The Healing Power Of Music: How Your Favourite Songs Boost Your Mood, Mind & Mobility with Dr Daniel Levitin #623

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29:58Dr 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 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.

30:40Dr Daniel Levitin: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, you know, what was I doing when I was 16? You know, what was my first experience with a car?

31:25Dr Daniel Levitin: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. If 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 can 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.

32:19Dr. 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 know you feel stuck your memories going you're maybe not recognizing people you know 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?

33:31Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:I mean that seems overly simplistic to me but on one level it seems well maybe that's exactly what is happening.

33:37Dr 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, you know, 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 Zaniga has written about this, as have other neuroscientists.

34:28Dr Daniel Levitin: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. Yeah. 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. 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.

35:22Dr Daniel Levitin: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 and you'll 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.

35:52Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Yeah. What's the relationship between music and trauma?

36:00Dr 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 traumatic, 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 just the most horrifying things the bodies of friends being blown apart you know trying to carry them back out of a war zone and um veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder often are debilitated and they're hyper vigilant, the slightest sound in the environment, you know, sends them into a panic.

37:15Dr Daniel Levitin:And there's a program here in the U.S. 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.

37:51Dr. 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.

38:21Dr Daniel Levitin:Well, the thing is, a song is something you can memorize. eyes. It's more highly structured than a journal entry. It's got a rhyme scheme. Typically it's got a rhythm. Uh, 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, uh, it's precisely, you know, it's like you were saying when you and your kids get home, uh, 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.

39:01Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

39:31Yeah.

39:32Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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 and music. A lot of people will also say, Dan, yeah, songwriting sounds great, but I'm not a songwriter. I mean, maybe I can get my head around journaling, but I can't get my head around songwriting.

40:12Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:What would you say to that person?

40:15Dr 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.

41:05Dr Daniel Levitin: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, you know, 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 you're 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.

41:49Dr Daniel Levitin: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 could 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, you know.

42:32Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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.

43:21Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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?

43:29Dr Daniel Levitin:Absolutely. And this is the not well-known secret of all writers of either fiction or non-fiction 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'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 jot down our thoughts on paper or speak them into voice memos.

44:25Dr Daniel Levitin:It's an act of discovery, not an act of dictation.

44:29Dr. 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?

44:49Dr 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.

45:38Dr Daniel Levitin:There's somebody here next to me 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 uplifting. I feel understood now. Yeah. musical tastes are quite unique aren't they I mean what you may enjoy listening to and you

45:58Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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 let's 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 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?

46:47So could it be that one particular song,

46:51Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:someone finds calming, whereas at the same time, that same song could trigger anxiety, for example, in someone else?

47:00Dr Daniel Levitin:Oh, absolutely. We see that all the time. I did a massive study of 20 ,000 listeners 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, you know, relaxing music was, you know, Enya or Bach, maybe, you know, 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?

47:48Dr Daniel Levitin: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. ACDC, 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 right. But 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.

48:32Dr Daniel Levitin:I mean, even setting aside the 20 different forms of talk therapy that might be recommended,

48:42Dr Daniel Levitin: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 Welbutrin. Well, we'll move to, you know, 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 going to work. You only have to wait three minutes. And you can go through a bunch of things.

49:19Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

49:48Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:just as you were talking about the maybe 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 i'm glad you went there with that that's absolutely true it doesn't matter

50:11Dr Daniel Levitin:from the research, it doesn't matter what school they were trained in. If they were Freudian or Jungian or Gestalt or Adlerian or cognitive behaviour, what really matters is your relationship with the therapist.

50:25Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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, these things are totally individual. Yeah.

50:42Dr 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, um, 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, asked the waiter, what do you recommend?

51:33Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

51:39Dr. 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're 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, of the decade or arguably off the millennium so far. I mean, it was like gold. 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 write in 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.

52:42Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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.

53:22Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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?

54:05Dr Daniel Levitin:Yeah. 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, you know, descent with modification.

55:03Dr Daniel Levitin:And the adaptations that confer the greatest chance of survival are the ones that get passed on. So, you know, those of our ancient ancestors who took, 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. Yeah.

55:56Dr 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.

56:06Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Your lab, I believe, has studied goosebumps before and what actually causes goosebumps. goosebumps and I think it would 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 Soup and Over 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?

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1:00:49Dr Daniel Levitin:that feeling of the hair on the back of 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 will 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 you know why when the ancient greeks looked at the stars they saw orion the hunter and you know the ursa major the big bear uh they orion the hunter doesn't really exist in the stars it's it's the human brain imposing order on something that's disordered.

