← Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
The Healing Power Of Music: How Your Favourite Songs Boost Your Mood, Mind & Mobility with Dr Daniel Levitin #623
01:29:26
Music is medicine. It has the power to heal us. And today’s guest knows it’s something we can self-prescribe, for free, whenever we want to benefit.
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- [00:01]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
In Parkinson's, inevitably, many patients lose the ability to walk because that timing circuit has been degraded, the part that tells them to put one foot in front of the other with a certain timing. So music that has the same tempo as the walking speed, the gait of a Parkinson's patient activates regions of the brain that are spared. And within a few seconds, the brain synchronizes to the beat of the music. And a Parkinson's patient listening to that can suddenly start to walk.
- [00:35]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live. More Today's conversation is a meeting of two key areas in my life. Music in medicine. Music has always been hugely meaningful to me. I've sung and played multiple instruments since I was a young boy, and honestly, some of my happiest moments have been performing on stage or simply losing myself in music. Now, even if you don't play yourself, and after hearing this episode, that might change, most of us know intuitively that music just does something to us. The right track at the right time can soothe you, energize you, or transport you back to another time. But here's where it gets even more interesting. In all my years as a clinician, music was never really discussed as a therapeutic tool. Drugs, nutrition, exercise, sure, but never music. Yet the more I've learned about and experienced its effects, the more I've come to realize that we could be missing out on a powerful and beautiful form of healing. Music is medicine. It makes sense, doesn't it? And it's the title of a fascinating book by today's guest who first appeared on my podcast back in 2020. Dr. Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, former record producer, and musician who's combined all those titles to become a scientific advocate for the primal therapeutic benefits of music. And his work is genuinely influencing public health policies around the world. So sit back, relax, and listen as we uncover the science behind that instinct. You've always felt that music is far more than simply entertainment or distraction. It can actually be one of the most powerful forms of medicine. Many of us will know that certain pieces of music can make us feel better, but one of the key messages I got from your book is that music can be considered a powerful form of medicine. So could you just sort of make that top line case? What is music actually doing to our brains and how can we therefore consider it as a potential form of therapy for all kinds of different conditions, such as Parkinson's or Ms. Or stuttering or Alzheimer's. I think just understanding some of the physiology would be really, really helpful.
- [03:37]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Right. So in the same way that medicine drugs, caffeine, barbiturates, drugs for schizophrenia, drugs for depression, in the same way that they don't all hit the same part of the brain, music doesn't. Not every piece of music hits the same part of the brain. Different musics hit different parts of the brain. And I think perhaps the best way to unpack this conceptually is to take the case that you mentioned first, which is Parkinson's. In Parkinsonism, what happens is the disease degrades circuits in a region of the brain called the basal ganglia. And those circuits use dopamine to help them process the timing of what we call voluntary movements. An involuntary movement is coughing or swallowing or hiccuping, startle reflex. But a voluntary movement is almost everything else we do. We feed ourselves, we walk, we exercise. Those are voluntary movements. And in Parkinson's, inevitably, many patients lose the ability to walk because that timing circuit has been degraded. The part that tells them to put one foot in front of the other with a certain timing. Cause if you don't, you end up with both feet in the air at the same time. Or more commonly, both feet planted in the ground, and you can't move either one. So music that has the same tempo as the walking speed, the gait of a Parkinson's patient, activates regions of the brain that are spared. And within a few seconds, the brain synchronizes to the beat of the music. And a Parkinson's patient listening to that can suddenly start to walk as long as the music's playing. And there's a form of therapy called rhythmic auditory stimulation therapy for Parkinson's, where they listen to music 20 minutes a day for a couple of weeks, and then they don't even need the music anymore because they've built supplementary circuits to help them walk.
- [05:43]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating, this idea that music has its own internal momentum. And it made me think of something that I think many of us experience. So let's say in my family, for example, we could be listening to a tune in the car on the way home, right? So then we stop the car and we come in. Let's say we've been shopping and we unload the shopping bags. The music is not on anymore, right? The car stopped, the car's in the drive. And I found this with my kids sometimes that maybe five or ten minutes later, we start singing the same part of that song. At the same time, it's as if we hit the chorus at the same time. As if what you're saying about this internal momentum is that this is actually going on inside of us even when we're not listening to the music. Is that kind of one of the things that you're talking about here?
- [06:39]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Very much so. And this question, we call this auditory imagery. This is the very first experiment I did when I was still in graduate school, was asking people to remember songs that they hadn't heard in a while, and they sang them at the exact tempo of the song.
- [06:57]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Are.
- [06:58]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Our memory for timing is exquisite. And we've now seen in a number of studies, if you start playing a song and you turn it off. This happens to me when I drive through a tunnel and the satellite radio can no longer reach. Right. Terrestrial radio still can reach, but the satellite doesn't. So when I emerge from the end of the tunnel, almost always I'm at the same part of the song that. That the satellite radio is. And that's not just me. This is a common phenomenon because we have timing circuits in the brain that govern everything from the release of hormones and digestive fluids and melatonin at night to help you sleep and wrecks it in the morning to help you wake up and all of these kinds of things. The timing circuits are millions of years old. Evolutionarily.
- [07:51]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. I read in your book that music came before language in terms of our evolution, which is really interesting to think about, isn't it? If music really did come before language, what does that tell us about us and about the role that music can play, play in our lives?
- [08:20]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, to be fair, this is a controversial notion. Stephen Pinker famously would claim that music is tricking a system that evolved for language. But the evidence that music came first is that the oldest artifacts we find in human and Neanderthal burial sites are musical instruments. The parts of the brain that process music exclusively are phylogenetically older. They're evolutionarily older. And we know this because the cortex built from the center out. And so their music centers are deeper in. They're the most resistant to brain damage. Whether it's caused by a trauma or a tumor or a stroke, music remains intact. And that's just some of the evidence that music was around first. And, yeah, what that means is that music may be a more powerful way to achieve certain things than language. If I was out at the coast looking at the waves and the sun were to set over the ocean, the sensation of calm, the colors and the rage of the waves I'm trying to describe them as best I can in words, but if I put on the right piece of music, maybe Beethoven's sixth Symphony, you know exactly what I'm feeling. Music has that power for emotional communication, and that's reflected in a bunch of neurochemical systems that are selectively responsive to music. Dopaminergic, serotonergic. We know that music can help relieve pain. My lab was the first to show that when you listen to music you like, opioids are produced in the brain. Endogenous mu. Opioids, which are analgesics.
- [10:26]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, which really goes back to the opening point, doesn't it, about music being medicine? We know through that lens of endogenous opioids, people will talk about the runner's high, won't they? They'll talk about exercise is good for you. Because of course, there are many reasons for that, but one of them is because of the endogenous opioids. But music is doing the same thing. Yet even though we know intuitively that the right kind of music can make us feel better, I don't think yet we've got to the point, certainly in a mainstream way, where music is thought of as therapy or thought of as medicine. And I guess my hope, and perhaps your hope when writing this book is that, you know, that might be something you can change.
