Is Music the Language of the Universe? with Daniel Levitin

25:43Yes. Anyone over 70 will get that reference. If you're an Eddie Murphy fan, you'll get it too. You'll get that from that one skit he did. Yeah, I'm with W.W. Norton. I'm very happy. Yeah, yeah. I have a few books with W.W. Norton. I know you do. That was part of the attraction for me. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Do I get 10 %? No.

26:06don't aid in a bet the publisher so in it which has the beautiful title I Heard There Was a Secret Chord that's great that's that beautiful song by who wrote that Leonard Cohen he's got that I Heard There Was a Secret Chord that pleased the Lord and you just hear it it's like ooh I gotta it gives me the not the willies But even without knowing the song, it makes you feel very Gwyneth Paltrow-esque. You know? Okay. I gotta get this book for some reason. It draws you to it. Yeah, we should bundle this with sales of goop. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you refer to a default mode network. What is that?

26:54This was one of the biggest findings in cognitive neuroscience in a generation, which was the brain wants to mind wander. Now, you might say this is something we always knew, but a lot of things we thought we knew turned out not to be true. And so the job of behavioral scientists, we have it a little bit easier than astrophysicists in that we have 20 ,000 years of history of people thinking that certain things are so, and then we can just test them and see if they really are or not. Folktales and all the rest. So the idea that the mind wants to wander as opposed to paying attention now has some neurobiological basis.

27:33It takes energy to pay attention to something and to keep your mind from wandering. And by energy, I mean neurons need to work harder. They are metabolized with blood oxygenated glucose. Glucose is the fuel. And your brain is already a big consumer of your body's energy. It is. So even within that now, you're now dividing up the tasks for who's energy intensive and who isn't. Paying attention to something, being engaged with something, and making decisions uses up glucose. And the phrase paying attention is actually quite accurate. You're paying with glucose. And it's a limited capacity resource.

28:11When you've been paying attention to something for a while, your attention flags. Your brain, your mind starts to wander. This is called the default mode network. It was discovered by my colleague and collaborator, Vinod Menon at Stanford. and it's a very important thing to understand because it's in the default mode when our minds are wandering that most problem solving gets done. Now if you think about it, it should be obvious because if I'm trying to solve a problem and it eludes me, it must mean in most cases that the solution is non-linear. It's not just connecting A to B, two things that I knew.

28:45It's having to come up with a non-linear solution and those typically happen while we're asleep and dreaming, another manifestation of the default mode as it were. Because dreams can get really random. They can, yeah. But that's where you get all this nonlinear, out-of-the-box thinking. Or you're walking down the supermarket aisle looking for the Cheerios and suddenly it comes to you, the solution. So getting into the default mode happens automatically when we've worked too hard unless we try to fight it. But you can get into it by doing three things. Meditating, walking in nature, or listening to music.

29:22So I think everything we've described thus far has been known to us all. The mood setting, the memory, jogging, what role it can play in our states of mind. Where does medicine come in? Where there's something wrong with you measured by doctors and then music fixes it or alleviates it. So this is the book I wanted to write 20 years ago when I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music. but there was not enough evidence for medical applications of music. No, this is a good scientist speaking here. Not enough evidence? I'm not going to go out there and do it. No, not at all. Okay, you know how many people don't think that way and they've started a YouTube channel?

30:00All of them. And they get a follow. All of them? All of them. That's every YouTuber that you, yeah. Just turn on YouTube and you're looking at that. Yes. No, no, the evidence was weak and I didn't want to go there. What you and I share, I think, is a feeling of an ethical commitment. If we're doing science and we're taking grant money, Ultimately, that either comes from governmental agencies or from tax breaks to private foundations, meaning the taxpayer funds scientific research. You and I believe that every scientist has an ethical obligation to explain how we're spending taxpayer money. And so I don't want to spend taxpayer money saying stuff that ain't so.

