Dr. Daniel Levitin has an extensive resume. He is a neuroscientist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. He is also the founding Dean of Arts and Humanities at Minerva University in San Francisco. He is the author of such bestselling books as This Is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs, so it’s fair to say that he has spent a good deal of time understanding how music affects the brain. However, he doesn’t just study the effects of music. He is also a musician who has performed with artists like Victor Wooten and Bobby McFerrin. By phone, he recently discussed his new book I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, a future theoretical world in which musicians would get paid to create healing music, and how Bobby McFerrin is proof of the concept of music as medicine.
What was the impetus for exploring music as medicine?
I’ve always been interested in how music can change our moods so easily. So many people I know have stories of how music was an integral part of romantic relationships forming or sustaining or how music helped them through a difficult time, particularly during a school year. Making friends and having music be a soundtrack to that friendship… I was always interested in that. When I became a neuroscientist, studying music and the brain, I started seeing studies here and there on how music can affect the immune system and treat disease. I wanted to dig deeper into that.
Was it a new discovery for you that the brain releases its own opioids as a pain reliever?
My lab was the first to show that. We hypothesized that it might be true. It was a rather expensive experiment to conduct. We wouldn’t have done it if we thought there was a chance it wouldn’t work out. On the other hand, it might have been an interesting experiment no matter which way it turned out. If the brain didn’t release opioids as a response to music, that would have been just as interesting as if it did in terms of expanding our knowledge of neurochemistry. I’m hedging here because I went into it hoping to find conclusive evidence one way or the other. When it came in, it didn’t really surprise me because it was my hypothesis. It does make a good story.
It does. Considering how many ads you see for prescription meds, it’s interesting to learn that our bodies do some of that work anyway.
It does. There’s less money in music for medicine than there is in pharmaceuticals.
Certainly.
It doesn’t have to be. I have friends with publishing deals, so they get paid to write music. You could imagine a world in which pharma would invest in music and they could pay a living wage to musicians who are writing healing music. And they would charge for it.
In the book, you discuss the trend toward designing music for wellness apps. Why do you think there is sort of a return to the idea of music as medicine?
It’s been around for tens of thousands of years. The return that you and I are speaking of is a direct consequence of there being good science behind it now. It’s not just speculation. In the aging field, there’s a whole lot of hooey about supplements you should take and things you can do to prolong life. All kinds of crazy claims are unsupported by evidence. It’s nice to know that there’s a place for this and it’s pretty strong.
Music has been used for medicine for a long time and our antecedents wouldn’t have known to tune it to a certain frequency, and like, you said in the book, tuning the number of Hertz may not impact the effect of the music.
There’s no evidence to support that. A lot of people think it, but that doesn’t make it true.
With the trend toward wellness and designing music, what do you think would be the next logical step?
I like the idea of musicians getting paid to create healing music. In effect, they do. At a concert, you expect your mood to be changed by it. If you didn’t expect your mood to be changed, you probably wouldn’t go. If it didn’t get changed, you’d probably be mad. I think it’s just an extension of that. We have inklings of it. We have sound baths where you go and your expectation is that you’ll relax or change your life in some significant way. I’d like to see that sort of thing more widespread and more a part of our normal conversation in daily life.
Have you experienced sound baths?
Oh yeah. A friend of mine, Jeralyn Glass here in L.A., conducts sound baths and healing sessions with crystal alchemy glass bowls. It’s extraordinary. I’ve also experienced the great effects going to a Bobby McFerrin concert or singing with Bobby.
I saw a clip of a comedian recently who was talking about how his friends go to sporting events, and a lot of times, they spend a lot of money just to be disappointed. His point was that he’d never come home disappointed from a concert.
This is an extension of what my friend Victor Wooten has been saying for a long time. One of the big differences between a concert and a sporting event is that in a sporting event, half the audience wants you to fail. Half of the audience hates half the players on the field. At a concert, everyone wants the performer to succeed. At a concert, you’re not going to spend the money unless you really love the musician or have some reason to think you will. The other nice thing about big concerts is that there’s an opening act. Typically, the opening act is chosen by the promoter or the band themselves to be somebody that you might not have discovered and might like based on the reason you’re there in the first place. I discovered one of my favorite artists of all time that way. That was Tom Brosseau. He opened for Punch Brothers. Famously, Jimi Hendrix opened for The Monkees, and a bunch of people discovered him that way. When it works, it’s really great. I saw Rufus and Chaka Khan open for Stevie Wonder at the L.A Forum in 1974. That was amazing.