- [11:15]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Absolutely. I mean, that's the reason I wrote the book. I read about 4,000 peer reviewed articles and synthesized the information in what I thought was a fair and balanced way, trying to make the case for things where the evidence is in and then being frank, where we don't have enough evidence. And so my personal background in this is that when you and I first met, I had just worked for five years with the National Institutes of Health here in the US to develop a Music as medicine grant program. And they gave away $40 million in research funds. And then I began working with the White House Science Office under the Biden administration to help promote the idea of music as medicine to lawmakers so that they could legislate government support for it. And the result of those efforts have been remarkable. One is that in the US the state of New Jersey, Blue Cross and Blue Shield private insurers there now cover music therapy. The state of Massachusetts, on the day I launched my book, sent a representative of the governor's office to my talk to tell us that Massachusetts was now giving out vouchers for free music therapy. And then just three weeks ago, the Netherlands launched Music as Medicine initiative through the royal family, the king and The Queen announced an initiative on music as medicine, and I spoke there to help kick it off.
- [12:56]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So things are coming together, that concept, music as therapy. I guess there are specific conditions where you will need a specific therapist to try and integrate music into your life in a certain way, which I definitely want to talk about, but in a much bigger and maybe more universal way. I think one of the messages from this book is that many of us perhaps have a deficiency of music in our lives, and perhaps correcting that deficiency might have all kinds of benefits. Is that fair, would you say?
- [13:37]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
I would. And just to get back to this notion that you raised that music may have preceded language in the query, what does this mean? If you look at contemporary hunter gatherer societies, they all have music as part of the. Woven into the fabric of daily life for rituals, for ceremonies, mothers singing to infants, work songs. And it seems as though we assume that hunter gatherers that have been isolated from the west are living the way we were 40,000 or 60,000 years ago. And so we assume, anthropologists, archaeologists assume that that's the way things were. We always had music. And in our own recent history, my grandparents were children before there was electricity, so there was no radio. If you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself. And most people played an instrument in their generation and nobody cared about whether they were any good or not. Not good enough. You never had that conversation. Entertainment in the evening was you'd sit around with the family and you'd play guitars that you made out of cigar boxes, or you'd play on cheap pianos that you found, or you would just sing, sing and sing and sing all night long. And you go back to hunter gatherers. They tend to have their sleep divided where they'll sleep when it first gets dark. But they wake from midnight to three and they sing a round of fire to ward off predators with the strength of their voices. So this music being part of our lives in a rich way, is part of our evolutionary history. And what really put an end to it was the development of concert halls in Europe about 500 years ago, where we created a class of performers on a stage and a class of listeners. And pretty soon, over the intervening years, it became, oh, well, I'm not good enough. I'm never going to be an Ella Fitzgerald or an Adele, so I won't bother to sing. But it's peculiar. Nobody says, I'm never going to be a professional soccer player, so why should I even play? Or I'm never going to be a Winston Churchill, so why should I ever talk. But with music, we say, if I'm not going to be an expert at it, I don't want to do it. I don't want to learn the instrument. It seems like a waste of time, which is, I think, a ridiculous argument. It's enriching.
- [16:22]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. I love this idea that it used to be something that we all did, humanity did. You did it with your tribe, with your community, with your family. And then my favorite chapter in your book is the final one, music, Medicine, Mystery and Possibility. It was so evocative, Dan, about what music is. And we all know that it does something to us that you can't always explain with words, can you?
- [16:56]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
You know, if music just made you want to dance or be social, if it acted as the same kind of icebreaker that alcohol does or party games do, that would be pretty good. But for those of us who are sensitive to it, it can evoke a sense of awe, a kind of spiritual or metaphysical state where we feel connected to the larger scope of humanity and to the universe at large. Music can invoke that. Other things can. Meditation, hallucinogenic drugs, you know, various tragedies cause or joys cause us to enter that state. But the more we enter the state of awe, the more we can relax, because we see ourselves as small parts of a very complex universe. And whatever's bothering us pales by comparison to the Normandy of things that are bothering other entities. I. I talk. In the book that you and I last spoke about the changing Mind, I relate the story of an experience I had with the Dalai Lama, whose picture is on the wall here behind me, where a woman came to him, a pilgrim. She had traveled for weeks barefoot to get to him for advice, and she was falling apart. She had a lot of problems. Her family was sick, and he helped her to meditate on the notion that there is no in the grand scheme of things, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there is no I. We are all connected now. We talk about this a lot. Few of us ever feel that unless we have a moment of awe or a hallucinogenic reverie or something. But here he talked her through a meditation practice that she knew, and she was hysterically crying and weeping. And he gets her to meditate for about 45 seconds, and she bursts out in laughter. Her ego dissolved. She felt a sense of awe. Awe at being with him, perhaps, but awe at the wonder of the universe. And she was healed. It was like those old Southern Baptist things. You couldn't walk and then you get up out of your Chair. It was extraordinary. And music can have that same effect on us if we let it. And art can in general. I think the one epidemic that we're experiencing is we're all so productivity oriented, perhaps over caffeinated as a society that we feel if we were to take five minutes off to just sit and stare, we'd fall 10 minutes behind in our work. And so I've made it a point to put art where I can't miss it, and I make it a point to experience it. I'm going to turn the camera around here just to show you the office, my home office. This is a painting I have of the Quebec countryside.
- [20:31]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah.
- [20:32]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
And it's right across from my desk. So when I'm stuck writing or something, I can just look at it and it transports me. You can't tell from the camera view, but when I stare at it, I get a sense of motion from those flowers in front and motion in the hills. It feels like the grass is in the wind. And then I have this Keith Haring right here, which is just this delightful, whimsical, love kind of a thing out of a hand. And with music, I got one of these wireless sound systems by Sonos where I can have music playing as I walk from the kitchen to the office or, you know, the bathroom and things like that. And I make it a point to make playlists. I tell the story in the book about the singer songwriter Joni Mitchell having a stroke and needing music to bring her back. And fortunately she had effectively created a playlist of her 16 favorite songs. And it makes me think that I'm going to come up with a playlist and attach it to my advanced medical directive so that if I'm in a coma, people will know what to play me.
