1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine

24:38We do. In certain Indian dialects, they have a different D. There's a frontodental D. So they wouldn't say deli as in New Delhi. They would say deli, New Delhi. I can make it. I can't really hear the difference. I learned to make it. In French, we've got all these different ou sounds. There's ou and there's ou. And they mean different words. If I say I'm getting a book or I'm getting a buc, it just sounds like I'm saying book with an accent. But in French, it would be something very different. Tu versus tu, different words, different meaning. Yeah, Chinese has this because they have tones. they all mean different things.

25:13One of them means mother, another means lamp, another means gunpowder. Yeah. But to us, it's the same sound. So the infant can learn it all, but a funny thing happens around age 10. The primary mission of the brain shifts to get rid of all that unused capacity to make room for other stuff. And so it starts pruning out unused connections. Yeah. That's such a bummer, but it makes perfect sense, right? Because the child's brain doesn't know where it is and the environment, as you mentioned, doesn't know what it's going to need. Right. So it says, OK, maybe I need really sharp hearing because that's what we're doing here.

25:50I need to learn this language. I need to be able to decipher this kind of communication. And I suppose that makes sense why young kids who are born into traumatic or unstable environments suffer so much throughout their lives, right, because they essentially prune a lot of neurons that they probably would have needed to, I don't know, go to college and be a successful doctor, but they retain a lot of qualities that keep them safe or alive in an environment where people are doing drugs or there's violence around them or they don't get food regularly or something like that. What ages does that sort of stop happening?

26:24Do we know? Did you tell me this already? It's variable, but say 10 to 14. Okay. So similar to the whole language thing as well. Discounts on the fine products and services that support this show? Music to my ears. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, researchers, scientists, creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself over at sixminutenetworking.com. This is a course. It's a free course. It's not a schmoozy course. There's no upsells in the course.

26:54It won't make you or other people cringe when you use the tactics. It's very practical. A few minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find it. Again, it's free. No tricky stuff. SixMinuteNetworking.com. All right, back to Daniel Levitin. I'd love to talk about music and pain relief because the pain relieving effect of music is fascinating. You touched on this earlier, but if we're listening to music and it can help with pain. Can it help with not just workout pain, the burn in the muscle?

27:29I just had back surgery. Now I'm on OxyContin. Do I need less OxyContin if I'm playing some good jams? Probably. Really? Yes. And you may not need OxyContin at all, depending on how bad the pain is. You might need Tylenol or ibuprofen, Advil. The brain releases its own opiates in smaller amounts than pharmaceutical levels. It has to be music you like. One thing that music can do, Again, it's a Swiss army knife, different music maybe will relieve pain for you, then we'll relieve anxiety. But a lot of times pain is exacerbated by anxiety or stress. We become more sensitive to it. The mechanisms are still being worked out, but they're at a sufficient point that I wrote my new book.

28:12I heard there was a secret chord. Links in the show notes. In the UK, it's called Music as Medicine, but it's the same book, different title. I wrote it now because I've been working with the National Institutes of Health and the White House Science Office for 10 years. And there really is a body of literature that not only shows that all these things work, but something in the underlying mechanisms. We can talk about the neurochemical signaling. We can talk about the brain, the biology of the brain that's involved. And we've seen clinical studies, randomized controlled clinical trials like you would with a new drug where music really can work.

28:51But again, not in every case. A friend of mine just got a terrible gastrointestinal infection from eating bad food in Pakistan. Oh, my gosh, that sounds horrific. So it goes to the doctor when he gets back. It was awful. The doctor says, oh, we'll take this antibiotic. He's had to take five different antibiotics. You know, and if you get strep throat, they'll give you an antibiotic. It doesn't always work. So medicine doesn't always work and music doesn't either. It's a trial and error. But I'm mentioning it because it's not like some wonder drug that's going to solve all our problems on the one hand.

29:25But on the other hand, it's about the same as other drugs. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Is there an addiction treatment angle for people who are hooked on things like opioids? Can we use music and addiction programs to help this? Or is it just that by the time you're addicted to OxyContin, what the body produces is not going to ever be enough? Music is a part of a lot of addiction recovery centers now, whether it's AA or Narcotics Anonymous or various treatment programs. Yes, music is a part of this. And it's a part of it for different reasons. It's not just the release of endogenous opioids, but the dopamine that motivates you to want to get better and follow healthful practices.

30:10I know that shamans and medicine people throughout history, throughout the ages, have used music as part of ceremonies, as part of healing. Did you manage to research that at all? I mean, it seems like an obvious connection. They obviously knew music did something back then, and maybe some of it was just to show how serious the ceremony was. But from what I've heard from friends, when you do something like psychedelics or some sort of medicine journey, there's a lot of music and drums and banging and things that go along with some of these ceremonies, and they're there for a reason. So you're asking the question that any serious scientist would ask, how do you fractionate out the effects of the music versus the dance and the community?

