Forum From the Archives: Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin on Using Music as Medicine
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Welcome to Forum and Happy New Year! I'm Alexis Madrigal with a special edition of Forum from the Archives. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin says we can trace beliefs about music's power to heal mind, body, and spirit back 20 years ago.

back 20,000 years. But only recently have we had good science to explain how music affects us and how we can use it therapeutically, not only to relax, uplift, and bring us together, but as part of the treatment for trauma, depression, Parkinson's, and more. In October, I talked on stage with Levitin in collaboration with San Francisco's literary festival Litquake. It's coming up right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Today we're bringing you my onstage interview with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin about his new book, "I Heard There Was a Secret Chord." It's about using music as medicine, and that really means that we dug deep into how your brain perceives and, I would say, uses music.

I spoke with him last week as part of San Francisco's storied literary festival Litquake, which is in partnership with KQED Live. Let's listen. Let's talk about the premise of this new book. How literally should I take the idea that music can be medicine?

How literally do you take the idea that if you were to eat the bark of a tree it might cure your headache? Yeah, I Aspirin it's Aspen. Right. Yeah, right That literally so you mean it like true just so everyone is clear you mean like really truly like prescribe Medicine in some sense. Well, I mean, yeah, but I mean there's over-the-counter - right I mean you can go get aspirin or you can make it yourself from the bark of a tree We I think the

The issue about music and medicine is that for tens of thousands of years it was used, hundreds of thousands maybe, and then it wasn't. And it's only since about the year 2002 when brain imaging got into the picture that we were able to see the biological underpinnings of what the brain was doing in response to music. And because of that, we had some scientific rigor to it all. And...

Music activates all the parts of the brain that we've mapped so far. It activates every neurochemical system that we can measure. And so it's not that one piece of music can cure everything or that all pieces of music can cure or treat everything. But just like penicillin doesn't cure every infection. I mean, but there is a literal aspect to it.

It's an interesting, I mean, you know, at one point in the book, you say music is a fascinating probe for the brain precisely because it both hits all the systems and is its own kind of integrated system.

Talk a little bit more about what sort of brain systems we're talking about. Maybe not the names of the regions, but sort of what we're talking about when we say, you know, that... So you don't want me to talk about Broadman Area 47? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, if you need to, feel free. I can control myself. Yeah. But just, you know, like, does a different part of the brain respond to rhythm than responds to, like, timber or something?

Yeah, so the brain evolved as a bunch of special purpose circuits. And there was no, from my perspective, there was no master controller saying, well, we need something that does this, we need something that does that. The idea of evolution is that as a need, an adaptive survival need arose, those people who had some mutation evolved

were able to get along better, and that mutation became instantiated in all of our DNA. So that's Darwin in a sentence and a half. But the idea then is that there was no coordination between the different circuits, and it's a bunch of special processing circuits, like a Swiss army knife. So music or any sound hits your ears, and they wiggle in and out, your eardrums, and the brain has to then...

somehow disentangle that dense stream of information that's represented only as wiggling. And there's a circuit that extracts pitch because it would be useful to know if it's an elephant or a bird that's making the noise, you know, the low pitch or high pitch, because low pitches tend to be associated with heavier, larger objects.

Another part of the brain, another circuit, extracts the duration of a sound. Another one, it's loudness. Those durations can be bound together into a representation of rhythm. The pitches into melody. Timbre, which is the sound of...

It's what separates, say, a trumpet and a clarinet playing the same note. It's the tonal color. I'm thinking of it as like the opposite of MIDI, you know, like the old MIDI. You'd be like, beep! It's like, ugh! And all the instruments have their own beautiful additions to that. Yeah, nicely done. So all that's different, and...

Because it's separable, and we know it's separable, we've seen patients who have lost, for example, due to brain damage, they lost the ability to understand or process rhythm, but they retain pitch and melody, or vice versa. People lose lyrics, but everything else is there.

as we see in the book with Ella Fitzgerald who temporarily lost some lyrics but had all the other parts of the music going. So for those who don't know this story beautifully told in the book, Ella Fitzgerald is live on stage in Berlin, right? And she's singing Mac the Knife. And at a certain point, she loses the lyrics. So let's listen to that. So good. The blues in life

She hasn't lost it yet. Oh, we tried to do. Yeah.

