But put on a song that I listened to when I was 8 and I know every word, I know everything. And you even point out like even non musicians will pick up very sensitive differences like that something’s just a little bit off. You know, it’s amazing that somehow memory encodes itself, at least for. It seems like for a lot of us, in a far stickier way, music.
00:35:09 – Daniel Levitin
Is sticky because in cognitive science terms, it’s a highly structured stimulus. By structured, I mean it’s organized. It’s organized in multiple ways that allow you to fill in missing pieces if you forget them. So we’ve all learned to count. And so If I go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, hmm, 9, 10, you know which number I left out? Because it’s so over learned, it just seems silly to you that you wouldn’t know that 8 is the number I left out. Music, you know, there’s only 12 notes. We’ve learned the scale. Ba da da da da da da da. It’s the only thing that could. Yeah, we know that. And we know that if a melody is going ba da da da da da da da da da da da, you know, we know there’s a pattern there. Even if we’re not musicians, we recognize that it’s structured. The melody, the rhythm, the choices of notes and durations are all very highly stereotypical. So our memory is keeping track not just of the particular memory, but of the schema that is the overall pattern of things. And that makes it resistant to decay and loss.
00:36:23 – Eric Zimmer
That’s really interesting that it is, because it is so structured. Do you think any of it also has to do with the fact that it is bringing multiple networks of the brain together? That you’ve got rhythm in one area, pitch in another area.
00:36:37 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, I think it’s that. And so the way memory works is it’s really not stored in any one place. It’s stored in a distributed network. We don’t know this for sure, but when we have patients on the operating table for brain surgery, they’re typically awake during brain surgery. And the reason is that if something needs to be repaired, the surgeon wants to be careful not to cut something or cauterize something. That’s an essential function. And so they’ll be applying a small electrical charge to different areas of the brain and see what happens. This is typical with epilepsy, where they have to cut out a focal point and they don’t want to remove your speech center or music center. And we’ve seen that if you apply a small electrical current to part of the temporal lobe, somebody will say, oh, well, that’s a song.
00:37:28 – Eric Zimmer
That’s fascinating.
00:37:29 – Daniel Levitin
In reality, the song is not there. That’s just the entry point to a node. It’s like saying, if I turn on the switch to the light in my room, the light isn’t where the switch is. The light’s in the ceiling, or it’s a floor lamp or something. But that just happened. That’s where I complete the circuit. But in reality, in the brain, it’s probably the case that the rhythm’s in one place and the pitch is in another, and the vocal timbre is in another, and the lyrics are in another. But that’s the nexus point. And we know this because we’ve seen patients who can lose lyrics and retain all the rest after a stroke or some other brain damage, or they lose their perception of rhythm, but they maintain their perception of melody and so on.
00:38:32 – Eric Zimmer
Another area that you write about in the book is music and helping with chronic pain. What are we learning there?
00:38:39 – Daniel Levitin
So, some years ago, my lab showed that when you listen to music you like, and of course, that’s subjective, but music you like, your brain produces its own opioids, endogenous opioids. And Francis Collins was just on the Colbert show, well, the Late show with Stephen Colbert, talking about this study. Francis in the White House Science Office, he’s been a big promoter of music and medicine, using that platform and his former platform as the director of the NIH National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest biomedical research organization. So this music and medicine that you and I are talking about is becoming more, I’d say, accepted within the government, which means it’s becoming more accepted by healthcare providers. And the idea that your brain can produce opioids in response to music is part of why it can help with chronic pain. The opioids that we take, you know, Oxycontin or Codeine and things like that, heroin, they’re addictive. And the amount of opioids that your brain produces in response to music are not as high as pharmaceutical levels, but probably high enough that you might be able to get by with music in an Advil rather than music and a highly addictive substance.
00:39:56 – Eric Zimmer
Now, is that the sort of thing where with people who are seeing really good results with that, that there is some sort of therapy that is going on there? Or I’m assuming that maybe it is, maybe it’s not as simple as putting on a song you like. Is there something more to music therapy for chronic PA that therapists are doing well?
00:40:16 – Daniel Levitin
So that’s a sticky question. We can have self medication with music, and most of us know what kind of music will soothe us. I think part of the difficulty though, this idea of a desert island disc that you might get tired of, you know, maybe your go to music for pain relief is no longer working for you. And that’s where a music therapist comes in. They can help you discover music that might serve the same functional therapeutic purpose. You know, that’s not music that you’re tired of.
00:40:43 – Eric Zimmer
We talked earlier about two types of music therapy. There’s listening to music, there’s making music. When we talked about memory and dementia, we talked about how people are able to continue to make music. Do we see with chronic pain any applications of making music, or has it largely been studied in the context of passively hearing music?
00:41:04 – Daniel Levitin
There are more studies on music listening because it’s easier to do, but there are some emerging studies on making music and pain relief. And yeah, I think the effects are even more powerful when you’re making music. I mean, provided that the pain isn’t in your fingers or something and you need your fingers to play. But even in that case, it seems as though the pain goes away while you’re playing.