30:54If you could assign a percentage, how much is attributed to the music per se versus these other paramusical aspects? and it's hard to say. It's very hard to come up with a controlled experiment. So in the shamanistic tradition, either contemporarily or 20 or 40 ,000 years ago, it was almost always the case that there was a large group of people. There was a leader, the faith healer, who was a very revered person in the community who had special knowledge and special skills. There were often herbal supplements of one kind or another. And the dancing in the community and it would go on for hours.

31:34There were typically trance states induced. So we try to do these experiments where we'll give people music or not music and we'll give it to them with dance or not dance. But what's a control for dance that involves body movement that isn't dancing? And what's a control for a large group of people that are really pulling for you to bring a bunch of your enemies together and have them sing songs that they, you know, ding dong, the which is dead, get out of here. It's very complicated to partition these out. But the fact is that the way we use music now in clinics and VA hospitals and even for self-remedy is that just listening or playing seems to have a substantial and statistically significant effect.

32:17That's really good news and very fascinating. I do want to separate the sound healing from what we're talking about right now. I want to separate music and therapy from nonsense pseudoscience like this bowl produces a frequency that will shrink your tumor. Can we do that briefly? Yeah. So I'm a scientist as well as a musician. And when I'm wearing my scientist hat, I just want to see what the data have to say. And I go in with no preconceptions. The data are there to tell a story. My job is to figure out what the story is. My job is also not to be distracted by shiny things and stories that don't fit the data.

32:57So I've been part of sound baths and I've been to particular sound baths that play Tibetan bowls or crystal alchemy glass bowls, and they're very emotionally moving. I agree. Spiritually moving. I have a friend named Gerilyn Glass who runs a therapy practice. She has a company called Crystal Cadence. I brought her to perform in front of directors from, I think there's 27 institutes of the National Institutes of Health a year ago. The director of the NIH was there and a lot of scientists. And I would say all of us were very moved. Now, if you ask her what she's doing, she'll say, well, and I'm going to get this wrong, this bowl is tuned to C sharp.

33:43And so it's supposed to lift your mood and this B-flat bowl is for treating this and that, and the A bowl that's made out of this particular crushed gemstone thing is supposed to treat anxiety. I don't believe that any of that's true. I also don't believe that when a great pianist like Horowitz or Kisine or Alicia de Rocha or whoever it is, when they're playing a difficult piece, you'll see them do this. They're waving the hand in front of the face. Yeah, for people who aren't watching, they're waving the hand off to the side in a circular motion. So after they release a note, their hand will sort of go off into the air in some grand gesture.

34:26Now, the physics of the piano is that once your fingers have hit the keys, the way you release it has no impact on the sound at all. And what you do with your hand after has nothing to do with it. But maybe it has something to do with the mood they're in or the embodiment of the emotion or something. But I think it's mostly for the audience's benefit that they do these grand gestures with their hands. They can believe anything they want to believe. I've met really wonderful musicians who think that the music is in their fingers, not in their brains. And I have to say, well, if we scoop your brain out of your head, you're not going to be able to play anymore.

35:06And they say, oh, yes, I would because it's in my fingers. I say, no, you wouldn't. I can't believe they argue with you on this. It's a bold argument. I play music. I work with musicians who are brilliant and I don't want to say anything that's going to interfere with their process. How they get there in a way that will move me and make me remember a performance for 40 years or transform my mood for a week or more, I don't care how they get there. And so when we're talking about the bowls, if a bowl player believes that this frequency is going to have that effect. Whether it has that effect on me or not, it's having some effect.

35:45But I do want to say there is no science at all that says that particular frequencies are associated with particular mood states or particular therapeutic things. And there's this whole pseudoscientific nonsense about how you have to listen to 438 hertz tuned music instead of 440 or 432. It's a magic number. And if you look at 432 and you multiply it, it's the distance between here and the moon. And it's the number of seconds that it takes the earth to revolve around the sun. And it's the heartbeat of your cells or some nonsense. It's no, it's none of those things. I also don't have a problem with going to a Tibetan sound bath with a group of friends after we went on a hike.

36:29We did this recently. I was in Laos and it was like, Like, oh, this person's going to play the bull. It was relaxing. I slept well afterwards. Might have slept well anyway because I hiked all day, but it doesn't matter. The only beef I have with this stuff is where people go, you don't need harmful drugs. That's Western medicine. Or you don't need big pharma to pump you full of chemotherapy. You just need to listen to this sound and it will help you. That is where this stuff gets dangerous when people stop looking for real health cures or get confused between what is actually effective medicine for a thing that can kill them or hurt them, that's where I sort of have to draw the line.

37:08I'm not trying to rain on people's parade because they have a brass bowl in their living room that has a little thing that they like to do in the evening. That's harmless. It's a fun hobby. Go for it. But if you're going to use that as you cure for cancer instead of using medicine, you and I talked about this eight years ago or so when we were talking about my book, A Field Guide to Lies. And I remember the conversation My recollection is that we talked about, and I think you were provoking me by using the term Western medicine. Sure. There's not two kinds of medicine. There's not Western medicine and alternative medicine.