Something about cash. Yeah. Miller. He was spinning that trash. And MacHeath, dear. He spins like a sailor. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Something rash. I'll be daring. And.

Oh

So good. That's perfect. I mean it's just a perfect snippet of music, isn't it? It's just so joyful and ebullient and it's become so many people's favorite rendition of it. And I think part of it, I have a friend named Livingston Taylor who says that the relationship between a performer and an audience is such that if the performer is doing their job, they're giving you everything they have.

And as an audience member, and I'm sure you've all had this experience, I sure have, you feel like, I want to give this person something. I want to bring them flowers. I want to give them chocolates. I want to give them more than just the money for a ticket. They've not only changed the evening for me, two hours of supreme, sublime pleasure, but if it's an artist I love, I've listened to them for decades, and they've given so much to me. What can I give back other than a ticket price or a T-shirt?

that I buy. But when they make a mistake, Livingston says, when an artist makes a mistake, the audience has an opportunity to forgive you. And that makes them feel like they're evening up the scales. And it makes them feel as though they're a part of your story in a more intimate way. And they see your humanity. It's almost better. It's the exact same reason why when you see somebody walking the tightrope,

Oh, and they wobble? Yeah, I mean they could do this. I mean they really could but you wouldn't watch that. I mean it's no fun, right? What they do is, you know, they're doing this, you know, like they're gonna fall. And so, you know, the mistake is this essence of humanness that we all make mistakes and we want to forgive it. But from a neuroscientific standpoint, this is gold.

It's like those visual illusions you may have seen in books where the train tracks look like they're converging but they're not, or the two lines look like they're different lengths. Your brain is playing tricks on you. And so scientists have learned a whole ton about the visual system by looking at how it gets things wrong. So here it is, we've got somebody, look at what she preserved. She did not forget the melody or the rhythm or the tempo.

She maintained the accent structure and the rhyme scheme. The only thing she lost was the words. And, you know, temporarily. And it tells us that these are separable systems. You were asking about different parts of the brain. The fact that they're separable systems is really important for music medicine.

What about the integrative component? Like what brings it together into the, what we call a song? So this is called the binding problem. How is it that all these disparate pieces of rhythm and melody and timbre and meter come together? They all come together later in the brain where later is about 40 thousandths of a second because brains work really, really fast. And then you have the song.

And it happens so fast that you don't realize the song was in these different pieces. And then once we have the song, a bunch of other stuff is happening. It activates your memory, your brain, whether you know it or not, and certainly whether you're a musician or not, it's searching your memory banks for things that are similar. Which is why if somebody starts singing a song that you've heard another...

you know like if your friend starts singing a song that you know a pop song the voices are different there might be no instruments but you still recognize it your brain's doing what computer scientists would call a pattern match it's finding the closest nearest neighbor in this enormous database of things and it can be like wildly different it's one of the most interesting parts of the book is how much you can diverge you gotta imagine like the waveform right the movement of your ear

the waveform is going to look nothing like what the brain is putting together as the song. Exactly right. And yet the brain recognizes it as the same song. I can change every note in a song...

and you still recognize it. We call that transposition. I can change the rhythm. I can take a ballad and I can turn it into a bossa nova. This is where jazz players live. And it's why, if you don't like jazz, that's fine. A lot of people don't. But if you do, what you're realizing is, oh, the song is big enough to accommodate wholesale changes in everything about it. Yeah. It's mind-blowing to think about.

How far can you push that? Like is there a point at which your brain's ability to recognize a song snaps? There is. There is. So, I mean the obvious one is if you take the pitches out of the range of human hearing, but that's... That's cheating. That's very much cheating. That's silly. There is a performance art piece where there's a composer that's playing a Beethoven symphony one note a week.

Also cheating, I would note. Yeah. But you can slow songs way down. I can go...

Yeah, Beethoven's Fifth. It sort of works. We're listening back to my KQED Live interview with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. It took place in October as part of San Francisco's literary festival Litquake. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We'll be right back. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw.

Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theater for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org. Today we're listening back on my interview with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin about the healing power of music and his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord. We don't really know how music evolved, but if it's like most things, it didn't evolve for one reason, but several. And the current thinking on this is,

that music preceded spoken language. My lab was the first to show, in collaboration with Vinod Menon down the road at Stanford, we found that the structures that process music are phylogenetically, that is, evolutionary older than the structures that process speech. And this is why you have cases like Gabrielle Giffords who lost the ability to speak

after she was shot in the head, but learned to speak again by learning to sing what she wanted to say. And that created new neural pathways that replaced the damaged speech pathways. So you've got the idea that music came first. I think it probably sounded... Stephen Mython's written a wonderful book about this called The Singing Neanderthals. I think music probably sounded a little like

I mean, well, communication was like, you remember Scooby-Doo? When Scooby-Doo wanted to ask a question, he'd go, "Rrrr!" So, I imagine our cave people ancestors were doing a lot of "rrr!" You know, and you communicated an emotion, primarily an emotion through some kind of melodic, temporal, rhythmic utterance.

- Interesting. What about like chimps and stuff? Do we find them drumming rhythms or anything like that? - They do drum, they like making noise, but they don't make music. They can't keep time, they can't synchronize. - That's so interesting.

It reminds me of a funny story actually. A colleague of mine tested the give a thousand chimps a thousand typewriters for a thousand years theory. - Right, Shakespeare, right. - With like a hundred chimps, with a hundred typewriters for like a hundred days. And what they got was a lot of the letter S for some reason. They just kept hitting the same thing over and over again. And then they peed and defecated on the typewriters. There was no Shakespeare there. - More of a performance art piece than a written work.

I mean, it's interesting too because I feel like so much of recent scientific history has been finding things that we once thought were exclusive to humans and we actually find them in more than humans. Except this is a circumstance in which it's kind of going the opposite way. It's a continuum though. We've looked at monkey brains, Michael Petridis at McGill and I have looked at monkey brains and at human brains and tried to figure out why is it that monkeys don't have music?

Their brains are very similar to ours. And if you look at the macaque, they've got a structure that's very similar to our structure in Broadman 47.

that allows us to predict what's going to come next in a temporal sequence. That's a fundamental ability because the brain, if nothing else, is a giant pattern detector. It seeks to find order in a chaotic universe. It seeks to find patterns. Patterns are instructive because they allow you to predict the future. They allow you to predict whether somebody will attack you or help you if you're injured, whether that fruit that...

you want to eat poison somebody else before, you have a pattern of observations. So monkeys have the pattern detector and they have things that allow them to move their lips and jaw and tongue. They have that same structure near what we call Broca's area. They're missing a key piece that ties those together.

And that piece in humans also has connections to our emotional centers and our movement centers. So they just haven't evolved it yet. And they don't understand octaves, which is fundamental to all human music. They don't understand... I mean, you can play them music, but they don't understand it. So how did music go from being what we presume was a somewhat utilitarian component of...

early human life into something that has such meaning for us and has such a profound effect on us, on our moods, our emotions, and as we're getting to it, on our health too. Yeah, so fast forwarding 100,000 years or so. Music activates emotional centers of the brain.

and it releases neurochemicals that help to change our moods and behaviors and impressions of things. So, for example, our labs show that when you listen to music you like, it activates a well-known reward circuit in the brain that previously had been associated with food reward. You're hungry and you eat and you get... If you hadn't really ever stopped to think about it, why do you eat? Well, I'm hungry.

What is that all about? We evolved a neurochemical signaling system that if your blood sugar gets low or your metabolism is needing nutrients, you have an urge to eat. When you satiate that urge, your brain gives you a little bit of dopamine, which says, yeah, you did a good job there. But find more Doritos Locos.

