← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
How Music Can Heal Our Brains
00:32:51
The act of listening to music impacts human brains in interesting ways.
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- [00:00]
A
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B
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C
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart. Happy Monday. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. On today's show, lots of people learn to type using a program called Mavis Beach. Beacon teaches typing. And although Mavis herself is fictional, a new documentary called Seeking make this Beacon explores her impact as a symbol of empowerment. We'll also look at the 10th anniversary of the Sony's picture hack. Some illuminating details came out of the hack, including a horde of emails that demonstrate the strains of racism and misogyny in Hollywood. A new investigative podcast called the Hollywood Hack takes a look, and host Brian Rafferty will join us to talk about it. That's the plan. So let's get this started with a doctor's prescription for how music can be used as a health care tool. Every Monday, we like to talk about mental health in a segment we call Mental Health Mondays. And for today's installment, we're going to be talking about music as a therapeutic tool for psychological conditions like depression or for more severe brain issues like strokes or dementia. Or, say, a brain. Music can lower our blood pressure when we're commuting to a stressful day of work. Or it can amp us up for a workout or an important meeting where we need to bring our a game. It can blunt our experiences of physical pain, or it can provide an outlet to express emotional pain. It's like the folks at SNL knew that music can be used to heal.
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B
Guess what? I got a fever. And the only prescription is Mark Cowbell.
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C
A new book from Dr. Daniel Leviton, a cognitive psychologist and neurologist and musician, tackles those questions and more. It's called I Heard It Was a Secret Chord, Music as Medicine. He'll be uptown this evening discussing the book and his research with WNYC's John Schaeffer at the Upper west side Barnes and Noble at 6pm, but he joins us now in studio. Nice to meet you.
- [03:14]
D
It's nice to meet you. I'm so happy to be back at wnyc.
- [03:18]
C
So happy to have you listeners. If you have any stories of using music as medicine, whether it's helped you through a traumatic brain injury or helped you during a mental health crisis, give us a call. 212-433-969-2212, wnyc. You can call that number or text that number. Or if you have any questions for neuropsychologist and musician Dr. Daniel Levitin, you can ask him. He's here. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Of course, our social media is always available. That's oflofitnyc. May I call you Daniel, please? Okay. Starting from the experience of listening, teach us a little bit about our brain. How does sound affect the brain? Which parts of the brain are responding to different musical qualities?
- [04:05]
D
Well, so it may not seem like this because we just hear the music, but the brain actually analyzes different features of the music in separate circuits. So your eardrums are wiggling in and out response to vibrations in the air from musical instruments or loudspeakers or earpods. And the rhythm of the music, the pitches, the melodies, the harmony, the timbre, that is the sound of a trumpet versus a voice, all of those are processed in separate circuits in the brain. Comes together later. Alison, where later is maybe 40,000ths of a second. But the fact that it's all processed separately is part of its healing power. It means that different elements of music can affect different areas of the brain, and music affects every area of the brain that we have so far mapped.
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C
Just a basic question. How did you get interested in this?
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E
You're a musician. Obviously it starts from there.
- [05:09]
C
How did you decide?
- [05:10]
E
Let me see how the brain is affected by music?
- [05:14]
D
Well, I had been in the music business for many years working for Columbia Records out of New York here. And when the music business started to fall apart, I was a staff producer and session musician. And I decided I would go back to college and study the subject of how is it we think what is thought made of? I wanted to think about thinking. And so I got a degree in neuroscience. And when I was in graduate school, my supervisor said, you know, you could study memory or you could study decision making or things like that, but a Lot of people do that. You have this background as a musician. Why not study the musical brain? And I wasn't sure I wanted to do that. I was afraid it might demystify music. And I realized that was the hubris of youth. It's more mysterious now than ever and more wonderful now that I see how complex it is.
- [06:15]
C
When you think about the evolutionary aspects, in the beginning of your book, beginning of your book, you write about shamans being present at various aspects of life. What do you make of the evolutionary reasons between music and sound and our bodies?