37:39There's just medicine. If something's been shown to work, we call it medicine. If it's not been shown to work, there are some people out there who will call it alternative medicine, but it's not an alternative. If we knew that it worked, it would not be an alternative. It would just be plain old medicine. So this is what killed Steve Jobs. Yes. Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer and he went to this charlatan named Dean Ornish who said, oh, I can fix that with yoga and diet. And maybe there were bowls involved. I don't know. And, you know, it killed him. He was going to die anyway, but he put all his faith in this weird thing.

38:20And when he changed his mind and saw it wasn't working, it was way too late for him to use actual treatments. Did he have a really bad prognosis? Because I swear I read somewhere that he had a very treatable cancer initially, and it just spread because he didn't do anything real to treat it. I haven't looked into this in 10 years, but I know that he didn't like what the doctors told him. Okay, that makes sense. So he found another doctor. Yes, air quotes. Who told him what he wanted to hear. Dangerous, dangerous. Tell me about music and memories. I find that I will listen to a song and immediately be transported back to a time where, I don't know, maybe that song was popular when I lived in Germany or maybe it was popular when I went to my high school prom or something like that.

39:08And you get those feelings come back. They come rushing back. That's why so many couples have a song, things like that. Is music generally anchored somehow to memories? Very much so. Not all music, but music that's associated with a particular time and place. And this is what Marcel Proust was writing about when he wrote about the Madelins, the cookies, or what we write about with smells, particular odors. If there's an odor that's ubiquitous and familiar to you and part of your life every day, that won't do anything. But every once in a while, you get a whiff. My grandmother used a very particular soap.

39:45I associated that smell with her. And when she died, she had two or three unused bars of this soap. And she died in 1987. And I would use the soap now and then. And it would instantly bring back a flood of memories of what she was like and what it was like to be with her. And it's because our senses are a trigger for memories. And most everything that you've experienced is in your memory system somewhere. The trick is to pull it out from all the things that are in there. And so you need something unique. The nature of music, at least in the last 60 years or so, is that we have popular music. We have songs that get played a lot for a relatively short period of time.

40:33Oh, yeah. And Happy Birthday and the National Anthem, things like that, where you hear them all the time. they can invoke certain memories, but they're less likely to than that song you heard the summer you were 13, or the song that was playing when you had your first kiss, or the song that was playing in that new country you were living in. Those get attached to the memories, and all the sights and sounds and people and events are attached. Memory is multifactorial. It's pictures, it sounds, it smells, it tastes, it's touch. Does it work for bad things as well as, oh, I remember this song. I loved it.

41:13We used to play it in college and go cruise around in the car and meet girls. Does it also function for bad things? Can you hear a song and you're like, oh, this is when my parents got divorced. This song was on the radio. Yeah, absolutely. It absolutely works for that. And a lot of people who have had traumas, if there was music playing or a sound, a non-musical sound, the trauma can be re-invoked or relived or experienced through the sound. This is why soldiers who come back from the war with PTSD, if a car backfires, they duck for cover instinctively, and it can put them in a hyper-vigilant and traumatized state for days or weeks or years that they can't escape from.

41:58Just ordinary environmental noises, The wrong song comes on. Same thing. Yeah. One of my earlier memories that I'll never forget because I'd never seen anything like this. A friend's dad was driving us to lacrosse practice. This is sometime in the early 90s. And we were stopped at a red light and the cars behind us started to honk. And my friend was like, dad, go. And he froze. And he goes, you guys hear that? And we were like, yeah, the horns. He goes, no, you guys hear that? He had been in Vietnam and he got so triggered by this helicopter that was quite loud and it was low. So it was really extra loud.

42:34And he just froze and he forgot where he was. Seemingly, he didn't know anything about what was going on in that particular moment. I emailed my friend about this and I said, do you remember that? And he goes, that definitely checks out as something that would have happened with my dad. So that was really disturbing. Well, of course, in a dangerous zone, a low helicopter can mean the matter of life or death. It could be somebody coming to rescue you. It could be somebody coming to kill you. And you have to freeze and take an assessment of the situation that really could kill you. And that moment, it's so horrible, the decision you have to make.

43:13Do I run towards it? Do I run away from it? Is this friendly or is this the enemy? It can be paralyzing. Yeah, that was one of those things where I just remember looking at my friend and being like, what the hell, dude? and he was just like, I don't know, whatever. And I remember his mom drove us the next time and we were like, what was that about? And she was like, oh yeah, something about Vietnam and it happens, it's very rare. But he never drove us to lacrosse practice again. I have a feeling when I told my parents, they were probably like, look, they're not letting my kid in the car with you.

43:42I mean, I feel bad for him. Obviously, this is something that affected him deeply, but I just found that to be so strange and it makes sense that the trauma and that sound are linked. I hope he's in a better place now because helicopters are everywhere. All right, if music can do all of this, can help us recall good memories, bad memories, help us calm down, help us get amped up. If music can do all that, why doesn't Spotify take my heart rate and physiological stress levels from my Apple Watch or my Oura Ring and suggest something to calm me down or to help my workout get better? I feel like Daniel Ek needs to get on this.