Well, exactly. Right. But the idea is that we're motivated to seek things that are healthful and we get this little neurochemical hit that tells us when we've done so as a reward. So we knew there was a food reward network, sexual reward network.

addictive behavior reward if you take drugs of addiction and you keep taking them. Our lab was the first to show that when you listen to music it activates the same reward system. So it's rewarding in an interesting way. It's different than say seeing a piece of chocolate cake in a pastry case.

where you look at it and you begin to salivate, you're really motivated to get it, that's the dopamine system. When you eat it and you actually consume the pleasurable thing, your brain produces opioids, same as heroin, smaller amounts. And so there's this partner system between the dopamine and the opioids. And to be clear, the dopamine doesn't give you the reward, the opioids don't give you the pleasure. It's that they unlock...

synapses and neural circuits that are designed to make you feel pleasure and all of that and to motivate you to get more. And so in the process of all that, because music has a tempo and it's always unfolding,

The idea of the prediction of the reward and the consuming of the reward are completely entangled. And there's no other thing we do that's like that, except maybe eating. That's interesting. And it's also, it's got to be pleasurable, or at least I find it pleasurable, most people do, to both be correct in your prediction about the next thing that's happening in the song, but also to be surprised by it. I'm so glad you brought this up. So the whole thing about music is...

whether you know it or not, you're a musician or not, your brain is trying to figure out what's going to happen next. And it pretty much knows when the next thing is going to happen because most music has some kind of a beat. But it doesn't know exactly what. And the job of the composer and the performer is to reward your predictions just often enough

that you feel like you're in sync with them. If they didn't reward them at all, the music would be uninterpretable, impenetrable, it would be awful. It would be random noise. So they've got to reward it enough of the time to keep you listening, but they have to surprise you enough of the time to keep you listening, otherwise you get bored. And so that's the magic, and when they get it right,

And it's different for everybody because there's no one song everybody likes and no one song everybody hates. But when they get it right, you can love a song for 50 years. You know, is that why you think kids like to listen to the same song over and over and over and over? It's exactly why. So kids like Baby Shark. Perhaps you have noticed. Baby Shark. Why do they like that? Because the infant toddler brain has not yet figured out

melody and rhythm. They haven't yet figured out that these notes tend to lead to these notes and these rhythms tend to resolve in this way. Their brain is literally wiring itself up. Sometimes a million new connections a day trying to figure out how the world works. And so they want very, very simple, impoverished stimuli. Coarse. Like, right? You know, their pattern matching is still very coarse. So it's helpful to have it be like...

And it's why at a certain age, there's nothing more that a kid wants to do than play tic-tac-toe because they haven't yet figured out that it's impossible. That it's the worst game of all time. Well, yeah. It's impossible to win against a well-matched opponent. But they don't know that yet. So it's all new. And as we age and develop, our taste expands and our...

Our tolerance for ambiguity and for surprise expands. And so we seek more complex music and it rewards us more. Remember, exploration is an important part of our human history. We all descended from ancestors who had enough of an exploratory instinct, enough of an instinct to figure out how the world works,

that they would seek out food if a tree ran out of fruit, or they would seek out water if the well ran dry. If they didn't do that, they wouldn't survive. So, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but everyone here in this room, all of us are descended from ancestors who were clever enough to find a mate through exploration. Not a single one of us have an ancestor who failed to reproduce. Yes, right. Yeah.

So let's get to some of the healing properties here. And I want to go in, I think through memory and therefore through Alzheimer's and forgetting. Tell us a little bit about how you sort of approach trying to help or treat Alzheimer's with music. Well, so music can't cure Alzheimer's and it can't slow the progression.

But this is one of the most important and potent uses of music, is in the case of Alzheimer's. So to begin with, often what happens with Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia is profound memory loss. And it can get to the point where somebody no longer recognizes their loved one. They don't even, they don't recognize where they are or how they got there. They may not even recognize themselves in the mirror.

This is profoundly disorienting. And one of two typical reactions ensues. They either turn in on themselves, they fold in on themselves because nothing makes sense.

Or they become aggressive and violent. And this is what happened with Glenn Campbell at some point with his musician, Glenn Campbell, who got Alzheimer's. He began beating up on his wife because he was angry and disoriented. She had to put him in a home. When that happens, they sedate you, which is no good for anybody, but they have to do something. And what we find is if you play music to somebody in that state, if it's music of their youth,

They've retained that. The way memory works is, any computer scientists here? The way memory works is what you call first in, last out. The first thing into memory is the last thing you lose.