00:41:26 – Eric Zimmer
So if we want to maybe tie up this music therapy part of the conversation for someone, how widespread is music therapy as something that people can find therapists to do? Most people in a major city could find musical therapists, you know, where health insurance companies with all this, like, how does this translate from what you’re seeing in the science to individuals who are trying to perhaps get help with any of these conditions?
00:41:56 – Daniel Levitin
We’ve Talked about the AMTA, the AmErican Music Therapy Association, MusicTherapy.org has a website. You can find certified music therapists there. Increasingly, in the coming years, I think we’ll find that music therapy is available in clinics and hospitals. But I would start there, the mta. And there are, you know, if you’re in a city like Miami or Boston or Los Angeles or cities where there are music therapy, university programs, there are students who are going to be doing internships. But yeah, I’d start with musictherapy.org great. There are thousands of music therapists, and some of them will do remote sessions.
00:42:38 – Eric Zimmer
Another thing changing direction slightly, but staying with music. You say that many people list unwanted music in public spaces as the chief annoyance of modern life, and that the EPA has amended the Clean Air act to include unwanted music under noise pollution. Does that mean I can do a citizen’s arrest on somebody who’s playing music too loud on the subway? Does that give me the authority to do that?
00:43:03 – Daniel Levitin
I suppose. But, you know, getting back to the wolf, I would be fearful.
00:43:07 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes.
00:43:08 – Daniel Levitin
I mean, if they’re playing a tuba, they might hit you over the head with it.
00:43:11 – Eric Zimmer
Yes. It is amazing how frustrating sound everywhere sometimes can be on that point. Yeah.
00:43:19 – Daniel Levitin
I think the thing we find most annoying is the loud subwoofing sounds from a car where somebody’s playing typically hip hop, although not always that, but it’s the subwoofer that you can actually see the car bouncing up and down because the bass is so loud. And the annoying thing about bass from an acoustics perspective is that the bass signals travel much farther than the high frequencies. Low frequency waves are themselves many feet long. And so those traveling waves can travel greater distances, which is why whales who have very low voices, as it were sounds, can make their cries and their whale song heard for over a thousand miles. That low pitch can travel and evolutionarily allowed low pitch. You know, from an ancestral standpoint, it would usually signify an avalanche or a herd of elephants coming towards you. And so it’s meant to evoke fear from an evolutionary standpoint. I don’t think the person in my neighborhood playing music is necessarily trying to evoke fear, although maybe, but that’s why we don’t like it.
00:44:32 – Eric Zimmer
Interesting. I did not know either of those facts that the base waves, the lower frequency waves, travel further. But it makes sense given that they’re.
00:44:41 – Daniel Levitin
Bigger and they’re non directional, which is why if you have a subwoofer in your home, you can put it anywhere in the room and it’ll have the same effect. Whereas the speakers, I mean, if you’re an Audiophile, you want to make a triangle, an equilateral triangle where the speakers are as far apart from each other as you are from them. That’s where you get the optimal sound and the optimal stereo field, and it allows the orchestra or the band to sound natural. Subwoofer doesn’t matter because the bass, being a long waveform, is non directional.
00:45:12 – Eric Zimmer
Well, another fact I didn’t know, but it makes sense because I see subwoofers positioned in a far more random pattern than I see speakers. Yeah. Okay, we’re going to close on this. You talk about the minor third in speech as well as music.
00:45:28 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, yeah.
00:45:31 – Eric Zimmer
There’s an example of a falling minor third being derisive. Correct?
00:45:37 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, yeah.
00:45:38 – Eric Zimmer
Or yeah, yeah, which means I’m agreeing. What happens if I do an ascending minor third?
00:45:46 – Daniel Levitin
Try one.
00:45:47 – Eric Zimmer
So does music help us to live better lives?
00:45:52 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah. It’s a question, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah. But it’s interesting. A cultural universal seems to be the descending minor third, as the teasing or the derisive or the sarcastic. And we don’t know why that is. It just seems to be the case. Nyan nya nya nya nin yan ya is a cultural universal. You hear it from kids in every culture we know of. So it’s just a funny thing. I don’t know why that is. I don’t think anybody does.
00:46:20 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, it’s fascinating that when we hear it, we know what it means.
00:46:24 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, exactly. And prosody is the term linguists use to refer to the melody of a language. And in every other respect, language is different greatly on prosodic meaning. So in English, if we want to make a statement, we usually have the pitch of the sentence fall down towards the end, like I just did there. And if we want to ask a question, as you did, we would have the pitch go up. So is this a question? Is this a rhetorical question? You know, the pitch goes up, which is why for a certain generation of people younger than you and I use so called up speak, they sound unsure of themselves. It sounds as though they’re questioning rather than stating. And I fight this all the time with my students. They’ll come in undergraduates, typically, although I’ve seen it in colleagues now, because it’s a generational thing, they’ll say, I’m not exaggerating. So I did this experiment and we had these variables and I played music for people, and it sounds like they’re asking me a question with each of them, it undermines their authority. And I don’t know where that comes from. Other than that, I think they were raised to be non confrontational. And asking a question sounds non confrontational. Are we going to the movies? You want to have dinner at the Thai place? You know, that’s not asserting yourself, you know, let’s have dinner at the Thai place. Well, I don’t want to eat Thai. I do. Do I want to eat Thai? You know, it’s just. But you know, there are certain things that need to be factual and need to be asserted. And the up speak kind of confuses all of that for me and my generation.