30:39So now we've got this book. Yeah. There's a lot of foundation for your statements. Give me a short list of some of the ailments that have been alleviated by music. I'll start with wellness. So music boosts the immune system, particularly immunoglobulin A. IGA is responsible for fighting off infections of the mucosal system, such as COVID or colds. Music also boosts the production of natural killer cells, NK cells, and T cells, which travel to the site to fight an infection. The most sickly people in the world are people who never listen to music. Is the inverse true as well? Well, we're talking about significant but small effects.

31:20And certainly there are always exceptions in the tales of the distribution. So quantify your statement that it improves your resistance, your wellness. Quantify that. You mean like P less than 0.05? No, I mean how much of an effect does it have on your immune system? For example, it can boost the immune system better than, say, echinacea or vitamin C or all these things that people— All right, so if I might have gotten five colds this year and I listen to music, would I get four colds? We don't know. We don't know. Well, you'll get five colds, but they just won't be as bad. Well, that's right.

31:55That can happen too. We don't really know, and I don't want to claim that we do. Okay. But we know in clinical studies and in laboratory studies that IGA, for example, NK and T cells are increased. Now, at that point, whether they're successful at fending off a disease or not, there's a lot of other variables. Okay, so it's one thing to say that these things are improved. Yes. And it's separate to actually do the clinical trials. But there is a logical progression, though. You'd expect it to be the case. You'd expect a logical progression. All right, so that's one thing. So your wellness? Parkinson's disease.

32:31Parkinson's disease is characterized by a degradation of cells in the basal ganglia I've seen brain maps It's in the back here Yeah, at the base underneath in there Basal ganglia A group of subcortical nuclei that are connected to the brain's own internal clock So what happens is dopamine is normally used for signaling and transmission of information in this cluster of neurons Isn't dopamine in the feel-good? It's a feel-good chemical. Neurochemical. Neurochemical. Well, so that's an interesting thing. Dopamine is throughout the brain, and it does different things in different parts of the brain.

33:10When you're experiencing pleasure and dopamine is released in the limbic system, including the ventral tagmental area, you feel pleasure. So dopamine does different things in different places, and it helps to maintain a steady gait and synchronize circuits that are required for walking, for movement. And that's degraded in Parkinson's. And so we give them L-Dopa, which is supposed to promote dopamine. Just to be clear, when Parkinson's is advanced enough, you're basically wheelchair bound. Right. And it starts, the first signs might be shuffling when you're walking, dragging your feet, an inability to maintain a steady gait.

33:48Sometimes you try to walk and you end up running. Sometimes you walk and you end up freezing or you can't get started. This is called fenestation. And what we find is that if you play music for people that's at the tempo of their natural gait, that activates a subsidiary redundant circuit. So we've got populations of neurons that fire in synchrony to music, that entrain to the music and predict where the next beat's going to be. And that allows Parkinson's patients to walk smoothly. there's a technique called rhythmic auditory stimulation developed by a colleague of mine named Michael Tout at University of Toronto.

34:28He was at Colorado State when he developed it. And let me guess, that's where you play the Bee Gees. You can tell by the way I use my walk. That's exactly right. Or any music by NSYNC. You play the music at the right tempo and the neurons start firing and they can maintain a steady gait. And after a course of this therapy, some Parkinson's patients are able to get rid of their crutches and walkers and walk for months. Whoa. So this music is a way to get in the brain without having to do so pharmacologically. Because I can imagine a future where, wait a minute, that other part of the brain remembers how you used to walk and it's being overridden by this.

35:11Let me go in there, nip, tuck, suppress this, boost that, and now you're done. Maybe that day will come. Yes. But until then, your music is filling that gap. Yeah, that's right. Another interesting case is chronic pain or acute pain, any kind of pain. Okay. Tell me about that. So pain is a$680 million drain on the annual economy in the U.S. Well, music doesn't stand a chance. It's the number one reason people visit. I'm surprised it's only$680 million. Yeah. I mean, when you think of painkillers, pain relievers. Could be more. People with chronic pain. Right. And the whole oxycontin. Exactly. It's all about pain management.