- [21:50]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Well, the funny thing is you're joking about that, but I'm hearing it going, that's actually a damn good idea. I mean, we know, don't we, that music can take us back to a different place. We know that, that you can hear a song and suddenly be transported 30 years back or whatever it might be. I mean, you know, in the uk, when you start university, we call it Freshers Week and. And the Freshers Week song, which is by a band called Supergrass, came on the radio the other day. I hadn't heard it in years, but I was literally taken back to the first week of uni. I can almost remember the weather and how I felt and what friends I was making and all that kind of stuff just from hearing a song. So it totally Seems really reasonable that actually, as well as trying to put your affairs in order and things. If something was to happen to me, well, maybe this playlist is going to rehabilitate me. You know, music literally is medicine. And of course we know, don't we? With Alzheimer's sufferers, sometimes music can be very powerful. Why don't you talk a little bit about the relationship between music and Alzheimer's?
- [22:58]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Beautiful segue there. Because my mind was going there too, in the great minds think alike department. The. The case with Alzheimer's is that often. And not just Alzheimer's, but other forms of cognitive decline, other forms of dementia. At some point, a patient may no longer recognize loved ones. We've seen this happen a lot. You've seen it in clinic, I'm sure. Or they don't even recognize themselves in a mirror. They don't recognize the caregivers who have been coming in three times a day. They don't recognize how the surroundings or how they got there. Everything is unfamiliar. And patients tend to have 1 of 2 responses to this. They either become very agitated because nothing makes sense, or they fold in on themselves and kind of collapse and become almost catatonic because nothing makes sense in this world they're seeing. But if we play the music from their youth, the oldest stuff in your memory is the last stuff to go. So if you play music from their youth, from sort of the heyday of their listening life, let's say ages 11 to 18, they immediately get back in touch with that part of themselves they had lost, and they can become verbal again. When they were not verbal, they can become activated. And that can last for a day or two. Just from a few songs.
- [24:38]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it, to hear that. It's interesting. Dan, as we're having this conversation, I would say about two months ago, I had Jon Bon Jovi on my podcast. He was in London, and we went to a music studio and had a beautiful conversation and a little bit of perspective. John was my childhood hero. And, you know, I was a mega fan for many years. I've seen him in concert over 30 times like a proper, proper mega fan. I remember in the preparation for that conversation, I started re listening to those albums of my youth, Slippery When Wet, New Jersey, Keep the Faith these Days. All that stuff that I used to idolize and dream about when I was a kid. And I think in so many ways, it just made me younger. I felt again like I used to feel like I can take on the world. I can do whatever I want. I thought, this is amazing. Just listening to music from my youth, which had a very powerful effect on me, literally had a profound impact on my state of being. Now I don't really struggle with low mood or anything like that. I'm pretty balanced and calm a lot of the time. But I did feel that that music gave me a lift. So what is it, do you think that's so powerful about that time period? Today's episode is sponsored by vivobarefoot. Now, one of the simplest ways to improve your whole body health is to start with your feet. Most of us don't realize this, but 95% of us are born with healthy feet. And by adulthood, 77% of us have foot problems. And a big reason is the shoes we wear. Modern shoes are rigid, narrow and over cushioned. They disconnect us from the ground and weaken the very muscles that support our posture, balance and movement. That's why I've been wearing Vivobarefoot shoes for well over a decade now. They're the opposite of conventional shoes. Vivos are designed for fit, flex and feel, to let your feet do what human feet have evolved to do. When you free your feet, you free your whole body. And studies have shown that wearing minimalist footwear like Vivos can increase foot strength by up to 60% in just six months, improving balance, natural posture and and the way in which you move. If you've never tried barefoot footwear before, Vivo make it really easy to do so. They offer a 100 day money back trial so you can wear them, live in them, move naturally, and if they're not for you, you just send them back. No risk at all. So if you're curious to reconnect with your Natural Movement in 2026 and give your feet the freedom they're designed for, try VivoBarefoot and get 15% off your first order by heading to VivoBarefoot.com LiveMore free your feet and the rest will follow. Today's episode is sponsored by Peloton. Now, we all know that moving our bodies more is good for us. But despite that knowledge, many of us find it hard to actually implement. And that's where the new Peloton Cross Training Bike plus powered by Peloton IQ can really help. It's built for fitness breakthroughs with real time insights and endless ways to move. And you can go from cycling on the bike to strength training off it with one smooth spin off the swivel screen, which offers endless ways to train for a well rounded routine while you lift. Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects your form and suggests new weights so you're always making progress towards your goals. And Peloton's Movement Tracking camera provides real time feedback so that you can train safer, lift smarter and make every move count more. With over 15 types of workouts, expert instructors to keep you motivated, and a personalized plan tailored to your goals, the Cross Training Bike plus takes the guesswork out of working out so that you can move freely and let Peloton handle the rest. Let yourself ride, lift, stretch, move and go. Explore the new peloton cross training bike plus@1peloton.co.uk that's o n e p e l o t o n.co.uk and please note peloton All Access membership is required to access all Peloton content and applicable features on your Peloton hardware.
- [30:00]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, it is a property of human memory that first of all, the things that we remember best in our lives are the things that had that delivered an emotional wallop. The most emotional experiences are the what we remember most vividly. And the reason is that if we were emotional about it, it's an evolutionary signal that maybe this is something I need to pay attention to. I almost fell off the roof. I better be more careful. I was really thirsty and I found this spring, you know, I need to remember where the spring is in case I get lost again. So emotional stuff gets in there and it's recorded more vividly. And then all the contextual information gets separate neurochemical tags for a memory. So you're 16 years old, you're driving in the summer, maybe you're driving out to the beach, there's a certain song playing on the radio, there's a certain somebody sitting in the seat next to you, there's some rain. All those details are encoded both as a package but also as separately, so you can access them. You can say, when's the last time I drove to the beach and all your beach memories come up or when's the last time? What was I doing when I was 16? What was my first experience with a car? All these are what we call retrieval cues. But once you activate one node in this memory network, all the other nodes start to light up. And so if there was a time in your life when you were particularly challenged or depressed and you overcame it, music that was around then can help you relive that experience, if you choose to relive it. That sense that so many of us had as teenagers, that I can do anything, my life is all ahead of me. The most Exciting parts are yet to come. I can be a doctor, or I can be a lawyer, or I can be a truck driver if I want. I could do anything I want to do. That sense of boundless optimism existed alongside a musical soundtrack for most of us. And the music can evoke that again.
- [32:19]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Could it also be, if I think about what it's doing in, let's say, an Alzheimer's patient, if music is something really mysterious that clearly can go beyond just mere language and words, it can stir things deep inside of us, it can take us to different parts of our life. Could it be that in Alzheimer's, quite literally, let's say you're 82 years old, you feel stuck, your memory's going. You may be not recognizing people, your sense of who you are is different from how it was in the past. Very simplistically, if you go back to the music of your youth, or even your 20s or your 30s, is it that that music is literally taking a part of you back so you then experience the world kind of in a state in which you were back at that time? I mean, that seems overly simplistic to me, but on one level it seems, well, maybe that's exactly what is happening.