- [06:31]
D
Well, it's a great question, and I wrote a book about it some years ago called the World in six. How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. To grapple with just that question, why do we have music? It's metabolically expensive. It's financially expensive to buy records or musical instruments. It takes us away from things like finding food. So what could be the reason that we have this genetic predisposition for it, and we've had it for tens of thousands of years? I think implicit in your question is the knowledge that some of the oldest artifacts we find in burial sites are musical instruments. Bone flutes, even Neanderthal sites. So to distill what was a whole book into just a sound bite, there were probably several reasons that music evolved, not a single one. And that's the story of evolution. It's not one thing. So in the case of music, consider that we've only had written language for 5,000 years, but humans have been around for somewhere between 40 and 200,000 years, depending on how you define human. So when you didn't have written language, how did you remember anything? How did you remember how to get to the well? Or how to boil a plant in a certain way so that it wouldn't be poisonous? Or how to avoid the neighboring tribe because Og over the Hill killed my uncle years ago? So all this knowledge was encoded in song, because the mutually reinforcing cues of rhyme and rhythm and meter help to preserve knowledge. We can remember songs better than anything else. In fact, the Old Testament was set to music before it was written down. It was orally transmitted for 1,000 years.
- [08:19]
C
A big part of your book is a call to action. In your view of the world, how would music be embraced as a healthcare tool?
- [08:30]
D
Well, so music has been used for tens of thousands of years to treat injuries, ailments, chronic pain, disease, and basically to give us a toolkit so that we feel better and don't get sick in the first place. We now know that music boosts the immune system. And most Americans use music as medication. Already we have a certain kind of music we use to pump ourselves up for an exercise workout, to help us get out of bed in the morning, to relax at the end of the day. So it's functioning kind of like caffeine and alcohol in some respects. What we haven't yet tapped is the potential for music to take the place of drugs. So easiest case to imagine is Parkinson's disease. People with Parkinson's are taking heavy doses of L dopa. Typically, they often have difficulty walking because the circuits in the brain that allow them to move and maintain a steady gait have been degraded by the disease. Well, it turns out that if they listen to music, they can walk again because music scaffolds existing circuits that were not damaged. The tempo of the music, if it's at their natural gait, can help them to walk steadily. And with rhythmic auditory stimulation techniques, the effects can last for months after the training has stopped.
- [09:59]
C
My guest, Dr. Daniel Levitin, cognitive psychologist, neurologist, writer, musician, record producer, as well as we learned. We are talking about his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Music as Medicine. As you can imagine, our phone lines are busy. Let's talk to Tatiana from Dover, New Jersey. Hi, Tatiana. Thanks for calling, all of it.
- [10:19]
F
Good morning. And I want to thank you for this part, this, this, this subject period. I just want to say that I would love to get the doctor's information on just to talk to him sidebar as well. But I want to share that my mom has vascular dementia, and music has been part of her healing and saving grace for my entire family. For my mother. My mother knows songs that I never thought that she would ever know. It's just, like, amazing to me that going back to 2011 or 2012, when she was in an incredible medical daycare, a Jewish medical daycare. I don't know if I can give the name of this daycare because of. For the pandemic. The pandemic happened and that took out this medical daycare for so many that it helped tremendously. And anyway, they did a concert and they were playing. My mother was singing songs that I never, ever knew she knew. And I'm like, me and my sister, sisters are looking at each other and like, how does mom know these songs?
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C
I'm going to dive in there and I'm going to. Thank you so much for calling in, Tatiana. I'm going to let the doctor respond now.
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E
First of all, your response that I'm.
- [11:51]
D
So grateful, Tatiana, that you brought this up because this is one of the major points that I was afraid we wouldn't have time to get to. And that is the use of music in dementia, Alzheimer's disease, memory loss. And music insinuates itself into the deepest parts of the brain, the oldest parts of the brain. And so it's one of the last things to go when we suffer cognitive decline. And we've seen this over and over again in assisted living facilities, memory care facilities. The problem that most patients face here is that when they lose the ability to recognize their loved ones or even themselves in the mirror, when they don't understand why they are where they are, they feel lost and adrift. And this causes, as you might imagine, intense anxiety and agitation. Some can become violent. But if we play the music from their youth, it's perfectly intact. They sing along, they come alive again, and it calms them because it puts them back in touch with the self they had lost touch with.
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C
Let's talk to Tony, who is calling in from Saddlebrook, New Jersey. Hi, Tony, thank you so much for calling, all of it.
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G
Hi, thank you so much for bringing me on and thank you, doctor for your help. I had a traumatic brain injury from in October, it was October 21st when I passed out because of sepsis, unknown sepsis, and ran my car into a telephone pole. And so the traumatic brain injury was both a massive concussion and the organic brain injury. And it's been a long time since then and I still have a lot of lingering issues, particularly with short term memory. I wanted to share first though, that before I asked my question, that.
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D
During.
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G
My convalescence, music was peace. And I chose just Dear Songs to Me or some very meditative music and kept the lights low and it really let me rest and heal without the stress of what I'm doing, what I was going through. I am curious, doctor, if besides music, maybe there's some other exercise to do with music for the cues for the brain in terms of trying to remember or trying to build the short term memory.