44:16They will. They are working on it. Are they? Okay. And Apple has Apple Music. That makes sense. In the foreseeable future, you will be able to opt in to letting the streaming service you listen to music on communicate with your Aura Ring or your smartwatch, your smart device. And maybe it'll alert you and say, hey, your blood pressure is getting a little high. Would you like me to play you relaxing music? Or maybe you'll opt into the automatic, whether you want it to or not. It'll start playing you relaxing music to lower your heart rate. And we know there is music that can do that in general for most people most of the time.

44:53But we also know there's music that does it particularly for you. They already know this, I'm sure, or could know it if they wanted to, because many of us have these devices that are monitoring. So I imagine a world in which music as medicine becomes invisible to us. Oh, you're on your way to the gym. The GPS knows you're on the way to the gym. It knows from past activity that you're about to get on the treadmill. It also knows that that cup of coffee you had this morning didn't really do the trick. You're a little bit sleepy. And so it'll play you ACDC or Van Halen or whatever pumps you up in the car on the way to the gym.

45:34And then you get there and it'll keep playing it. You've had a fight with somebody and it'll know what music will calm you. And the horizon, and we haven't used the two letters AI yet. But I think what AI can do for us here is whatever music might be relaxing to you today may not always relax you all the time because your brain is constantly changing. Different events and different physiological occurrences can lead you to have different kinds of anxiety, let's say. And so ideally what AI would do is it would start with a tried and true, this always calms Jordan down, and monitor in real time whether it's actually calming you down.

46:20And if it's not, it would get something else from your playlist. Or there are now 200 million songs across all the streaming services. It would find something you haven't heard that could become your new go-to thing and test it in real time, see whether your body really reacts. It seems like AI could actually just make music that it knows I will like in that moment. Probably could. Yeah, that'll be interesting. I think it's quite fascinating that music therapy is not only effective because, let's say, it's pleasurable. It actually is doing something in the brain. You mentioned the immune system in the book.

46:52You mentioned that music discovery can affect our immune system. What's going on with music discovery in our immune system? Why would we even evolve something like that, that ability? The why question with evolution is always tricky. We know that music can affect the immune system in several ways. Listening to pleasurable music can increase levels of immunoglobulin A, an important antibody that travels to the site of mucosal infections and help fights them off. We know that music that is pleasurable to you can increase the production of natural killer cells and T-cells, also important for fighting disease and infection.

47:34Some music can lead to reductions in inflammation. Why music does this and why the immune system responds to it, we don't know. But it does. And so evolutionary reason, my guess is that we evolved over tens of thousands of years with music and music co-evolved with us so that the kinds of music we made and gravitated towards was the kind of music that made us feel good and was a sort of iterative process where one changes and the other changes in response to it. So they co-evolved. I mean, music is ancient. I suppose it makes some sense. It just is sort of mystifying to me why we would integrate that music so thoroughly into our brains.

48:22I just don't understand. And I suppose maybe we never will. I've heard people who stutter normally don't always stutter when singing? What's going on here? So stuttering, like Parkinson's, is a motor disorder. It's a failure to regulate movements in a particular order and at a particular time. People who stutter are unable to get the words out in the right order and at the right time. The thing about music is that it has its own intrinsic tempo to it. Language, normal spoken language, doesn't. We sort of say things the way we want, when we want, but when we're singing, there's a time when the word has to come.

49:04And so if you can sing and not have any disfluency, it's because of music's internal clock that carries you along with it. So Elvis Presley, who we talked about earlier, was famously a stutterer when he spoke. He didn't stutter when he sang. He also acted, but he probably, when he was acting, memorized the script with a certain cadence. James Earl Jones, the actor, is very disfluent and stutters when he gives interviews. But when he's in a role, like in Star Wars or many of the other great roles he had, he has to be able to memorize the script with a cadence and work out ahead of time what the rhythm will be.

49:47And once he does that, these rhythmic circuits in the brain, which are separate from the language circuits take over. They effectively hijack the speech system and you're in the music mode. It seems like a miracle. And my mom is a speech therapist. I know teaching people how to manage a stutter is very tricky. It doesn't always stick. It's easier when they're kids going back to what we discussed earlier in the show. So this seems like a really good insight into how to get around something like that or manage something like that. What about Tourette's? You mentioned this in the book as well. There's a similar effect here as well.

50:22Tourette's is, by definition, a motor disorder characterized by tics, unwanted movements. There are some versions of Tourette's that include swearing uncontrollably. And at least with the tics, musicians who have Tourette's, such as Billie Eilish, the tics almost disappear when they're performing. Again, because the music system, in the way that singers can bypass the speech system, the music system takes over the motor system in its service, in the service of playing music. And so the ticks disappear, and it's an island of respite for them. They may not disappear completely, but they're certainly reduced.