00:48:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, yes, I agree. It is curious to wonder why that becomes as pervasive as it does. I guess it’s just speech tics that we all have. I have about 100 of them. As my editor Chris would tell you. He just manages to get most of them out of the interviews.
00:48:28 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah, we all do. But getting back to the point I meant to make, but I digressed there, is that different cultures use prosody in different ways. And so one of the reasons why it’s hard for us to learn a foreign language isn’t simply learning the vocabulary, but learning the melodic intonation of that language in a way that is authentic to the language and the way other speakers of it use it. That can be TRS difficile en very difficult in French and even more difficult in Chinese or Thai.
00:48:58 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. As I mentioned earlier to you before, we start, I’m in Portugal as we record this. And yes, Portuguese is. It’s challenging the rhythms and the speech.
00:49:08 – Daniel Levitin
You can get the words out, but you’re going to sound like a foreigner and you might be misunderstood even though you got the words right because the rhythm and the melody were off.
00:49:17 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. So we are about out of time here. Two things I’d like you to leave us with. One thought about music and healing that we haven’t talked about that might be interesting to someone or helpful. And then also share a little bit about your audiobook because it has some special things that you would expect in a book about music.
00:49:36 – Daniel Levitin
Well, I don’t think you missed anything, but I appreciate that you are a good researcher. One thing that I would just like to emphasize is that playing an instrument is really neuroprotective and healthful, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re good at it or not. It disappoints me always to hear people say, oh, well, I can’t sing or I can’t play a musical instrument. I mean, it’s funny, I grew up where there Were pickup basketball games every afternoon in my neighborhood and I never heard a kid say, oh well, I’m no Wilt Chamberlain, so I’m not going to play with you guys. You play basketball because it’s fun and it doesn’t matter whether you’re good or not. I mean, it’s fun. And I’ve never heard anybody say at a dinner party, I’m no Martin Luther King, I’m no Edward R. Murrow. So I’m not going to talk. I’m not an orator, you know, but we say it about music. I’m no Ella Fitzgerald, I’m not going to sing. I’m no Keith Jarrett. So I’m not going to even touch the piano. It’s really sad to me. Music’s not a competition.
00:50:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. I mean, I do not come by a lot of talent musically by nature. I have just persevered over the years and it’s one of the things that I am most grateful to my younger self for having done. Because it is such a gift to be able to play even at whatever level I’m able to play. I’m so glad I know how to do it.
00:51:06 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah. And truly great musicians often don’t care whether you’re good or not. They will play with you because it’s not about what you’re capable of. My friend Victor Wooten makes a really nice analogy and I know that you like analogies because parables are analogies indeed. If you go to a friend’s house for dinner and they’ve got an eight year old, are you going to talk to the eight year old? Of course you are. You’re going to modify what you talk about. You may or may not talk about the war in Ukraine with them or if you do, you know, you’re going to modify to talk at their level and you’re going to try not to be condescending or, you know, insulting, but you’ll try to adjust what you say and musicians do the same. Musicians will play with you and adjust what they do so as not to make you look bad. You’re not going to talk to that 8 year old and try to make them look like an idiot. And a competent, big hearted musician, even a pro, is going to not try and make you look bad. They’re going to try to work with you with what you bring.
00:52:08 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. I’ve been fortunate to be around a bunch of very good, very kind hearted musicians that you’ve described who played with me from the very beginning and it’s part of why I stuck with It.
00:52:19 – Daniel Levitin
And it lifts you up. It lifts you up, right?
00:52:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yes, 100%.
00:52:23 – Daniel Levitin
Yeah. I’ve been a great beneficiary of that.
00:52:25 – Eric Zimmer
Okay.
00:52:25 – Daniel Levitin
Your book, I read the audiobook. I include some musical examples there that I play on the piano or the guitar. And then whether you have the audiobook or the ebook or the physical print book, there’s a playlist that I created, actually a series of playlists on all the major streaming services. So the idea is that there’s a QR code on the back of the book. Maybe you’ll include one on your website and it will take you to all 275 songs in the book in the versions mentioned and you can listen to them as you follow along.
00:53:01 – Eric Zimmer
There’s that many of them in the book. I mean, I read the book and there were a lot of songs, but I had no idea there were that many. That is a lot.
00:53:08 – Daniel Levitin
Well, some of them are just a mention. They’re not discussed. But you know, when I opened the book describing a concert, a performance of art, Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and you know, they were playing in Walked Bud and so I mentioned that they were playing it. I don’t really dissect dissect it, but you know, if you want to know what in Walk Bud sounds like, there it is.
00:53:29 – Eric Zimmer
Wonderful. Well, we will put links in the show, notes to your work and where people, people can get the book. And Daniel, thanks so much for coming on again. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. It’s great to see you again.
00:53:40 – Daniel Levitin
Great to see you. Thank you for having me.