- [14:36]
C
Thank you so much for calling in.
- [14:37]
D
That's a great point. Thank you so much, Tony. And I'm sorry to hear about your injury. I feel for you because I had a concussion in 2017 and I experienced many of the same distressing symptoms that you're talking about. One of the things that music does, and not all music does everything for everybody, right? We all have our own taste. But music that you might find relaxing, which a doctor can't prescribe because what's relaxing to you might be stimulating to someone else.
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H
But.
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D
Relaxing music releases prolactin, which is a soothing tranquilizing hormone that's also released between mothers and infants during nursing. It can calm you, it can stimulate relaxing music, can stimulate serotonin, a mood stabilizer, and it can stimulate neurogenesis, that is the development of new neural pathways. And it can reduce the stress response, reducing cortisol. All of these reasons mean that listening to music and playing music are neuroprotective. They can help you rebuild the pathways that were damaged by the traumatic brain injury. And you were asking about exercises. I would recommend playing an instrument even if you've never played one before. It's never too late to learn. And the reason is that you're talking about short term memory. The act of playing music requires that you think ahead to what you want to do and then implement it and then check in whether the sound that came out is what you intended. And that's a great way to stimulate memory.
- [16:12]
E
Yeah. When I was in the rehab, I shared with you earlier that I had brain surgery six months ago, yesterday, tomorrow. Sorry. And they had music. Music therapy was a big part of it. Like, she left a ukulele with me and just because she knew I could read music, I thought I could read music. Fingers crossed, I could read music. And it really, at first I was like, oh, I'm not so sure I should be concentrating on memory. I should be concentrating on learning how to write again. But I realized what you were saying, all the different developments that were happening as I was playing, as I was just noodling around on the ukulele. And then when I left and my piano teacher from before said, can I help you in any way? And I went to her lessons and she just really helped me step by step. It was the simplest 30 minute lesson about the scales. And I was happy to see that I could remember reading music, but it really made a difference. It also made a difference, honestly, emotionally. Yeah, it just did.
- [17:09]
D
Well, being able to create music is a real boost in self efficacy. And you realize, oh, if I can make these beautiful sounds, I must be doing okay. I tell the story in the book of Roseanne Cash, local New Yorker, who lost her ability to play after brain surgery and gradually got it back. And it was not just important for her to be able to play because it's her career, but it also boosted her mood and sped her recovery. It's a big thing when you're thinking.
- [17:43]
C
About the role of music and how important it is to people, but then you have your doctor hat on about the scientific messages that you're getting, how do you balance those two? I mean, you write in the book, how can we scientifically study something as magical, ineffable and as spiritual, moving as music?
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D
Well, so I think the secret is to use real music and real musicians. The tradition of experimental psychology was that we tended to use really degraded music that maybe the scientists wrote themselves in order to make it a controlled experiment or they presented music, computer generated music that didn't have any motion. What we're finding, I've been working with the National Institutes of Health and Francis Collins from the White House Science Office on just these issues of how do we do this, how do we study it properly? And part of the answer is, well, we get actual musicians to play the music and we allow people in our experiments to choose what they want to hear or to at least tell us whether the music is having the emotional effect or not. You mentioned at the beginning of the hour the more cowbell skit from snl. As it turns out, I had breakfast yesterday morning with Buck Darma who wrote Don't Fear the Reaper. Oh, really? The lead singer of Blue Oyster Cult. And we were talking about music, by the way, one of the best songs I've ever heard in my life. He just released, it's called this Is the End of Every Song under his own name, Buck Dharma, on all the streaming platforms. It is amazing, epic. That's so full of hope and promise. And it was therapy for me and for him in writing it. But I mentioned Blue Oyster Cult because we did a survey of people who listened to music to energize themselves. A lot of people said they used Blue Oyster Cult. And then we found a cohort of people who relaxed to Blue Oyster Cult and ACDC music and Van Halen. And I said, well, what do you use to energize yourself with? Well, Swedish speed metal. So, you know, everything is relative.
- [19:57]
C
My guest is Dr. Daniel Leviton. We'll have more with him after a quick break.
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E
This is all of it.
- [20:10]
C
This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Dr. Daniel Levitin. The name of his book is I Heard There Was a Secret Cord Music as Medicine Again. He'll be at Barnes and Noble on the Upper west side at 6pm with WNYC's John Schaeffer. We got a text in here that says, I've heard people who stutter can sing without stuttering. It's almost like the music gives order to speech. Any truth to that? What's happening in the brain that Makes that easier.