51:03That's incredible. So it must feel so good for somebody who is constantly suffering from these ticks to play music and sing as much as possible. Yeah, it does. Man, that Tourette's stuff is fascinating. What many of you may not know is that I also have Tourette's, but it doesn't happen when I'm podcasting. How weird is that? F***ing shit, f***ing f***, balls. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the amazing sponsors who make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

51:40If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, go ahead and email me. I'm happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Daniel Levitin. What about MS, multiple sclerosis in music? I've got friends who've had this. It's something that scared a lot of us because we were all getting older and some of my friends just suddenly had symptoms of this. Can you describe what this is and what it does to your body? Multiple sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the myelin, which is the insulating sheath around the neurons.

52:20Neurons are sending electrical signals, and like the wiring in your house or in that microphone that's in front of you, they need to be insulated so they don't short-circuit or arc. The wires in your home have rubber around them or some rubberized plastic or insulating material. Wires, as it were, in your brain have myelin, which is a fatty white substance. And that's why we call it white matter. It's after the white insulating sheath. When that sheath becomes degraded due to the disease, it causes a lot of things. Memory trouble. Your neurons are not speaking to each other properly. Memory trouble, movement disorders, fatigue.

52:59And music plays a role there in all of them, but for different reasons. Music motivates you through the dopaminergic system, so it helps you get over the fatigue. It can help with memory problems to the extent that music can serve as a cue for some memory. And in the way of Parkinson's, it can help people with MS to walk and move more continuously and speak better. It's very scary. I've read some research that this comes from the same virus that causes mononucleosis, which I had that in college. Epstein-Barr virus, yes. So I think I got it from like, I don't know, going abroad and kissing girls in bars or something in Panama.

53:37Who knows? They called it the kissing disease. Yeah. Because it was transmitted by saliva. Yeah, that is just really scary. Why do some people get this and other people don't? Do you know? I'm not an epidemiologist. Right. Caveat. And I'm not a physician. I'm just a simple country neuroscientist. But what I do know about Epstein-Barr is that if you were to test the entire population, something like 90 % of us would have Epstein-Barr antibodies. I see. Even still now, you would have them. The question is whether you become symptomatic. So mononucleosis, Epstein-Barr, as far as I know, same virus.

54:19Mononucleosis is a manifestation of the virus. Some people have a recurrence of it later in life. The mono can come back 10 or 15, 20 years later. Sometimes it's diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. Sometimes it can become narcolepsy if there are other factors. But most of us are able to live with it and keep it in check. Some of us can't. We don't really understand the body's ability to fight these invaders very well. I see. Which is why long COVID is still a thing. We haven't figured that out. Some people get it. Some don't. Seems not to be particularly related to which strain of COVID you got or how severe your case was.

55:01So Captain Kirk used to say space, the final frontier. Yeah. I think the brain is the final frontier. Yeah. It's a vast, undiscovered, uncharted territory. It can be a little bit scary for those of us that are up in our 40s and stuff happening to our friends and it just it starts to get real. You mentioned with the stuttering and the Tourette's that there's almost like an alternative pathway in the brain for some of these things. I think a decade ago or so, we talked about paradoxical kinesia. So how an old grandma can fly into action and maybe move super fast in an emergency or how someone can lift a car off of their baby if it's trapped under the car.

55:42Is this the same kind of thing? How does this work? No, I think this is different. I think that is attributed to a sudden burst of adrenaline and some other factors. We're not talking about adrenaline here in a fight or flight emergency response. I think a better analogy is what happened with Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman from Arizona shot in the head in 2011. And she was shot. The bullet entered a part of the brain that is involved in speech, Broca's area, and she could not speak after the injury. But she learned to speak. And you can hear her give speeches now in 2025. and she sounds quite fluent.

56:24She used what was a technique called melodic intonation therapy. It turned out she, this has been well known for 100 years, some people who can't speak can still sing. And so she was taught to sing things, simple things, but necessary things like, show me to the bathroom, or I need a glass of water. And by repeating these songs in the intact music system, The musical circuitry is separate from the speech circuitry. You're still making very similar movements with the jaw and the lips and the tongue and the larynx, but it's music. So it's a different system. And this gets to a fascinating evolutionary issue, which is the brain wasn't designed.

57:08It's a Swiss army knife that evolved to solve a bunch of different adaptive problems. And so there's a speech system that evolved separately from the music system. And of course, if you were to design it now, you'd design it entirely differently. You'd make them a single system. Why wouldn't they be? They use a lot of the same capacities, a lot of the same operations, but they evolve separately. For that matter, the neurochemical system that evolved, there are a hundred different neurochemicals. Crazy. You don't need a hundred neurochemicals. And by the way, the neurochemicals don't do anything themselves.