So your childhood memories are going to be more resilient and resistant to any kind of brain damage. So you get somebody with Alzheimer's, you play them music from when they were 10 or 12 years old, not when they were six, because that has already become banal. They don't want to hear that. But something from 10, 12, 14, 16 years old,

It allows them to connect with this part of themselves through their memory, intact memory, that they had otherwise lost touch with. And it has profound effects. They are no longer disoriented. They're oriented to, oh, that is familiar. That's comforting. It tends to release prolactin, which is the same soothing and tranquilizing hormone released in mothers and infants during nursing. It's...

it tends to decrease cortisol levels. Cortisol is the stress hormone that causes adrenaline and anger and violence. Because cortisol is what you need for the fight or flight reaction. And listening to music in that case, even for just 20 or 30 minutes, the effects can last for days. And we've seen patients who come out of themselves and start talking and coming alive again.

You know, it's interesting in the book you note that another neuroscientist had shown that music is a more effective cue of sort of autobiographical memory than other things. This is the work of Peter Gennada just up the road at Davis. And is that basically why that would be effective? And Amy Belfi in Missouri. Yeah, well, so it's partly that.

Because it kind of brings you, like you were saying, it kind of brings back the sense of self, a narrative of self. Yeah, but there's a caveat here. So if you've heard a song that's associated with a certain time of your life, and that's sort of the way popular music has been since the 1940s. Songs get played on the radio for a certain amount of time. And yeah, you may still hear them. We still hear Hotel California all these years later, but...

Fortunately or unfortunately, we do still hear Hotel California. But for the most part, there are songs that you lived with for that summer you were 16, and they come back every once in a while, and as soon as it comes on, it puts you back to that summer when you were 16. Or there was a song that you associate with a certain friend, right? And it's because the way your memory works is, although your memory can store individual features of an experience, like the song,

like the shirt your friend was wearing when you spilled soup on it, and all of that stuff, it also forms the memory with links to all these things. So I play you a song, and it'll flood your memories from that moment. And that is...

why music can trigger so much autobiographical memory like Proust's Madeline's. And it's also a key to how post-traumatic stress disorder can be treated. Go on, yeah.

People with post-traumatic stress disorder are often in a state of hypervigilance and the slightest little thing will set them off. But if you play the music that is familiar to them and calming and ask them to recall the traumatic experience, it allows them to pull it out of memory, get recontextualized with this low cortisol, low fear song, and then put back in memory. And the key here, as my friend Kareem Nader showed,

If you ever saw the film, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it was based on his research. And none of us in the field knew this until he discovered it. Any memory you recall of any kind, as soon as you pull it out and sort of have it in your consciousness, it is now prone to distortion. And when you put it back...

it can get changed. It's emotional valence, whether it was happy or sad, the details of it, if somebody corrects you. And really the best evidence we have for this in our own lifetimes, the malleability of memory, was the Twin Towers, where most people in America, 80%, say they recall seeing television footage of a plane hitting the first tower and then hitting the second tower.

And that is not what anybody saw because the footage from the first tower did not exist for the first day or two. What everybody saw was the plane hitting the second tower. And then later when somebody found some guy on the street who had this footage, they showed it. And what your brain said was,

maybe not out loud, but was, oh, I stored the second part of the sequence first, but it's actually the second. And so it rewrote it when it put it back. And everybody has this false memory, including President Bush, that they saw him in the wrong order. Your brain is making false memories like this all the time. And

That can actually be a benefit if you've got a stress associated with a certain memory. You can pull it out and recontextualize it, put it back. I actually, I don't know about you all, but I actually find this incredibly wonderful that our memories are not like some concrete thing. It's not an object you put in your brain. It's part of you, right? It's an actual...