- [20:38]
D
That's absolutely true. And in fact, I devote part of a chapter to stutterers who sing and stutterers who act like James Earl Jones. And music. Exactly. As the listener said, music provides an order. What happens is the internal clock in the brain of stutterers sometimes gets a little bit out of whack. And so what you need is stimulation from an external source like music, which bypasses the conventional circuits and provides order and timing.
- [21:11]
C
This next question says, can you ask the guest for his thoughts on Williams syndrome? You wrote about this in your book a lot. First of all, define it for us what Williams syndrome is, and then we can answer the question.
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D
I didn't know this would be on the test. Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder that affects about 1 in 20,000 individuals. It's caused by the deletion of one copy of a set of genes on chromosome 7, and it leads to a neurodevelopmental disorder. Most people with Williams syndrome have low IQs in the range of 60 to 80, meaning they probably will never hold a regular job or be able to live independently. Although there are some exceptions. They have profound deficits with eye hand coordination. They can't think logically. They can't tell time, but they can tell musical time. And they play musical instruments beautifully. Language is also preserved. So music and language in Williams are preserved, but they live with profound challenges in almost every other domain of their lives. And they've taught us a lot. Thousands of Williams syndrome individuals who have come to my lab and other people's labs generously spending their time undergoing all these tests we give them have helped us to understand the relationship between genes and musicality. And they're just so sweet and upbeat, and they're the friendliest people you would ever meet.
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E
Let's talk to Janet. Hi, Janet.
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C
Thanks for calling all of it.
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H
I'm happy to be on the air. This is Janet Sullivan. I'm a musician, but I'm also a music therapist. And I worked for a very long. Oh, I'm very happy to meet you via the air. I worked in a psychiatric hospital for a very long time, and music therapy is extremely help in orienting people when they're depressed and even when they're psychotic. And I also was a music therapist after 9 11, and I worked with first responders for over a year, just going to sites and helping people heal from the trauma of being involved in the crash of the towers. So music therapy is used in China and India going back millennia. So it's a traditional intervention which in our modern world has been codified into a profession. Thank you for this wonderful segment. It's extremely interesting.
- [23:49]
E
Thank you so much for calling in. Dan, you talk about musical memory, and you use the often covered summertime as an example that demonstrates Summertime.
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C
Yeah. With all the versions.
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D
Right.
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C
You can have that version.
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E
You can have a slow version, but we recognize it somehow. What's the role of musical memory in our appreciation of music and the impact that it has on our bodies and our brains?
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D
Well, so you raised such an interesting point. You can recognize songs that have been changed in so many ways. We can recognize a song that's been transposed in pitch or played on different instruments. I've got a recording of the nutcracker suite played entirely on mandolins by the modern mandolin quartet. Something you would never have heard before, but you recognize it instantly. Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum da da Right. But it's on mandolins. Music is such a rich stimulus that has so many attributes to it. As we were talking about earlier, that's what allows it to preserve in our memory even when we lose other things, because there's so many access points to it. I can name a song like, as you did summertime, and it immediately evokes a memory without even any sound. I could sing bum bum bum bum, and you know what I'm talking about.
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C
Bum bum bum.
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D
Right, exactly. So musical memory is an important part of post traumatic stress disorder treatments, as the previous caller was alluding to, because it allows us to recontextualize traumatic experiences and make them safe again. There are a number of music therapy approaches that clearly our caller was expert in. And we see in addition to that music, Making for PTSD and in veterans administration facilities has been a great way for people to recover from ptsd because when we make music, by definition, we're invoking music we've heard before and recontextualizing it and basically improvising something new. All songs have something to do with other songs that came before them.
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E
In some of today's most popular songs, we hear a kind of tonal tension between the story of the lyrics and the mood of the music we have pulled. Fast car, for an example. Let's take a listen.
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D
You get a fast car I want a ticket to anywhere maybe we make a deal maybe together we can get somewhere.
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C
So it's an upbeat. It's a nice tune. It's a sad song. How would the brain. How does the brain make sense of the different, sometimes opposing Elements.
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D
You know, I could talk about this song for an hour. It is such an amazing piece of music. And, yeah, it's a sad song. And maybe the first few times you hear just sounds like a happy little ditty, especially when the chorus comes in. And remember when we're driving, driving in the car, speed so fast. Felt like I was drunk. You know, I mean, just. It's this uplifting melody, but hidden beneath it is this very sad story of hopelessness. Really. Am I going to end up just like everybody else with my head below water? Everybody else I know from the narrator's story. The music can make it safe. It can allow us to lower our guard and let in thoughts and feelings that might. Otherwise, we would have our guard up. We wouldn't let them in. We wouldn't allow ourselves to be vulnerable. And through that experience of letting something in, of making ourselves vulnerable, we can find our common humanity, we can find empathy, we can become more attuned to other people's experiences. It's difficult to get somebody to change their mind by arguing with them, but if you expose them to the right piece of art, and here I'm talking dance, painting, literature, music, you can change their hearts. And from that, the mind follows.