57:42We say a dopamine motivates you and oxytocin makes you feel bonded. That's a very sloppy shorthand. Your listeners are going to hear this first because most neuroscientists won't tell you this. What they do is there are circuits in the brain that relax you, circuits that make you feel bonded to other people, circuits that motivate you. Those circuits evolve separately from one another. And it just so happens that they evolve so that a very particular neurochemical binds with receptors and activates the opening of those circuits. So we think of it as like a key and a lock. Yes, a key. Yeah, that makes sense.

58:21But if you were to design it from scratch, you might only need four neurochemicals. Huh. An excitatory one that is short-acting, like adrenaline. It doesn't stay around for a long time. An inhibitory one that's short-acting. And then a long-acting excitatory and inhibitory. Log-acting things like immune function. Yeah, four neurochemicals would do the trick, but we have 100. Wow. All because they evolved separately at different times, different ways. So it's just redundant. But hey, it works out for somebody who has a little bit of brain damage, right? Because they can use that other system to communicate in ways that the other system is now damaged.

58:59So is that why if someone has a stroke, similar to a gunshot wound to the head, they can maybe sing what they need or sing communication and something along those lines, as opposed to speaking if they can't speak anymore? There are a lot of demonstrations of this and some recent work being done at UC Berkeley by Robert Knight, my colleague there, where a patient came in just recently who had a stroke and spoke in what we would call a word salad. He could not say the words to happy birthday. When he tried, he said words that didn't belong in it and he couldn't get full words out. And he was like, huh, closet.

59:38Okay, poor guy. But he could sing Happy Birthday perfectly fine. And so Bob Knight taught him, you know, the guy is a grandfather. He likes going to the meat counter, the butcher, to order pork loin. So Bob taught him a little song. Go to the meat counter. Sing the song when you want to order pork loin because you can't speak to the butcher. So the guy goes and he sings to the butcher. I'm trying to imagine what that is. I'd like pork line. Does he have to finish the whole thing or is it just like one line? Yeah, yeah. Because the butcher could be like, I got it. I see you every Tuesday. I know already.

1:00:10Man, that would be... Today, could you give me some pork loin? Yeah. Tomorrow, I'd like some hot dogs.

1:00:19We're laughing at somebody who had a stroke. We are terrible people. Now, I'm not laughing at that person. Well, he laughs about it, too. Of course. I would hope so. Look, he can communicate after a stroke. It's amazing. There's nothing more awesome than that. What about music instead of or in addition to drugs? I mentioned the pain-killing thing earlier, but what about conditions like dementia? There's drugs for this. Do they work well? I don't really know. I don't think their cure-all are even highly effective at this point. Are people working with music on this, or is it just in the research phase?

1:00:52We cannot cure dementia. We can possibly slow it down with drugs. And there are some experimental drugs for this and some standard drugs. Riva Stigmine is one of the promising approaches the last time I looked, which is about four years ago. There are other things coming down the pike, these new GLP ones that gave us Ozempic. The next three to five years, I think we'll see some really dramatic movement there. But the role of music that's most apparent is that oftentimes people with dementia are experiencing a loss of memory such that they don't recognize loved ones. They don't know where they are or how they got there.

1:01:34And they may not even recognize themselves in a mirror. It's profoundly disoriented. Yeah, she is. And it causes many of them to just crawl into themselves, fold in on themselves because nothing makes sense. Or it can cause them to become violent because people are approaching them and kissing them and they don't recognize them. And why are you kissing me? I don't know you, depending on your personality and how you respond to being kissed. You know, it could be aversive. Or why are you talking to me? Like, you know, in that familiar tone, it's disrespectful. We've just met. They can become very agitated, violent.

1:02:11If you play music of their youth, a principle of memory, and I know you're fascinated by memory. You should have a colleague on who just wrote a book about memory. Whose name you can't remember right now? Actually, Charan Ranganath. Oh, he was on. Yeah, he was on recently. That was episode 1002. So it was actually June 2024. Yeah, super interesting guy. I will never not be fascinated by it because it's almost like this superpower that humans have that works in all these funny, mysterious ways. And now we're finding it interacts with music. One of the principles of memory is that the memories that get in earlier are the strongest and the most robust in many cases.

1:02:50You play a person with Alzheimer's or dementia, profound memory loss, a song from their youth, and it suddenly reconnects themselves. They reconnect with the self they thought they had lost. That must feel like a massive relief in some ways to somebody like that. And the relief can last for a long time. It can pull them out of themselves if they were catatonic or withdrawn and make them social again. Or if they were aggressive, it can calm them. That's good to know. It seems like that stuff should be on play from wake up until bedtime in any care home instead of some of the depressing silence, frankly, or loud ass TV that you hear in those places.

1:03:29What about music and sex? How can that help asking for a friend? A lot of people like making love with music on. There are a lot of different kinds of sexual activity. There's quickies, there's longies, there's different tempos to sex, both in the act itself, the movements, but also in the arc of it. Is this something that we only have 10 minutes before the kids get home? Or we've got a nice evening. Let's take our time and explore each other for an hour or so or two. Music can fill the silence in the background in a way that allows you to feel like you can relax and slow down if that's what you want to do.