35:47Conservative number. Yeah. It's the number one reason people go to the doctor. Doctors report that 80 % of their patients come in and say, it hurts here. That 80 % of doctor visits, it hurts. How do we treat pain? We use two things that we've been using for thousands of years. The bark of a tree or its synthetic equivalents, which is aspirin. Or something from a poppy or its synthetic equivalent. Heroin, opiates, opium. My lab was the first to show that when people listen to music they like, doesn't matter whether it's heavy metal or hip hop or classical or jazz, R &B, if it's music they like, the brain produces its own endogenous opiates.

36:28Remind me what endogenous means. Internal to the brain, its own. You could just say internal. We use the word endogenous because we're fancy. You know, in my field, we see spots on the sun. We call them sunspots, okay? We like tell it like we see it. But the sun calls them endogenous sunspots.

36:51Okay, so it's endogenous. Keep going. The brain's producing its own opioids, and they help to ease pain. Now, it's not producing them in pharmaceutical levels, but in sufficient levels that instead of having an Oxycontin addiction, you might have been able to get away with, say, an Advil and music, or maybe a very small, much smaller dose of opiates for a much shorter amount of time. The whole opioid crisis could potentially have been averted. Whether it anesthetizes you, it can definitely help with pain management. That's the point. That's right. You can do it either way. It can either be the painkiller or it can just assist the painkiller.

37:32It doesn't make a difference. That's right. It doesn't make a difference. Wow.

37:53How about any other sort of neurokinetic afflictions that might be touched by music? Multiple sclerosis arises, you know, the neurons have an insulating sheath, like the wiring in your house is insulated. Cool. And it's because they're sending electrical signals and you need the insulation so they don't interfere with each other and all of this. The myelin sheath is a white fatty tissue, which is why we call it white matter. And multiple sclerosis is a loss of myelination. Ouch. That sounds terrible. So you have cross circuits, short circuiting of your brain signals. But music can help with the movement disorders of multiple sclerosis.

38:33And another kind of movement disorder is stuttering. And it's mostly in boys. It is mostly in boys. We don't really know why, but it's an inability to speak smoothly. And we think, again, it has to do with timing circuits and an internal clock gone awry. And music kind of hijacks the system with a steady tempo. Isn't that helpful for people such as yourself, professional neuroscientists, to one day find a way to get inside the brain and fix that problem? Well, we are inside the brain now. My colleague, Eddie Chang, and my other colleague, Bob Knight, both in California and the San Francisco Bay Area, have implanted arrays of electrodes inside.

39:13I'm ready for that to fix everything. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's astonishing what it's doing. So the way this happens is that there are people with epilepsy, which is uncontrolled electrical activity that causes seizures. Some of them volunteer to be in our experiments. And from that, we can do in humans what we've been doing for 100 years in animals, which is to measure from single cells at a time. And so it's not far off where we will figure out where the stuttering cells are and maybe be able to treat it. And how about Tourette's syndrome? Yes. Tell me about that. Tourette's disease is debilitating.

39:49Almost every case is accompanied by tics, unwanted motor movements, facial tics, and body jerking. It's often thought of as the disorder in which people swear uncontrollably. But that's not present in all the cases. I read somewhere that was the rarest of them. Yeah, it is. Oh, is that right? That's the rarest of Tourette's where people actually swear uncontrollably. The tics, and often what they do is make sounds. Yes. Instead of swearing, they're like, whoop. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, something like that. Music can help that too? It seems so. So I write about the musician. What do you mean it seems so?

40:27You're a scientist sitting in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. Don't you know you're supposed to lie? No. I don't ask you a question and say, well, it seems to be the case. Anybody could say that. Tell me something out of your lab that has some statistical integrity. Well, so here we're talking about a collection of anecdotes, and the plural of an anecdote is not data. Okay. That's a good line. That was a very good line. I like that. That's a good line. But there are a number of cases that from anecdotes come studies. So the case of Billie Eilish is a perfect example. Popular contemporary singer.