- [33:38]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, I think that's fair to say, to different degrees and different people. And it's got some commonalities with dreaming. I mean, I assume I'm average and no different from anybody else. And I have these dreams where I'm suddenly back in high school and I didn't bring a number two pencil to the exam and I forgot to study and my whole grade is writing on this, or I show up late for an exam in uni. I imagine you have those dreams too. These are connecting with the former self. There is this odd aspect that appears to be uniquely human. And Mike Gazaniga has written about this, as have other neuroscientists. Dan Dennett, the philosopher, wrote about it as well. We stitch together a narrative of our lives without consciously trying to do so. That creates continuity. Oh yeah, I'm that same person. But we really are different people. Our brain chemistry is changing, our experiences have changed us, our brain connectivity has changed. We are very different people than we were 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. But it. And so these thinkers would say it's all an illusion that we think we're the same person because we're not. But because we're these hyper analytic beings, many of us find comfort in being able to stitch it together and go back, read old journal entries or meet old friends. And create that sense of continuity. I'm now 68 years old, and I find it especially valuable that I have friends that I knew when I was 13. Not because they're my closest friends, necessarily. Now we've changed, you know, follow different paths, but because we knew the people we were back then and we liked those people and we like each other now. And it's just this wonderful sense of, you know, what a ride this has been.
- [35:53]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. What's the relationship between music and trauma?
- [36:01]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Music can certainly along the lines we're talking about. If there was a piece of music playing around the time of a tragedy or a personally traumatic event, that can trigger a kind of post traumatic stress in the listener. Right. If you saw something horrific, a car crash, somebody you knew was in the car, you saw a family member die, a violent death, there was music going on, even not at that moment, but in that period, that song can really trigger you. And it can take a lot of therapy to get over that. But on the flip side, we've seen that people who have severe trauma, particularly soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, coming back having seen the most horrifying things. The bodies of friends being blown apart, trying to carry them back out of a war zone. Veterans with post traumatic stress disorder often are debilitated and they're hyper vigilant. The slightest sound in the environment, you know, sends him into a panic. And there's a program here in the US Called Songwriting with Soldiers, where professional songwriters are paired with soldiers and they write a song about the traumatic event. And what that does for the soldier is it gets the song outside and into the world so they can be more objective about it, and there's something healing in the same way that journaling can be healing. But now the song is an entity, a living, breathing entity, and it's out there, not in here. And many of them find it very therapeutic.
- [37:52]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Do you think it's unique to songwriting? Because, as you say, it almost sounds like a form of journaling. Journaling is a way, of course, to get our thoughts down, out of our mind and onto paper, which can be incredibly beneficial. But writing a song, of course, can do that as well. Do you think there's something unique about the song? Because, of course, there's the words, but also the melody, Whereas with journaling, it's just the words.
- [38:22]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, the thing is, a song is something you can memorize. It's more highly structured than a journal entry. It's got a rhyme scheme, typically, it's got a rhythm. It's got a certain number of Syllables per line. And if you're lucky, the melody and the words reinforce one another. And so it's precisely. It's like you were saying, when you and your kids get home and the car is in the drive and then you're in the kitchen, there's still a song playing in your head. Songs play in our heads. And most of my friends these days, those who are not neuroscientists, are songwriters. And almost every one of them is writing songs about some emotional experience that they're trying and often a sad experience, a breakup, a loss, a loss of friends, a loss of confidence, a loss of health. And those songs become therapeutic for them in the way they do for the soldiers.
- [39:30]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, you mentioned that soldiers who have experienced PTSD have been teamed up with songwriters to write these songs, which they found healing. Some people listening, Dan, might be thinking, well, I'm not a songwriter. Going back to what you said before about, you know, I'm not a musician, you know, I'm no good. You know, maybe I was told at school I wasn't good. You know, I never got picked for orchestra or choir or whatever. So you have this negative view of yourself in music. A lot of people will also say, dan, yes, songwriting sounds great, but I'm not a songwriter. I mean, maybe I can get my head round journaling, but I can't get my head around songwriting. What would you say to that person?
- [40:16]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, there are a number of ways to do it. I started writing songs when I was 16. I didn't know what I was doing. The Beatles had to write 100 songs, they said, before they got a good one. So you just have to keep doing it. And now there are online songwriting courses on YouTube and, you know, but if all you can do is say the words and warble out a melody and you don't even know how to play an instrument or write chords, you can upload that to Suno and it'll turn it into a country song or a classic rock song or a hip hop song. And you can iterate it until you get the features you like. I'm not recommending AI music as something that will be fulfilling. I'm recommending it as a kind of a kickstart, as a, you know, what I've done as a songwriter and I spent a lot of my career as a record producer working with songwriters. They'd write a song and then we'd run it through different iterations. We'd get different musicians in or we'd do different styles. Let's try it as a Calypso, let's try it as a heavy metal. Let's see what works. And you're using your ears and your in real time not to see necessarily what you think is going to sell the most records that never works, but to see what feels truest to the artistic vision. So, you know, AI software can help there a little bit. And in the same way that people now use AI to write. I would never publish anything or put out to the world something that was AI written. But I like it when AI will give me some suggestions. And maybe out of 500 words that it writes, there's one word in there that I can use that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. But I think the more. I mean, that's for people who. That's an option. But another option is just to collaborate with somebody who plays an instrument and doesn't know how to write or want to write.
- [42:31]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
You know, in the section on songwriting in the book, there were a couple of things I noted down. You mentioned a quote from Nick Cave. The thing about writing a song is that it tells you something about yourself that you didn't know. And then you specifically say Dan about you. I don't write after I've understood something. I write to help myself better understand it and to better explore my emotions and just to make sure this is really, really applicable to everyone. I honestly believe that that's what journaling does for so many people as well. I do accept songwriting as different, but for people who maybe are a bit intimidated by the thought of writing a song or don't have a friend who they can collaborate with, journaling kind of can do a very similar thing. You can find parts of yourself that you didn't know were in there just from starting to write your thoughts down on a page, can't you?
- [43:30]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Absolutely. And this is the not well known secret of all writers of either fiction or nonfiction is that most writers don't go into the article or the book knowing exactly what they're going to say or if they think they do, it changes along the way. There's something about the words staring back at you on the page and you realize, oh, well, that that's what I thought I wanted to say, but it's not very clear and it leaves a bunch of unanswered questions and I don't know the answers to those. I have to figure them out. That comes in professional writing like you do. It comes in amateur writing, for lack of a better word. When we journal or, you know, jot down our thoughts on paper or speak them into voice memos. It's an act of discovery, not an act of dictation.
- [44:30]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. I've heard you once say that sad songs can be medicine when you're feeling depressed. Why is it, do you think, that when we're feeling low, we also want to listen to songs that talk about feeling low as opposed to upbeat, happy ones?