1:04:10It can also guide the movement so that the sex becomes like a dance. The tempo, it can synchronize to it. It can also help invoke that default mode network. I think there's goal-oriented sex and non-goal-oriented sex. And by that, I mean most things we do have goals. There can be orgasm-motivated sex and just sex that's motivated by a desire for closeness and a connection with another person. It may end up in an orgasm or it may not. And the goal of it is not necessarily to have an orgasm. And it can still be very pleasurable and fulfilling and as rewarding as non-orgasmic sex, believe it or not.

1:04:51And so the music gives you permission to have that more leisurely kind. And if you're having trouble getting into that zone, the music can create a separate space in the way we might light incense or change the lighting. Or if you're not somebody who has a glass of wine all the time, the wine sets this apart as a separate event and a separate thing we're going to do together. So it's all about setting a space and a consciousness and an intention. People would use different kinds of music that's meaningful to them for these different experiences. I love the idea that we can utilize music for things like this.

1:05:33What about depression? So many people suffer from this, whether it's severe or minor. Can you share some insights into how music interacts with our brain to ideally alleviate symptoms of depression at some level? Is that a thing? It is. and it needs to match the state you're in. If you're depressed, you need to play depressing music. What? Really? You'd think it'd be the opposite. If you're depressed, you're typically in that situation because you're feeling to some degree misunderstood. Okay. Happy music is just a bunch of other people who don't understand you. I see. Yeah. Depressing music allows you to feel that you are understood.

1:06:10It allows you to live with that experience and thus overcome it. if I were to jury-rig this on my own, right, oh, I'm feeling down, I probably would just say, all right, Spotify, happy music. And then I would just be annoyed that this happy music was playing while I felt like crap. So it makes sense. You almost need to start from a point where the music is relating to me on my level. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. How can someone incorporate music into their daily life as a form of maybe self-care for mental health? Do you just wake up and assess your mood and play music according to that mood?

1:06:44Is that helpful at all? Yeah, it's helpful to have go-to playlists. If you're a real planner, as I am, I have a playlist that I have as part of my advanced medical directive that if I'm in the hospital and I can't speak for myself and I'm just languishing there, play me these songs. And they're songs from your youth? Not all. No? I'm not talking about if I have Alzheimer's, but songs that are meaningful to me and that will comfort me and help me to feel part of something larger rather than stuck in my own self. I see. Help me feel connected to the universe or to my own past and hopefully a future.

1:07:26I see. So this isn't something where you're incapacitated and this music will break you out of it. It's maybe something that'll just make you feel better. You're right. I should have an Alzheimer's playlist and a chemotherapy playlist. Before you forget to make it, yeah, exactly. All jokes aside. But yeah, before you can't make it, this is all, man, this is amazing. What about lo-fi beats? Are you familiar with this? Of course you are. There's a whole channel lo-fi girl, right? When you're studying or something, you put this on. This has just gained massive popularity for studying and focusing.

1:07:55Is there something in the structure of this that makes it effective, or does it just happen to be trendy? There is something about entraining gamma waves of your brain to music. It's still early days. I would say it's not pseudoscience, but it's not yet in the evidence base. Got it. Okay. I just wondered if the simplicity of lo-fi music maybe allowed the brain to enter some kind of flow state more easily. I don't know. Stabbing in the dark. Some people claim that lo-fi music enhances memory and learning. Also no evidence for this yet? Psyche Louie at Northeastern University, a tremendously talented researcher in this field, with her collaborator, Ed Large, University of Connecticut, has a new treatment for Alzheimer's that involves gamma wave lights flashing and music that has activity in the gamma wave as a way of slowing the progression of Alzheimer's.

1:08:53I just saw a demo of it a few days ago, and it was very impressive. Are there scenarios where certain types of music might hinder rather than help learning or focus? Is it, hey, we don't know if lo-fi music helps you focus, but we do know that heavy metal sure doesn't or something like that. Is there anything that's anti-focus, anti-learning, or is that not a thing? There is no evidence that listening to music while you study will help. There have been a thousand papers on this, literally a thousand papers. Proper music, not lo-fi beats music like you would have on the radio. Heavy metal, jazz, classical, no evidence that it actually helps you study, and in fact, evidence that it creates a state of divided attention where the results are worse.

1:09:36The problem is that it's so much more fun that we get deceived into thinking we're doing better, but we're not. I see. That's funny. I never thought about that. I think for me, I would listen to lo-fi beats when I'm trying to focus on something, but what it does is it blocks out the a-holes talking in the library that are distracting me. So that might be the only use of it, but honestly, a good pair of noise-canceling headphones or something where I couldn't hear anything is probably actually better. This is all amazing stuff. Music can heal you, can help you in some ways, help you get rid of pain, help you get laid.