1:02:01Dr Daniel Levitin:And so that predictive device in 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.

1:02:51Dr Daniel Levitin: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 you mentioned before that

1:03:14Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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.

1:04:08Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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? We don't have any research on this, but I think the marketplace has decided for us.

1:05:01Dr Daniel Levitin: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. Part of it is being with others and feeling part of something larger than you because there are another thousand or 10 ,000 or 40 ,000 people there with you. The same reason we go to see sporting events live is to be with other people. It's even if you're watching at home, people often have football parties.

1:05:45Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Yeah.

1:05:47Dr Daniel Levitin: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. Yeah. But nobody wants to do that.

1:06:25Dr Daniel Levitin:So there is something about live music that's different. And I like to think it's that we feel some

1:06:37Dr Daniel Levitin:connection to the artist. The artist is there. They showed up for us. Yeah.

1:06:43Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Earlier on, we spoke about Alzheimer's and in your book, you write about Glenn 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?

1:07:04Dr Daniel Levitin:So Glenn 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 that this was a kind of a house studio band. Glenn was the guitarist.

1:07:50Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

1:08:44Dr Daniel Levitin:And you, 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, so, you know, that, that sort of thing. He had a teleprompter, but many artists his age use teleprompters. Mick Jagger's using a prompter as far as I know, as Bono. So that's all right. You can't remember all the lyrics to the 500 songs you do.

1:09:22Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Yeah. But, and then off stage,

1:09:27Dr Daniel Levitin: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. Wow. 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 reserves. So I like working out at the gym. There's a guy there who can bench press 500 pounds. I can't do that.

1:10:14Dr Daniel Levitin: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 you're 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.

1:11:06Dr Daniel Levitin: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 you can't prevent alzheimer's but you can mask the symptoms of it for many years if you've got cognitive reserve yeah i love that that real take-home for us to

1:11:35Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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 they're not listening to music anymore. why do you think they might benefit from bringing more music into their lives

1:12:16Dr Daniel Levitin:well um i think through music i mean the big picture as i write about in the second to the last chapter the big picture is um 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.

1:12:50Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:That's okay.

1:12:51Dr Daniel Levitin:It doesn't like not being the center of attention.

1:12:58Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

1:13:35Dr. 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 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.

1:14:22Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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.

1:15:04Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:What is it that you like so much about this song and why did you include it in your book?

1:15:12Dr 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.

1:16:06Dr Daniel Levitin: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 driving and...

1:16:49Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Speed so fast as if I was drunk, you know, just, yeah, that feel good sort of, you're just escaping. Yeah.

1:16:56Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

1:17:52Dr Daniel Levitin: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, you know, 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, 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.

1:18:48Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

1:18:56Dr. 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, 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 she says, take that fast car and just keep on driving.

1:19:33Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:I, like you, Dan, I don't think I'd 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

1:19:54Dr Daniel Levitin:things from it we all take different things from from songs um one of my my 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.

1:20:42Dr Daniel Levitin: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 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 know the same mouth I want to finish off Dan talking about something that we touched upon at various times throughout

1:22:04Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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 said 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,

1:22:53Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:is it reasonable that we can use science to study music?

1:23:01Dr Daniel Levitin:Well, 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 one or 2 % of it. But that one 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 one or two percent of the equation, but it's an important one or two percent.

1:23:45Dr Daniel Levitin:Now, I don't know that we've benefited in practical ways from trying to understand the origins of the universe and the Big Bang, but 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

1:24:12Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:so that it seems silly.

1:24:14Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

1:24:59Dr. 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 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?

1:25:28Dr 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.

1:26:06Dr Daniel Levitin: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.

1:26:34Dr. 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 worry through 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 never ever learned an instrument before. What would you say to them?

1:27:16Well, I mean, certainly it's easy enough to,

1:27:22Dr Daniel Levitin:pianos, 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 five cents on the dollar because they don't play them anymore or don't want them anymore.

1:28:20Dr Daniel Levitin: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. So you would say to that person,

1:28:57Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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, you know, start singing along.

1:29:08Dr Daniel Levitin: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. Yeah.

1:29:20Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Even if in the shower. 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. I do too. Thank you again for your hospitality.

1:29:41Dr. 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 Five. 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 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 at drchatterjee.com forward slash Friday 5.

1:30:48Dr. Rangan Chatterjee: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 movement, 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 audio books, 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.

1:31:25Dr. Rangan Chatterjee:Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen 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.