- [44:50]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
I think because most of the time when we're feeling low, it's because in some sense we feel misunderstood by another person or by the world, or we misunderstood ourselves and did something we didn't want to do or think we could do or should do. And that feeling of being misunderstood. If I put on you're sad, you're low, I put on happy music. That's just a bunch of people who don't understand you either. But if I put on the right sad song, there's this glint of recognition. Oh, my God, that's. They're talking about me. That's how I feel. And, you know, I'm no longer sitting at the edge of the cliff staring into the abyss by myself. There's somebody here next to me who's. Who's put this whole experience to music, and they came out the other side and turned it into a great work of art. That's. That's uplifting. I feel understood now.
- [45:50]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. Musical tastes are quite unique, aren't they? I mean, what you may enjoy listening to and you will connect with may be different from what I might enjoy listening to or connect with. And so thinking about this idea as music, as medicine, I really like this idea that say someone has depression or has been diagnosed with depression. We can't really prescribe this song for you to help you feel better because it may be that that song doesn't resonate with you. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if we're going to use music in a healing way for ourselves, we, whether it be to lift our mood or lower stress or just know that there's other people out there in the world who feel the same way in which we do. It's highly personal, isn't it? So could it be that one particular song someone finds calming, whereas at the same time that same song could trigger anxiety, for example, in someone else?
- [47:01]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Oh, absolutely. We see that all the time. I did a massive study of 20,000 listeners in. In Europe, back when UK was in Europe, they were included in the study. And we asked people what kinds of. All kinds of questions, 200 questions, and one of them was, what music do you listen to? To relax. And at the time, relaxing music was Enya or Bach, maybe slow ballads by John Coltrane. But then there was this cluster of people in Sweden who were listening to metal to relax. And we got farther down the questionnaire. What do you use to help yourself get out of bed in the morning or get through an exercise workout? And the Swedes were listening to, like, you know, Swedish speed metal to get them going. And so regular old metal seemed relaxing to them by comparison. AC dc, Van Halen, very tame compared to Swedish speed metal. So it is very subjective. There is no one song everybody likes. There's no one song everybody hates. And even if you have a set of favorite songs, those may change throughout your lifetime. You may get bored of them, they may not hit you.
- [48:18]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Right?
- [48:18]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
But, you know, since we're talking about this as music, as medicine, and since you are a medical doctor, just so our listeners will know, if you go to your doctor and you complain of depression, it's a lot of trial and error. I mean, even setting aside the 20 different forms of talk therapy that might be recommended, the medicinal side is, okay, well, let's try Prozac. And it'll take three months or so to see whether it's working. And if it's not, we can raise the dose. And then, you know, well, that doesn't work. And six months in, you say, well, we'll move to Zoloft. Well, we'll move to Wellbutrin. Well, we'll move to. I mean, it's constantly chasing the right concoction. And music is somewhat like that. You've got to do some trial and error. Fortunately, you don't have to wait three months to see whether the song's gonna work. You only have to wait three minutes. And you can go through a bunch of things. And many people have a strong intuition about what they like and don't like, and they can immediately home in on it. But there is a profession called music therapist. It's a certification that is separate from being a therapist. And there are music therapists all over Europe and the UK and the US and Canada and the Commonwealth, and they can help you to find music that will help you achieve your therapeutic goals, whatever they are.
- [49:49]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Just as you were talking about, there may be 18 or 20 different forms of therapy. And of course, there's research on the various merits of certain types of therapy, but there's a lot of research out there supporting that the most important thing is not the therapy, but the therapist.
- [50:07]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
I'm glad you went there with that. That's Absolutely true. It doesn't matter from the research. It doesn't matter what school they were trained in, if they were Freudian or Jungian or Gestalt or Adlerian or, you know, cognitive, behavioral. What really matters is your relationship with.
- [50:24]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
The therapist, and therefore, we can apply that to the song. What really matters is our relationship to the song, not someone else's relationship, as you just said. You know, these things are totally individual. Yeah.
- [50:43]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
The other thing that matters is not just your personal relationship with the song, but your relationship with the artist. So, you know, you may find something appealing out of an unearthed Bon Jovi song because that voice and band is so familiar sounding to you that you're predisposed to it. For me, it wouldn't be Bon Jovi, it would be Robert Smith and the Cure. But, you know, it's to each his own. I have a friend who's a comedian named Dan Perraro. He writes a syndicated comic strip called Bizarro that's been in newspapers all over the world for 30 years. And he says, as part of his standup routine, I always hate it when I overhear somebody at the table next to me at the restaurant, ask the waiter, what do you recommend? He says, I don't have the same mouth and taste buds as the waiter. What he likes has nothing to do with what I like.
- [51:40]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I love it. It's so true. And I've been thinking recently, did you observe what happened with Oasis this summer? You know, they were one of the biggest British rock bands of all time. Right, Right. And they reformed and they were probably the hottest tickets not of the year, off the decade, or arguably off the millennium so far. I mean, it was like Goldust. I think one and a half million people across the UK went to one of their concerts, and I didn't. I've seen them many times before, but I was away in the summer. And the reason I'm bringing this up is you writing a book about what actually happens when we listen to music with other people. In your final chapter, you write that music is that phenomenal experience. Music is rather unique in that it can be a communal experience and at the same time be very personal. And the video footage of Oasis was really quite phenomenal. People who went, I've got really good friends who went, they said wrong. And it was like nothing else we've ever been to. Everyone was happy, everyone was hugging each other. There was no negativity. It was just pure joy. And at the end of the night, when they played Champagne Supernova, one of their Biggest hits, you know, with all the lights. It's a dark British summer evening, everyone's singing. It would have been like a spiritual experience. And I genuinely believe that a lot of people were having a nostalgia for a different time of their life. You know, in the 90s, when life seemed a bit simpler, there was no smartphones or social media. We weren't as busy and as stressed out as we are today. And I genuinely believe that maybe the Oasis concerts did more for the collective well being of the UK than maybe anything else that year. And I don't believe there's any drug on the planet or a prescribed drug on the planet that could probably do to people what they experience when they experience that collective effervescence in an arena with songs that they love and 80,000 other people around them also love. That is healing, isn't it? Yeah.
- [54:06]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
And just on the neurochemical side, that experience releases oxytocin, which is a neurochemical that helps you to feel more trustful and bonded. It's the same chemical that's released during. When two people are together and share an orgasm, it bonds them together. It was evolution's way of tricking the man to stick around, is the way some biologists look at it. And you get that sense of warm attachment from sharing music with others. We don't know why, but we talked earlier in the broadcast about how different neurochemical systems evolve to support different aspects of music. And one of them is this social bonding, probably owing to the. I mean, this is all evolutionary descent with modification, and the adaptations that confer the greatest chance of survival are the ones that get passed on. So those of our ancient ancestors who found pleasure in singing around a campfire and therefore successfully warded off predators or neighboring tribes that might attack them while they were asleep, they're the ones that lived. The others all died out. And so we are the legacy of people who liked hearing music collectively. And I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but none of us is descended from an ancestor who failed to reproduce.