1:10:11Excellent. What about bad or even evil uses of music? Is there music being used for the dark side at all? Speaking of James Earl Jones. certainly we use music to intimidate okay army bands may have battle of jericho the walls came tumbling down the idea is that loud music that is not the music of your tribe yeah the americans drove manuel noriega out of his compound in canaba when nothing else worked we turned off the water the electricity the air conditioning blockaded the food the only thing that made him give up was heavy metal music blasted at 160 decibels. He couldn't take it. Wasn't it Van Halen or was it Metallica?

1:10:54I think it was Van Halen. There'd be some poetic justice if they played jump. That's right. Yeah, that's right. I remember reading about this and it's funny, man. He's in there. He can't wash his hands, can't sleep. And he's finally, he's just, I can't take it with the guy with the leather bodysuit. Just I'll go to prison for the rest of my life. Yeah. The less obvious one is that although the music may not be intended to intimidate or disturb, it often does. When we ask people what are among the most unpleasant features of modern life, often in the top five is unwanted music in public places, piped in music.

1:11:35Or the guy with the Bluetooth speaker on the subway. They know who they are. Oh my God. Yeah. They're doing this on purpose, right? This is an attention thing. What do you make of that? I know you're way off topic, but those people, they have to know I'm the most annoying person here. I don't know. It was a beautiful pastoral afternoon in the countryside, and some guy came in with what must have been 2 ,000 watts of subwoofers in his pickup truck. And you could hear him coming from half a mile away, and then he just parked his car next to the reservoir and played his loud music, and it made it miserable for everybody.

1:12:08I don't know what that's about, but it was very obnoxious and unpleasant, and I left. There's a special place in hell for people who decide to ruin environments for everyone else. It's got to be an attention thing. I would love to hear people's theories. If you're a person who does this or used to do this, please email me and tell me why you did that. I got to know. It's got to be an attention thing. I can't think of any other reason. Or it's just that you're so self-absorbed. You don't care what other people are doing or think. Yeah, possibly. Yeah, some sort of disorder, I suppose. where do you see the future of music therapy and neuroscience heading in the next decade with the stuff there is an evidence base now for music therapies and music interventions music therapies are those done by a therapist music interventions are what you might treat your loved ones or how you might treat yourself or a doctor a dentist playing music in the dentist's office that's not a music therapist it's a music intervention we've seen increased recognition that this is a real thing by health care providers.

1:13:09State of New Jersey, Blue Shield, Blue Cross in the state of New Jersey now reimbursed for musical therapies. Massachusetts is giving out 12 vouchers for free arts therapy as a preventative to help people stay healthy in the first place. Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, is working to get legislation passed that will get Medicare to pay for music therapies and music interventions, maybe even for people who otherwise couldn't afford it, elderly people to have their Spotify subscription paid for as a prescription by Medicare, Medicaid. Interesting. Yeah, that would be, your Spotify price has gone up to$1 ,100 a month because insurance is paying for it.

1:13:49Oh, and you can only access these five playlists. Sorry. Anyway, that's a whole different podcast, I suppose, on the future of the American healthcare system. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss this. I just find it so amazing what the brain can do. I love the fact that music interfaces with our minds in such a primal way. And I think people, by the way, who love music as much as you do are going to get a lot more out of the book. Because I will admit a lot of the stuff in the book was like terminology, music stuff. Of course, I understood what you were saying. But a lot of the finer points probably went over my head as somebody who doesn't play a musical instrument and is not as much of a music fan as you.

1:14:26I recommend reading the book for people who like music and for people who don't care about it per se, but I think people who especially love music are really going to love the book as well. I tried to write it keeping in mind the dictum of The Simpsons, which is, The Simpsons is a cartoon that works at two levels. Kids love it, and then there's a lot of stuff that they're not going to understand, and they just ignore it. And then adults get this sort of satire and more advanced humor. So I tried to write the book thinking, I want to communicate at a level where the average high school student will get a lot out of it, but even scientists will get a lot out of it, too.

1:14:59I think you did a great job with it. Thank you, Jordan. But yeah, thank you once again for coming back on the show. Thank you, Jordan. Good to see you. The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery, with 75 % still unexplored. You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vescovo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans, built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures, revealing a world few have ever seen. 71 % of the Earth is ocean, and of that, 75 % is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary. Deep ocean in the middle of the Pacific is completely unknown.

1:15:33We just don't go there, and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean. I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans. If I'm going to spend money, I'm not going to spend it on a$10 million birthday party. I'm going to spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology. It was kind of like Ocean's Eleven, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management?

1:16:08Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking, they wanted to do it. That, I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries. But I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear, and I don't leave it to other people. I want to be at the control. When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together? Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15 ,000 meters. That thing was a tank. And things did go wrong, eventually.

1:16:44You can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware. And you need to mitigate those risks. What did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach? To find out, listen to episode 1089 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:17:23slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, comes out every Wednesday-ish, has something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, in under two minutes. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. And don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

1:17:53In this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in music, interested in the science of music, or alternative healing type stuff, maybe share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

1:18:21and we'll see you next time.