I write in the book about something that's very personally meaningful to me, which is the Beatles. And I had interviewed George Martin around the time

that they were making the Beatles anthology in 1992 or so. And he and Paul McCartney and George Harrison and Ringo Starr got together with Jeff Emmerich, the engineer on their recordings, and they're trying to recall, well, who played one instrument and how many takes was this? And all of them had different and completely incompatible recollections. And then there's this guy, Mark Lewison...

who was an archivist they hired, and he had all the boxes of tapes and all the contemporaneous notes, and he'd want to come in and say, well, no, Paul, you didn't play here. Yeah, most hated guy on the island. Yeah, exactly. No, Mark, don't say anything. We're listening back to my KQED Live interview with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. It took place in October as part of San Francisco's literary festival Litquake. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We'll be right back. ♪

Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Today we're listening back on my interview with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin about the healing power of music and his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord. You mentioned earlier Giffords and her ability to sing when she couldn't talk. This is actually also something we find with people who stutter, right? That there are some people who have a stutter, but who can sing

totally, totally well. What's going on there? So stuttering is

Another interesting thing like a visual illusion or LF forgetting the lyrics, it's the system gone wrong. And so it allows us to see what the system does when it's working right. And I mean, by analogy, if you drive an old car, you may not know what a carburetor does or that you even have one until it breaks, right? So in order to speak fluently,

What we need to do is set up what's called a motor action plan. Your brain needs to figure out what movements, motor movements, your tongue, lips, jaw, and larynx are going to make. And they have to be made, they're very precise movements. Just a fraction of a millimeter would change a D to a T or something like that. Dog to tog, whatever tog means. And...

They have to be done in a precise order and in a precise timing. And when that system doesn't develop properly through childhood and maturation, you end up with stuttering because your brain knows what it needs to do, but it gets stuck at the actual motor part. And so stutterers, and it happens to many of us who aren't habitual stutterers when we're

on stage with an important person or live radio or having to give a speech. But in a stutterer, it causes them to get stuck and it's because the internal clock that's supposed to orchestrate these movements in precise timing doesn't work. And so music acts as an external clock.

that this motor action plan, this sequence, can synchronize to. To the beat. And so you find people like Elvis Presley, who stuttered when he was speaking, or Mel Tillis. Yeah, we have a Mel Tillis on the plane. Mel could barely speak, but he could sing, and sing fluently. And he sang some very difficult songs because that timer is working. It's exactly the same underlying mechanism as Parkinson's patients who,

have a degradation to the circuits that help them maintain a steady, even walking gait. And if you can't put one foot after another in a precise order and with precise timing, you either freeze or you fall over. That happens to many Parkinson's patients. But you play music that has the tempo of the gait

GAIT gate, and we've got entire populations of millions of neurons that automatically, without you willing them to, will fire in synchrony with the tempo. And so a Parkinson's patient can walk smoothly and continuously while the music is playing, and with rhythmic auditory stimulation therapy,

can train circuits to do so, so that the patient only needs to imagine the music. Stuttering, Parkinson's, two sides of the same coin. Let's hear, just in honor of Mel Tillis, Stay a Little Longer. Okay, this is an extreme stutterer singing a very difficult song. ♪ I've seen my little blue-eyed Sally, she lives away down on the shim-boned alley. The number on the gate and the number on the door, the next house over is the grocery store. Stay on

So fast, man. I mean, how much can doing this therapy help, say, a Parkinson's patient? We've seen patients who cannot walk, even with a walker. They just, they're shuffled. They can't really get one foot in front of the other. And after just walking,

music playing for about 15 seconds, their brains synchronize and then they can walk without the walker. Here's another question: Does a metronome work as well as music? That is one of the best questions because if it was just the rhythm you would think so. But they don't. I mean they kind of work. There's something about how engaging music is, how emotionally rewarding it is that it's not just the rhythm.

And it's not just any song. It has to be a song you like. It's really weird. That's so interesting. You know, there is another really fascinating Parkinson story in the book about a beloved Bay Area figure, Bobby McFerrin.

Some people may know that he has like an improv session over at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. I think it's on Monday. Every Monday at noon, he sings at Freight and Salvage for like 35 bucks. You've got to go see it. No two performances are alike. It's all improv. He comes out and he just is quiet for a moment and...

Whatever melody pops in his mind, he starts riffing on. It's extraordinary. But it's partially a response to some of the degradation that he's experienced, right? The improvism, because that's always what he's done. But, right, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's a few years ago, and we spent...

We've spent a fair amount of time together. We made a documentary film together for PBS called The Music Instinct. We've sung together. He's visited my lab. And he's not yet having trouble walking, but he is having some trouble with controlling the muscles that allow him to sing. So you wouldn't know it. I mean, he's one of the best singers on the planet, so him at 98% is still... But he notices. But mostly it was fatigue...