- [55:53]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah.
- [55:57]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
They succeeded in reproducing because of a number of qualities they had. And one of them clearly was the ability to enjoy music together.
- [56:07]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Your lab, I believe, has studied goosebumps before, and what actually causes goosebumps. And I think it'll be interesting to talk about that here, because I do think that, you know, I appreciate. You may not be an Oasis fan, but anyone who is into their music will know the song Champagne Supernova. It's this magnificent song that, in the right setting, in a stadium would feel rather mystical and magical. I imagine some people who heard that in that collective setting had goosebumps at the same time. So what are goosebumps and what do we know about them so far? Today's episode is sponsored by the Way Meditation App. Now you probably heard me talk about this app over the past few months and that is because I absolutely love it. Meditation has so many benefits for our physical health and mental well being, but only if we do it. And that's one of the reasons I love the Way so much. It makes it really easy to establish a meditation practice that sticks. One of the most unique things about the Way is that it is a meditation app with no choice. They understand that too much choice is stressful and can lead to procrastination and indecision. And so with the Way, you only ever have one choice, which makes things really easy. Just open the app, follow the path and your transformation will unfold. Now, there's no question that for me, using the Way has helped me feel calmer, more relaxed, and I would say it's also broadened my perspective on life and what is truly important. The creator of the app is Henry Schuchman, a Zen master with the most wonderful, relaxing voice who actually was a guest on this podcast a few months ago on episode 590. So if you think 2026 is finally going to be the year when you start and stick to a meditation practice, I'd highly encourage you to check out the Way. And to give you a little extra motivation, the Way is offering my podcast listeners 30 free sessions to get you started with your practice. That is a fantastic offer. What have you got to lose to take advantage? All you have to do is go to thewayapp.com live more to get started and begin your journey towards peace, calm and purpose. Today's episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. The relationship between diet, mood and overall well being becomes especially relevant during winter. More people are paying attention to how nutrition can impact how they feel, both mentally and physically. Now, AG1 is a daily health drink that supports digestion and contains five strains of gut bacteria, carrying compelling research on the enrichment of our microbiomes. AG1 is a company who is committed to updating its formula as the scientific research evolves and the latest upgrade includes five strains of bacteria, up from two in the previous version. These strains were tested in three clinical trials and shown to enrich the gut microbiome by increasing beneficial bacteria on average up to tenfold. That means the bacteria in AG1 not only survive digestion, they enrich the microbiome as well. AG1 also contains a variety of plant based compounds and botanicals such as spirulina, chlorella and artichoke that act as food sources for beneficial bacteria, which makes AG1 a smart addition for anyone interested in how daily nutrition can influence our gut health. For a limited time only, get a free AG1 flavor sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavors. Plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. See all details@drink ag1.com livemore.
- [61:07]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
The feeling of the hair on the back of the your neck standing up, or that little shiver you get down your spine. It's related to a sense of awe. It's also related to surprise, whether you know it or not, and whether you're a musician or not. When you're listening to music, there are parts of your brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, that are trying to track and predict track the music that's going on and has gone on, and then predict what'll come next. If your brain is nothing else, the human brain is a giant prediction machine. It tries to figure out what's going to happen next, and to do that, it looks for patterns. Which is why on a cloudy day, if you lie on your back and you look at the clouds, you might see a rabbit. Or why when the ancient Greeks looked at the stars, they saw Orion the Hunter and Ursa Major the Big Bear. Orion the Hunter doesn't really exist in the stars. It's the human brain imposing order on something that's disordered. And so that predictive device, particularly in a region called Broadman Area 47, is trying to figure out what's going to happen next in the music. The composer's job and the performer's job to some extent, is to reward your expectations enough of the time that you feel that there's a conversation going on. It's almost like you're completing each other's sentences, you and the composer. But if you're completing each other's sentences too much, you get bored. And so the composer and performer's job is to surprise you every once in a while, to not fulfill your prediction. And if they can surprise you in a way that's extraordinarily pleasing, that can lead to goosebumps. And it will work even with a song you've heard a Thousand times. Because schematically that song is different than the tens of thousands of songs you've heard before it. And so even though the surprise in that particular song is anticipated, it's still surprising compared to all the other songs.
- [63:29]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
You mentioned before, that perhaps something has changed in modern society where because we're busier or we feel the pressure to perform and get through our email inbox and our to do list, that those opportunities for art that used to exist have in many ways been eroded in many of our lives. One thing I've observed since the COVID pandemic is this collective inertia that's set in across society. I really don't think we've fully recovered yet. We've not gone back to doing the things that we did beforehand. We've lost so much from not going back to these collective type of experiences, whether it be yoga or concerts, or watching a musical or whatever it might be. Is there something unique about doing this or listening to music with other people that we don't get from listening to music by ourselves? And I guess the follow up to that is in a world of YouTube now, where whatever concert you might want to go to, someone's taken a high definition video recorder in and has uploaded it to YouTube. Right. So the second part of that question is, is there a difference? Do you think of watching a live experience of a concert on YouTube versus actually being in the concert hall yourself?
- [65:12]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
We don't have any research on this, but I think the marketplace has decided for us. As you note, being able to listen to music at home through AirPods or whatever, or to watch a YouTube video is always more convenient than going out somewhere. And yet concert venues sell out. It's part of it is being with others and feeling part of something larger than you because there are another thousand or ten thousand or forty thousand people there with you. The same reason we go to see sporting events live is to be with other people. Even if you're watching at home, people often have football parties. Yeah, I know. People with listening parties. That seems not to have caught on in the same way. But the other element is that in a live performance, anything could happen. Certainly true at a sporting event as well as at a music event. You know, they're not going to play it exactly the same way as you heard it on the record. And that can be exciting. But I think if it was just the collective experience of being with others and not also the live element of anything can happen, some entrepreneur would have figured out that they can sell tickets to the O2 and just play records, but nobody wants to do that. So there is something about live music that's different, and I like to think it's that we feel some connection to the artist. The artist is there. They showed up for us.
- [67:00]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah. Earlier on, we spoke about Alzheimer's. And in your book, you write about Glen Campbell, and I'd love you to talk to us a little bit about Glenn and what do you think his story tells us about the brain.