In the process of researching and writing this book, was there anything you found really surprising?
The most surprising thing that happened when I was writing the book was Bobby McFerrin’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s and his self-medication with music. It was the kind of thing I had read about in papers, but to see it up close with a friend of mine, and see how it really works, that was vivid.
What are some of the effects music has shown on Parkinson’s patients?
If the disease reaches a point where they are unable to walk, either because they freeze while they’re walking or they can’t get started, it’s because the disease has degraded a sort of internal timekeeper. The most obvious and direct effect is that music helps them to establish an external timekeeper, to keep pace, to maintain a steady gait. Music activates a bunch of supplementary circuits that fire in synchrony with the music. If you get the tempo at about the speed of your walking rate, even if you have Parkinson’s, you can walk again. That was astonishing to find out. It’s one of the most powerful things with Parkinson’s. In Bobby’s case, the disease causes fatigue. When Bobby sings for an hour and a half, as he does once a week now in Berkeley at noon on Mondays, he gets this sort of runner’s high, and it lasts a couple of days. It’s extraordinary.
Wow! That’s amazing that it has that deep of an effect.
There’s a lot going on. Singing releases dopamine, a neurochemical that motivates you, so it increases motivation to do a number of things like follow his doctor’s recommendations, go for walks, etc. It increases serotonin, which balances mood and fuels the immune system to help fight the disease. He’s getting endorphins and adrenaline from the audience. In addition, he’s feeling the love of other people. When you talk about the ancient tradition of using music for healing around a fire in pre-literate and pre-industrial societies, possibly a lot of the effect of people being healed was that you have the whole tribe there rooting for you. That optimism and sense of community are very powerful.
That’s pretty extraordinary. You talk a lot about music and memory and you mentioned how you can love a song because of a relationship and then grow to have an aversion to the song if the relationship ends. It’s just something that’s so easy to relate to.
That’s part of the power of music. It can work in two directions. If you have profound memory loss, it can help you to reconnect with the self you had lost touch with. We’ve seen that in Alzheimer’s patients. If you’re depressed or feeling misunderstood, you can put on a song that reminds you of happier times. Sometimes it backfires. You put on a song and it provokes a memory of something unpleasant. That’s what happens with people with post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly after serving in the military, such as when they hear a song that was playing when their buddy got killed. That’s heavy. Or anything by that artist can trigger a panic attack. It cuts both ways.
There’s a story in the book about a 90-year-old man who was snapped out of his catatonic state by music from his youth.
There are a lot of stories like this. That definitely is what works. Memories from our youth are more deeply embedded in our brain so they’re more resilient and resistant to damage and disease.
I thought it was interesting when you talked about the right music as it relates to memory and how the right music is what you choose at any given time.
It’s like, what’s the right romantic partner? There’s no formula and everyone likes something different. Your tastes can change over time. The key to music therapy and music medicine is that you, as the patient, have to be involved in the selection of the music in most cases. I’ve been starting to think lately: I have an advanced medical directive, and it says what should be done if I’m in a coma and that sort of thing, or if I’m coming out of a coma, what I would want done. I was thinking I should put a playlist in there. When I’m recovering, and I can’t make decisions for myself, these are the songs I want to hear.
That’s an excellent idea. Along the same lines, I talked to a woman who told me that she was challenged to make a playlist for her wake.
A lot of people do that. I’ve been to funerals where people specified the music they wanted. Of course, you’re not there, not in any conventional sense. There’s a place for it, and I like the idea, and I think it serves a different purpose.
It’s the songs you want to be remembered for.
That’s right. Or remembered by the songs that you and your friends listened to together. If you’re in a hospital bed and you can’t speak and you’re still sentient, somebody playing the wrong music for you could put you in a bad mood.
That’s true. There is plenty of music I wouldn’t want to hear if I were coming out of a coma.
Like The Smiths “Girlfriend in a Coma”.
For me, it would be anything by The Smiths.
All of their songs sound alike. (singing) I had a job, and I was miserable. I lost my job and now I’m miserable…but actually, I do love them!
Exactly.
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine landed on the bestseller list in its first week and is available now wherever you buy books. For more information about Dr. Daniel Levitin, visit https://www.daniellevitin.com.