That he was experiencing in malaise. But when he starts singing. It releases dopamine for him. Which motivates him to want to keep singing. And then other neurochemicals are released. And in the end. Singing is therapy for him. And if he weren't singing. He would not be.

in nearly as good a physical shape as he is. It actually boosts the immune system for all of us and especially for him when he needs it. It helps him to keep active neural pathways that are necessary for basic thought and cognition. But because he's improvising,

He's growing new neural pathways all the time. Every time he improvises a new song, that's a brand new neural circuit he's created. So he's building up all this cognitive reserve. We talked earlier, does music help with Alzheimer's? Learning to play an instrument, and it's never too late at any age, even 80, 90, even if you've got a disease like Alzheimer's, learning to play an instrument builds up new neural pathways everywhere.

so robustly that it can hide or mask Alzheimer's for years. I wanted to ask one final question about a condition here, which is, you know, depression. What you know, when when I think of times in my own life or people I've known who've been depressed, it does feel like certain types of music appeal or music doesn't appeal at all. What is the sort of prescription

for knowing that it's not going to cure depression to hear a special song, but like what's a way that it can alleviate what people are going through? So this is quite paradoxical and interesting, but generally speaking when we're depressed, not in every case, but generally, it's because in some sense we feel misunderstood.

Somebody yelled at us, we had a fight with somebody, we didn't get the promotion we thought we deserved. Whatever it is, you feel in some sense misunderstood and cut off from others.

And so the last thing you want to hear is a happy song because that's somebody else who doesn't understand how you're feeling. And you don't want somebody to come by and say, "Oh, buck up." You know, you really have it pretty good. You have no run-down. Good day sunshine. Yeah, that's right. No, you're doing a good day sunshine. No, no, you want to punch somebody. But you put on the right sad music and within seconds you go, "Oh."

I couldn't put it into words, but that is how I feel. I feel exactly like that. And then at least at a subconscious level you realize, oh, there's somebody here at the edge of the cliff staring into the abyss with me. And they've turned that experience that they had into, they came out the other side, they turned it into a beautiful work of art. There's comfort in that. And our brains release soothing, tranquilizing, comforting hormones

and it can actually lift us up. And it can invoke a good cathartic cry, which is what often we need and we don't allow ourselves to do it. Let's go right here.

Hi. I noticed that I have my AirPods in and I listen to music in the background all the time, but I seldom listen with attention. So I just wonder what is the difference in benefit between having music playing versus listening with attention versus playing music? That's a great question. These are very different experiences. We often use music as sonic wallpaper.

People with ADHD find it helpful to work with music because it helps to quiet some of the chatter in their brains. And then listening to music attentively or intentionally is different. And then a third kind of listening to music is kind of hybrid where you're not doing anything else.

and you may not be trying to analyze the music or anything, but you're allowing it to carry you away. And that's where the biggest benefits come from. That's where you can enter a trance state, a meditative state. It's where you allow your mind to wander. There's a mode of consciousness that we call the daydreaming mode. I mean, you're familiar with it. It's a very healthful and restorative mode to get into.

And what we've learned is that from a work, I wrote a book about workplace productivity called the organized mind. And from a productivity and creativity standpoint, you don't want to work pedal to the metal for six or eight hours. You want to give your mind a break probably every hour and a half or two. It depends on the person and you want your mind to allow your mind to daydream because that hits a reset button in your brain. And, um,

That reset button is crucial to restoring spent metabolites and glucose in the brain from paying attention and exerting attention.

Attention is a limited capacity resource. You can run out of it. So paying attention is really a very apt metaphor. But getting into that default mode of daydreaming, music is... That's what it's actually called. It's called the default mode. Yeah. Music is... And Vinod Menon, my friend at Stanford, and I discovered where that switch is that allows you to get in there. It's in a structure in the brain called the insula.

And it's this neurochemical switch that takes you there. You can get in there by walking in nature, by having a couple of drinks, by relaxing through meditation. But music is the most reliable way. So they're very different uses. They're not all the same. Question for you. Is there any kind of medicinal use or effects that music can have on tinnitus? I suffer from tinnitus pretty bad. Yes. Tinnitus is a ringing in the ears. It happens because the neuro...