41:06She has Tourette's, and she finds that when she's singing, the Tourette seems to go away. Seems to, because she's not keeping a log. She's not being observed and monitored. But from these observations of people like Billie Eilish and others, grant applications will go into the NIH. I'm part of a panel that's been working with the NIH and the White House Science Office. National Institutes of Health. Yeah. Yeah, mm-hmm. Francis Collins has been a big promoter of this work. Though no longer head of NIH, is that correct? He's been in the White House Science Office now. Okay, got it. And he's working on eradicating hep C, but he convened a meeting of 50 scientists in D.C.

41:45last December on music and medicine. Oh. And he entrusted me to help him choose the scientists who would be there. We also invited professional musicians. Do you get to tap some of that budget that's allocated to non-traditional medicine? Yeah, so there's an Institute for Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and Emmeline Edwards runs the place, and she is terrific. Because the NIH has a budget line for that. But it's also the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIA, the Addiction Agency, National Cancer Institute. I think most of the 26 institutes now are interested in music as medicine.

42:24for one thing because it's potentially a huge cost saver. And the best example of economy is this. If you go to get surgery, it's likely that in the pre-operating theater, they're going to give you Valium, a benzodiazepine to relax you before they anesthetize you because knocking you out and relaxing you are two different things. They're not the same thing. That Valium that might cost$5 at the CVS on the corner or the Duane Reade or whatever, in a hospital, the average cost is, you know what? $750. Oh. Same pill. Same pill. You've got compliance, you've got regulations, you've got all kinds of reporting that needs to be done, and you've got...

43:04Overhead! It's ridiculous. But a number of studies have now shown that if you play people relaxing music that they themselves chose, this is an important point, you can't foist music therapy on somebody using music they don't like. That has the opposite effect. So I'm intrigued that this is all in progress and it's active. It's an active field of research. All of this. Very much so. Very much so. Last thing, just to close out where we're going here. Tell me about memory. How does memory work? Like if I took a snapshot as a physicist and I come to your brain and I just look at the state of every neuron, am I going to know what memories lurk hidden within your neurochemistry?

43:54I used to know, but I forgot. That was too easy. That was really low hanging. That was beneath you. That's so low, that was windfall on the ground. Yes, that's called bending down and picking up an apple. It's not even low hanging. So it matters when people claim, or at least hope, that one day we can upload your brain into a computer. You have to upload the configuration of every cell that is storing information that we would call memory. Right. So this is the idea of the connectome, which Sebastian Sung at Princeton and others have been working on. That's a recent term, right? Yes. Connectome, yes.

44:33And the idea is it's parallel to the genome. It's not enough to know where all the neurons are or what they do. You have to know how they connect to one another and what state they're in at any given time. So what is it about the state of your neurons that preserves a memory? So here's what we think. I mean, this is speculation. When you experience something, for example, you're looking at a sunset, you're listening to music, you're drinking a nice glass of red wine, that's an experience, and the experience is delivered to you, beginning with some stimulation impinging on your sensory receptors, setting off a cascade of neurochemical, neuroelectrical activity.

45:14And so there's some group of neurons that are delivering that experience. If it's wine, it's the taste buds in your olfactory system and the olfactory bulb, and it presents it to somewhere in your brain that has self-consciousness and awareness in the prefrontal cortex of what's happening. If you were to later remember that experience, as I say, my lab and other labs have shown that it's the same neural family, the same group of neurons, the same pattern that are activated in the memory. So what allows you to distinguish a memory from an actual event? It appears, we think, there are neurochemical tags that get attached to an event when it gets stored in memory so that when you pull it out, you know that it's a memory and not an actual event.

46:01This is evolutionarily very important because the same thing happens when you dream. There are neurochemical tags that say this is a dream because otherwise I might dream that you punched me in the nose and then I come to see you and I don't know that that's not reality. And that could lead to another punch in the nose. I would say where's the evidence of you getting punched in the nose. So what then of the – what's that movie with Arnold was in it? Total Recall. Total Recall. Instead of paying for an expensive vacation, you would sit down in some doctor's chair and they would implant the memory of you having had the vacation.