- [67:22]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
So Glen Campbell is, in America, anyway, one of the most famous musicians. He began as a member of what we call the Wrecking Crew, which was a set of studio musicians that included him and Hal Blaine and Carol Kay and others who. He was a guitarist, and they played on a bunch of records by 60s groups that had the songwriting ability and singing, but not necessarily the musicianship to make great records. So I'm talking about records by the Birds and the association, the Turtles, the Mamas and the Papas, a lot of the Phil Spector recordings. This was kind of a house studio band. Glenn was the guitarist. He played for the Monkees and other groups, and then he developed into a songwriter and solo artist, had a TV series and had a number of massive hits on the country charts here in the us. So he's somebody that's as well known here as, say, Adele or Oasis is known in the uk. And he developed Alzheimer's and decided that he wanted to do one last tour. He loves performing and that they could send a film crew out with him to document it. I've seen the family got in touch with me around this time because of my research work, and I saw the brain scans, and when he was in the middle of the tour, I would say half his brain was offline at that point. And there were vestiges of this apparent to an audience. He would sometimes forget that he had just finished a song and maybe play it three times in a row. He often didn't know what city he was in. You know, he'd say, you know, good evening, Philadelphia. When he was in St. Louis, you know, that. That sort of thing. He had a teleprompter. But many artists his age use teleprompters. Mick Jaggers using the prompter, as far as I know, some as Bono. So that's all right. You can't remember all the lyrics to the 500 songs you do. Yeah, but. And then off stage, he didn't know where he was or what time of day it was. And he didn't recognize people that he had known for decades. But once the song started, he played as brilliant as ever.
- [69:57]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Wow.
- [69:57]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
With half his brain missing, he might still have been the best guitarist on the planet. What that tells us about him is that he had spent a lifetime building up what you and I would call cognitive reserve, excess capacity, excess redundant neural circuits in the same way that an athlete builds up muscle reserve. So I like working out at the gym. There's a guy there who can bench press £500. I can't do that. I can't even do 250. But on a bad day, the guy who can do 500 can still do 250. So on a bad day, Glen Campbell could still play better than anybody else. Tony Bennett went through the same thing as a singer when he had Alzheimer's. This is well known. The thing that we've practiced the most is something that can stay preserved. And the take home message for I think all our listeners here is if you don't play an instrument now, it's never too late to start. I know a lot of people in their 70s and 80s who started to play. And if you do play an instrument or used to keep up with it, not because it's necessarily going to be that you're going out on tour, but playing an instrument builds up cognitive reserve and motor reserve in ways that are helpful. It builds up eye hand coordination, it builds up feedback loops where you're anticipating a sound. You have to listen to it, you have to adjust the sound. It does all these things that are neuroprotective for memory and for attention. And you can't prevent Alzheimer's, but you can mask the symptoms of it for many years if you've got cognitive reserve.
- [71:51]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I love that. That real take home for us to think about learning to play an instrument if we don't currently do, or if we do, just make sure we stay consistent with that and keep playing. That's very practical. Dan, what about as a music listener? Let's say there's someone who's come across this conversation who doesn't really listen to music much anymore. Maybe they did as a teenager, but for whatever reason they don't now. They listen to the news or to podcasts about health or, you know, they're not listening to music anymore. Why do you think they might benefit from bringing more music into their lives?
- [72:34]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, I think through music, I mean the big picture, as I write about in the second to the last chapter, the big picture is through engagement with the arts in general and music in particular, we often can imagine the world different than it is that's what art does is it paints a picture of somebody wanted to join the interview.
- [73:08]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
That's okay.
- [73:09]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Doesn't like not being the center of attention. Art can paint a picture of other lives, of other ways of seeing things, and through imagining a different world, that act of imagination, we can imagine a better world. And it's only by imagining a better world that we can build it. So I would say what's at stake here is the future of the society that you want. If you're not engaged with the arts, you're not going to have the imaginative strength to think about making things different. And things can always be made better.
- [73:53]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
It's so thought provoking, what you've just said. If we just continue with these super busy rational lives where we get through our emails, do our job, do our errands, make sure the shopping's in or whatever it might be, that's going to be one type of existence. And of course for some people that they've got really tough lives and they're doing the best they can to make ends meet and to keep a roof over themselves and their family. I understand that. At the same time, even if you can bring in some of the arts and of course through this conversation, music into your life, it does help you imagine, it does take you out of your own existence and connect you to the world around you. People sometimes do that through meditation, right? Or through loving kindness meditation. They might try and connect themselves to the world around them. But music is also a powerful way of doing that. And in your book you have all kinds of luminaries from the past talking about the benefits and the essential nature of music, including Nietzsche, who says life without music would be a mistake, which I think says it all. Dan, I just want to talk about the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. In your section on trauma, you wrote quite a lot about this song. It's of course a phenomenal song that stood the test of time. What is it that you like so much about this song and why did you include it in your book?
- [75:31]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
It's a powerful expression of a person's emotional life. Whether it's autobiographical or not is not the point. But I like songs that are little novellas, little short stories that capture something very real. And so Tracy is writing about a person, may or may not be her, who's in a dead end job in a small town and faced with. A decision about whether to care for her alcoholic father or care for herself. And she doesn't see any way out. And somebody with a fast car, we could be a man or a woman, we don't know, shows up and they dream of going to the city and getting better jobs and having a life there. And they get there and whoever it was she went with is spending all his or her time at the bar, not helping to raise the kids, doesn't have any money. And she finally says, you know, effectively, I wish you had just taken your fast car and kept on driving. But what's so seductive about the song is the chorus. I listened to that song for decades, and I just liked the melody and I liked the words. And I didn't really. The story didn't really register with me because the chorus is so bouncy. You know, I remember when I was in your arms, you know, we were.
- [77:05]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Driving and speed so fast, as if I was drunk, you know, just. Yeah, that feel good. Sort of. You're just escaping.
- [77:13]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Yeah. And it just sounds bouncy and intoxicatingly wonderful until you realize the darkness that's beneath it. And so any great piece of art has these layers and these levels. And it's a funny thing, the bounciness of a melody and a rhythm can distract us and in some way make the darker message more palatable. One of the most famous songs of the last hundred years is Mack the Knife, which most people will be familiar with. It was a big hit for Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. But it's about a serial killer in the way that Maxwell's Silver Hammer by the Beatles, a much loved song of theirs, is about a serial killer. So it's a funny thing. We allow ourselves to surrender to the music and the lyrics kind of seep in. I just saw an Instagram post that was really funny that during the 1969, the year the Beatles were breaking up, Paul McCartney, the caption was, some therapist should have intervened and taken care of. Helped take care of Paul McCartney's psyche, because in that same year, he wrote this song about obsession. Oh, darling, darling. A song about legal problems and a breakup with two of us. A song about desolation with the long and winding road, and then a song about a serial killer in Maxwell's Silver Hammer. You know, the lyrics were telling you everything you needed to know about his emotional state, but none of us noticed the cries for help.