- [28:17]
C
This is a great text. Years ago, I was visiting Maasai friends in southern Kenya. One day we walked a few kilometers to my friend's grandmother, who at the time was something more than a hundred years old. The lovely woman, who'd always lived in the traditional Maasai lifestyle, no longer spoke, but only sang. She was not suffering from any kind of dementia. She could carry on completely lucid conversations, but only sang her part of the conversation. According to my friend, her grandmother just started this habit later in life. What would cause someone to sing?
- [28:49]
D
Joy, perhaps?
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C
Well, we talked about the, you know, brain injuries, and Gabby Giffords is a great example that she used music therapy quite literally in her recovery, where she could sing songs, she could recognize songs, even though she couldn't necessarily speak that well at the time. What goes on in that interaction?
- [29:11]
D
This is a technique called melodic intonation therapy. And in Gabby Gifford's case, she utterly lost the ability to speak. But it turns out there are redundant pathways in the brain for music, and she and other people in this technique are taught to sing what they want to say. So she might be taught to sing, I need a glass of water, show me to the bathroom, things like that. And once they become instantiated in the music circuit, there's transfer that occurs. Eventually, new new neural connections and pathways are made, rebuilding the damaged speech circuits. And now she speaks absolutely fine. And in the case of the Maasai woman, it may be that her speech circuits were damaged and she figured out on her own how to sing what she wanted.
- [30:00]
C
What about pain? Where does music factor into alleviating pain?
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D
So my lab was the first to show that when you listen to music you like, again, it's not a particular song, it's subjective. Your brain releases its own opioids. Endogenous mu. Opioids, they're called same opioids that you might get from heroin or in an oxycontin are released by your brain in small amounts, and they cause you to feel pleasure and they cause anesthesia. And so we now know that music can treat chronic pain or acute pain through these endogenous opioids. And the opioids that your brain releases aren't the same as you would get in a pill, but they're enough that you might be able to get through pain without having a strong dose of an opiate or no opiate at all, or a smaller dose for a smaller amount of time. You know, dentists figured this out a long time ago. They tend to play you music when they're doing the drilling. And we've now confirmed it with experimental studies.
- [31:06]
C
Let's take a call from Regina. Hi, Regina, thanks for calling, all of it.
- [31:11]
I
Hi, thanks for taking my call. My story is about my dad, who passed away at 91 in 2020. And, excuse me, he was. Although he didn't make his life as a performing artist, music was a great force in his life. So when it came to the point he had severe dementia, and when it came to the point where he was completely disconnected with us and he was no longer speaking, it occurred to me that we had recordings of a recital that he had performed years before, maybe 30 years before he died. And I brought in those recordings that I brought in those CDs. And, you know, again, my father was not in touch with anyone, but when he heard his voice singing again, it brought him back to life. And when he couldn't speak and he couldn't connect with us, he could sing. And he sang with his whole heart, and he sang loud and he sang proudly. And, you know, it was a phenomenon in the nursing home because, you know, you could hear his voice carrying down the hallways. And it brought back a joy that had been lost. He was just a lost soul before we started playing that music for him again. And that music provided the soundtrack to his final phase in life. And he actually had a beautiful death. And the music was a part of that. And I didn't even know it was part. It was possible to have a beautiful death until I was there to witness my father's death and with him singing in the background. It was amazing.
- [33:01]
C
Regina, thank you so much for sharing that story.
- [33:04]
D
What a beautiful story. The role of music in palliative care and in hospice. Maybe we all should create a playlist for when we're demented or dying. Put it with our advanced healthcare directive.
- [33:18]
C
Those are excellent ideas. There are many excellent ideas in the book. I Heard There was a Secret chord. It is by Dr. Daniel Leviton. He'll be at the Upper West Barnes and Noble with WNYC's Jonathan Schaefer tonight at 6pm thank you so much for coming to the studio.
- [33:33]
D
Pleasure to see you, Alison.
- [33:34]
C
And we got that song you wanted. You ready?
- [33:37]
D
Yeah.
- [33:37]
C
All right, let's hear it. The End of Every song by Buck Dharma.
- [33:58]
J
I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high quality news about science, technology and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24 7, our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, climate change. Genetic engineering, childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news. For more sponsorship information, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.