We didn't get into all the physiology here, but your neurons are tuned to specific frequencies. And in your brain and in the inner ear, if you were to unroll them, they would be like a piano keyboard. All the frequencies of the piano in order. That's so crazy. Isn't that crazy? It's crazy.

and then some because you can hear beyond the range of the piano. But what happens is with age often or with overexposure to loud sound, some of those neurons stop firing and your brain knows enough to say to itself, "Well, gee, I'm supposed to be getting input from them.

There's something wrong. So I'll just create some input from them internally. That's really what you notice? It's a hallucination, yeah. And so the therapy is you can buy these little white noise devices that make sound like when a radio is between stations. And you tune the white noise device

to where the ringing is and you play it for five or ten minutes, you fatigue the neurons that are causing that and then you can be fine for a day or for two weeks. It depends on the person and all that. If the right piece of music can heal, can the wrong piece of music make you sick? Yes, it can. Specifically at Hotel California.

The right piece of music can heal. The wrong piece of music can harm you. In that we've done surveys of 20,000 people about what do you find the most annoying things in modern life. And always in the top five is unwanted music piped into public spaces where you don't have the control over it. If you don't like something you're seeing, you close your eyes. Very hard to shut out your ears, even with earplugs and

- Big cans and everything. - Noise reduction headphones, you can't get rid of all of it. And in fact it was unwanted music that drove Manuel Noriega out of his compound, if you'll recall. The US Army shut off his water and his power and air conditioning and food and he still didn't give up the compound until they blasted Van Halen at 130 decibels.

You know, I mean, this is, it's interesting though, because it's a precise match for each person, right? I mean, one of the things you know in the book is that

Heavy metal isn't like as a category bad for people. People who like heavy metal, it's like great for them. I love it anyway. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I would have gone there just to hear it. Yeah, right. In Panama. Take the palace. Yeah. The right music is what's right for you. You can't say the classical is better, heavy metal is bad, rap is bad. No. It's very subjective. Just like you can't say what is the right food for you. Yeah, it has to have nutrients, but...

One food isn't really better than the other. This is kind of continuing with what you were saying about it has to be right for you. Have you documented or noticed a difference between the impact of music with lyrics versus instrumental music? And what's going on there? Because you made the joke about good day sunshine. Well, just those words itself can be annoying. But the music itself, what is that difference? People have different...

aspects of music they listen to. Some people really like lyrics, some people don't notice them. They can sing them but they don't really pay attention to what they're singing. You mentioned Hotel California. I've been in many foreign countries where people don't speak a word of English but if Hotel California comes on they know all the words. People have different sensitivities to lyrics and then even people who love lyrics

can be moved by a song like "I Feel Good" by James Brown, which is just "I feel good." I knew that I would. I feel good. I mean, it's not Leonard Cohen, it's not Joni Mitchell, but it works for the song. And so the extent of the studies are that if you're lyrical oriented, lyrics can move you. If you're not, they often don't do any harm.

Hi. I wonder if you could talk about people who don't seem to respond to music. So I'm a musician. I have a husband and a mother who really couldn't care less. Never want to hear it. Never seem to have any... I heard there was a secret chord. David played it, please the Lord, but you don't really care for music, do you? Exactly, exactly. Yeah. We...

Getting back to Darwin, the whole point of natural selection is descent with modification, which is the idea that there has to be random mutation or we could all be wiped out by a single virus. And most of these random genetic mutations have effects that we don't notice, but every once in a while we do. And we estimate that 10% of the population do not like music.

And so, you know, there's individual variability. So, yeah, music cannot help them. We've been listening back to my KQED Live interview from last week with neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. It was part of San Francisco's literary festival, Litquake. Levitin's also a musician, and we're going out with his live performance from the event. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim. There is delight...

In singing though none hear Beside the singer There is delight There is delight There is delight

In praising, oh, the praiser sits alone. And, oh, the praise far off from him there is delight. We've been listening back to my KQED Live interview from October with neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin. It was part of San Francisco's literary festival Litquake. We're going out with his live performance. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Form Ahead from the archives with Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw.

Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

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