46:37Yeah, yeah. And that would be just as good. Oh, remember we were on the beach and we found the shelves? Yeah, that was great. And it cost you$20 instead of$2 ,000. My colleague Danny and collaborator Danny Conovan recently passed away, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who won the Nobel in economics for his studies of how human beings are irrational, how the brain is irrational, and he documented it. Did he need to have a study to show that we're irrational? Come on now. Well, he cataloged the different kinds of irrationality. That's pretty cool. It's not good enough just to know we're all irrational.

47:15What category of irrationality are you? That's good work there. And one of them was that when studying vacations, People were told, you could have the most fantastic vacation of your life, but you won't remember it, but it'll be free. Or it'll be not as good a vacation, it'll cost you a lot of money, but you will remember it. Which would you prefer? People prefer to have the one they can remember. A big part of going on vacation is not just to have the anticipation of it, but the memory for years or decades later. So you get to an interesting point. if you could just have the memory but not the experience, I suppose that would be something.

47:56But I am still, as a musician, as an artist, I can't defend this scientifically, but I feel like a virtual vacation, an implanted vacation, would be like AI-generated music. It would be like fake flowers at a hotel lobby. Looks fine from a distance, but when you get close enough to realize it doesn't have a nice scent or a nice texture. You've got this uncanny valley between what is real and what is not, and you don't want the false one. Well, I've had enough experiences in my life where people told me I had a good time. But I for sure cannot remember it. Was single malt scotch involved? Very much so.

48:41One last thing about memory. I heard about this when I was in college, and I assume, but then I didn't hear about it again, that you are more likely to remember something you learned by reproducing the state of mind you were in at the time you learned it. So if you're studying your chemistry book while you're high, you're better off taking the exam while you're high. Yeah. Is that true? And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, I failed out of college. What? You didn't smoke enough weed. You didn't smoke enough weed. This is called state-dependent memory retrieval. It was discovered by one of my teachers, Gordon Bauer, at Stanford.

49:19When did that happen? Oh, he discovered it in the 70s. I'm old enough to have been in college in the 70s, and that's what I remember this coming out. This was a big finding. I mean, the idea is if you study in one classroom, you're going to remember the material better if you're tested in the same classroom. And it has to do, again, with retrieval cues. And he called it what? State-dependent memory retrieval. One of the experiments they did was parachuters. You learn a bunch of unrelated words while you're falling out of an airplane. And then you try to recall it either on the ground or falling out of an airplane again.

49:52And it turned out the finding wasn't as strong as they thought because it was not the actual physical state of being in an airplane. It was the state of arousal of being that energized. Okay. So not a complete duplicate of your scenario. Yeah. Just a duplication of your emotional state. But this is the reason why depression is so hard to treat. People who are depressed only remember the sad times of their lives. It's very hard for them to get access to the happy memories. And they think, oh, I was never happy. Which means they can't draw upon those good times in the face of bad times to counter it.

50:32It's just like, oh, everything's bad all the time. But music can help here. One of the promising things that I'm working on with a group at UCLA is treating drug-resistant depression with drugs and talk therapy and music. And if you play somebody who's depressed a happy song, that makes them feel worse. If you're depressed, usually it's because in some sense you feel misunderstood by the world or by others or by people in your life. And you put on a happy song and that's just one more person who does not understand you and you're furious. Why are you rubbing it in my face? Right. You put on a sad song, and suddenly there's somebody there staring into the abyss with you, at your side, and not only do they understand how you feel, but they've been through it, and they came out the other side and created a beautiful work of art.

51:25So Daniel, this has been a delight. Thank you for having me here at the Hayden Planetarium. Good luck with the tour. Thank you very much. Chuck, always good to have you here. Always a pleasure. And Gary, get well soon. Thanks for taking us into this topic. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.