- [79:15]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, it's interesting what you're saying about Fast Car. I was talking to my wife this morning about it. We're both big Tracy Chapman fans. And I said, hey, Vid, what do you like about the song? And she said, well, first of All I love the story. I love Tracy's voice, the emotion in her voice as she's singing it. And I said, what do you know about the story? You know, what do you remember? She goes, well, you know, and she basically said accurately how it all starts and then how it changes at the end. You know, it's almost the punchline to the song when, you know, she says, take that fast car and just keep on driving. Right? I like you, Dan. I don't think I fully registered the story. I just loved it for years. Whereas my wife hears lyrics more than I do. I hear tunes and beats, and she hears words. So that's really interesting as well, isn't it, that we can have the same piece of music and take different things from it.
- [80:15]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
We all take different things from songs. Two of my favorite lyricists are Walter Becker and Donald Fagan of Steely Dan. And they write their lyrics intentionally, to be obtuse, because they want people to read into it whatever they want. Dylan said in his autobiography, he tried to write out of both sides of his mouth. He tried to write messages that were contradictory so that people could find in it their own truth. He's not precious. Dylan's not precious about insisting that people interpret the song the way he intended. An opposite case is Joni Mitchell, who is indignant if you interpret the song differently than she did. She had a very particular thing in mind. And, I mean, I think I recognize her right, and respect her right as an artist to say, no, the song doesn't mean that. But on the other hand, I think the beauty of songs is that people can find their own meaning in them, as we do in poetry or as we do in paintings or film or dance. We can project our lives on it, or we can allow a blank screen in our minds and hearts to have that song projected on it. And it can mean what it means to us, and that meaning can change. I think that's part of the power of it. And, you know, Joni may have had something in mind writing autobiographically, and that's why she wrote it, but it doesn't mean that my experience is going to be the same just because, you know, getting back to the waiter and the patron at the restaurant, we don't have the same sense organs. You don't have the same mouth.
- [82:16]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
I want to finish off Dan talking about something that we touched upon at various times throughout this conversation. You know, what is music at its core? What is it really? And in the final chapter of your book, you quote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and you say that he viewed music as not merely a representation of the world, but as an expression of the very will that drives everything in our corporeal and metaphysical worlds. And then you say this distinction elevates music to a plane where it becomes not a mirror, but a window into the deepest recesses of existence. I love that it's so evocative. But with that in mind, Is it reasonable that we can use science to study music?
- [83:19]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, if you let me take. Let's do it as a counterfactual. If you can't study music scientifically, you can't study consciousness scientifically, or emotions or feelings of awe or the origins of the universe. I mean, all these things are probably more complex and marvelous than we know. And we probably understand 1 or 2% of it. But that 1 or 2% we've understood has helped us to do things that were valuable to us. Like the discovery of the germ theory of disease by Semmelweis, the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming. That's 1 or 2% of the equation, but it's an important 1 or 2%. Now, I don't know that we've benefited in practical ways from trying to understand the origins of the universe in the Big Bang, but that the work that has come out of modern physics is helping us to better meet our energy demands as a culture and better engineering and things like that have come about so that it seems silly, but cars are safer now than they were 50 years ago because of physics and engineering. And the space program, which seemed purely exploratory, gave us things like Kevlar and fire retardant materials. So the nature of science, as Einstein said, is you don't know what you're going to find until you start looking for it. It's not engineering. That's what distinguishes science from engineering. Engineers, they build a bridge and it darn better be exactly as they thought it would be at the end when they started it. But with scientific research, if you think you know what it is going into it, then it's engineering, not science.
- [85:17]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, perhaps it's not that we shouldn't use science to study music, but we should understand the limitations of what we find. Perhaps that is another way of looking at it. Would you say, Dan, having studied music, you know, you are a musician yourself, but you have studied this topic for many, many years now. Has your research in any way changed the way you utilize music in your own life?
- [85:47]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
It has, thank you for asking. I am now more likely to write music or play Music when I'm feeling off kilter, because I feel like before I studied the science, it felt untested or frivolous or self indulgent. Now I've got the rational basis for knowing how it works. And so I allow myself to spend more time doing something that's not writing books or doing research or cleaning the house. And the other thing that I learned, I learned it from Joni Mitchell mentoring me in songwriting and from my friendship with Sting, which is that the discipline required to do music is much more than I acknowledged, and it makes practice much more pleasurable for me, knowing how hard they work at their craft.
- [86:53]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah, I love that, Dan. Honestly, I love talking to you. I think the book is absolutely phenomenal. It's such a wonderful and original read. I've thoroughly enjoyed making my way through it, and I think I'll keep coming back to it over the coming years. To finish off, Dan, if there was someone who is listening to us right now and they're struggling in their life, they are struggling with meaning, with purpose, maybe they feel a bit stuck, Maybe they struggle with low mood some of the time, and they're keen to bring music into their life. But perhaps they've never, ever learned an instrument before. What would you say to them?
- [87:35]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Well, I mean, certainly it's easy enough to. Pianos are probably the easiest, and keyboards are the easiest instrument to play. I mean, you're a guitarist and you know, you have to build up calluses, and it's hard to visualize the scale on a fingerboard because the strings are tuned to different pitches. But on a piano, a novice can make a sound as you can play a middle C as well as Arthur Rubenstein or as well as Elton John. Stringing the notes together is much easier to learn. And there's so many videos now on YouTube about how to play the piano. And there's a glut of pianos. People buy them electronic keyboards on Facebook, Marketplace, or various neighborhood websites. People are often giving them away or selling them for 5 cents on the dollar because they don't play them anymore or don't want them anymore. And so the cost barrier to entry is very low. And YouTube videos are very, very helpful. There was a song I wanted to play on the piano, and I couldn't quite figure it out because the official sheet music for it is wrong, which is often the case, and it's buried in an arrangement so that I couldn't hear what the pianist was doing. And the song I learned was Martha My Dear by the Beatles, a Paul McCartney song. And I take so much pleasure playing it now, and it was a YouTube video that taught me.
- [89:12]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
So you would say to that person, maybe start learning an instrument and if that feels like a step too far, would you encourage them to start listening to more music or singing?
- [89:25]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
You know, start singing along. You don't have to have a great voice. Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan showed us that. Just, you know, sing more. Sing along with the music you like.
- [89:37]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Yeah.
- [89:38]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Even if in the shower.
- [89:40]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Even if you're in the shower. Let music be thy medicine. Dan, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for making time. Thank you for writing such a wonderful book and I hope we get to do this again sometime in person.
- [89:53]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
I do too. Thank you again for your hospitality.
- [90:00]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free@drchatterjee.com Friday 5 Now if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics. Happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change and movements, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audiobooks which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want a little to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.
- [92:13]
Dr. Daniel Levitin
Sam.