Scientists Discuss Music and the Origins of Language

You refer to a default mode network. What is that? This was one of the biggest findings in cognitive neuroscience in a generation: the brain wants to mind wander.

Are you suggesting that we made sounds if we don't yet have words or language as we now think of it? The available evidence is that the neural structures that encode music are phenetically older than those that encode speech. Wow. So evolutionarily, we were musicians before we were talking to one another. From a brain development standpoint?

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Yes, this is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and I've got with me Chuck Nice. Chuck, how you doing, man?

Hey Neil. All right. Okay, this is StarTalk special edition. It is. And if—if I've got you for StarTalk special edition, we also get Gary.

That's right, in this edition Gary O'Reilly is going to take us in. Gary, what do you have to tell us?

Generally speaking, music is a pleasure. We appreciate the artistry and enjoy the performance. Music can transport us to another time and place, alter our emotional state. Now ask yourself, what throws an audience into a trance or a performer into a flow state? Why do we get awms—that nasty little rascals—and they're annoying? They are just some of music's gifts. The ancient Greeks knew, way back when, that music has the power to heal. So we're talking the cognitive neuroscience of music, and for that we need someone very special whose range is nothing short of extensive: Daniel Levitin, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in music and psychology; multi-million bestselling author with another just out; a musician; a record producer; and an engineer working with some of the best in the business—and I mean the best. And I am just scratching the surface when I say that he has won loads of awards for loads of stuff.

So Neil, enjoy the show. Sorry I can't be there. Co stopped me, but uh, I know you're going to have a great, great time and it's going to be a fantastic show. Thanks Gary. Again, sorry you can't be with us.

So Daniel Levitin, Daniel, welcome to StarTalk.

Thank you for having me, Neil.

Yeah, listen, dude, you've done everything in your life. I haven't done an interview with you yet. Okay, and now you can die. So you're here primarily because you just released a book, yeah, and we're going to talk a bit about that, but mostly just about the human brain and music. When we look at your background, starting out as a music producer, and you knew everybody, anybody who's anybody… this book connects music and neurological health. Maybe we kind of knew it well, but this book—all 350 pages of it—is… it's 412. You didn't read the notes at the end.

Good. That was good. I read 4,000 peer-reviewed articles, so you wouldn't have to. And they're in the notes.

Very good. That's why we buy the books. Yeah, so you analyze and put into narrative something we always suspected was true but didn't really have evidence for it, right? And so let's just start from square one: the movie *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*. We communicate with those aliens initially with musical tones.

Yeah. It makes the bold assumption that aliens can hear, right? This is a sense that we have, and we're just assuming other life forms will have it. They might have some other that we don't. So that's our bias. It's—to see what biases we put on our aliens. Plus they were bipedal; they had a head, two eyes, a nose and mouth, ears. Okay, that's our bi—they also had lousy taste in music because they actually liked that song that we played them. It was awful. All four notes. Yeah, but there is this idea of five notes; there is this idea that a sufficiently advanced technology society will have things like the Fibonacci series or a geometric series, powers of two. And so the idea that there might be some universal language—math would have been the obvious one—not so entertaining for a Spielberg movie to have. Perhaps they have prime numbers popping up.

That's right. Right, right. That's it. Would have totally fed the geeks in the world. We would have flocked to the film.

Can you comment on why we care at all about music? What we do know—you know, music being auditory—doesn't leave the same kind of trace as, say, cave paintings, right? So a lot of this is speculation.

When you say tra—the same historical evidence, archaeological, physical evidence, right? Although we do have bone flutes that are dated between 40 and 60,000 years ago.

Oh, wow. And they've been found not just in—well, you just said that like that's a thing. You mean someone took a femur, carved it out and blew air through it and made a flute?

Yes. You just said a bone flute, like—get in the corner, H—yeah, you know, shut up. I shut up, cuz there are many, many jokes that go with bone flute, but you are exactly right to point this out because yes, somebody had to find a femur, right, and drill holes in it at precisely spaced intervals, right, to get particular pitches. They're 40 to 60,000 years old. They're among the oldest artifacts we find in human burial sites. I'm guessing they might have done this with wood. Cuz it's easier, but wood doesn't last as long.

Going to say calcifi—califi—bone be here. Wood—wood would turn to dust. Yes. And so the interesting thing is, okay, well, if they went to that much trouble to have this technological thing, you know, of of drilling the holes, however they did it, the bone flute wouldn't have been the first musical instrument. They would have been stretching skins across stumps; they would have been beating their chest, Bobby McFerrin style.

This is perfectly reasoned. The bone flute requires sufficient effort, right, that surely there were other instruments made with less effort before you got to that and didn't last.

Okay. Right. Yes. And it makes sense because there are other instruments that happen without you doing anything but singing. Yeah. Singing, banging two can—can keep a beat. Early rock music. I see what you did there. Or if they had any Coke bottles, you just—at the time. Okay. So we agree it existed; we agree it's—ask then the question why. So in my field, we have a journal called *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*, and it's an interesting model for a peer-review journal. Somebody writes a target article—I don't know if they have this in astrophysics—uh, somebody writes a target article, and then other people around the world who are qualified in the field get to write commentaries on it, peer rev—and those commentaries are peer-reviewed. So you have an idea put forward, and then maybe 40 or 50 people weighing in on what they think about it. Do you have this?

Not really. It's a wonderful thing because—well, we do have in—in the journal *Nature*, right, we have—you can write an article, and the article is a little bit controversial, the editor will solicit a comment on it. I've written some of those.

Okay. So beyond that, no, we don't. It's not a free-for-all as you describe. The nice thing is that it helps a field to cohere into some kind of a consensus, almost a town hall. Yeah. Then the target article people get to write a response to the—

Yeah. So I mentioned this because in 2019 there were a couple of target articles about the evolution of music, and this is something I devoted a whole book to in 2008, *The World in Six Songs*: the subtitle was *How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature*. And the idea was, you know, like so many things with evolution, as you've explained to the public better than anyone can, things don't evolve typically for a single reason or a single purpose; there's—there's a bunch of different evolutionary pressures. And in the case of music, there were at least six independent lines of why music became important and encoded in the genome and passed down, not just culturally but genetically.

Give me the—the most significant one that has to do with survival.

I am not—qualified to—I'm not—six—why me—one of the six—I will—you asked me to rank order. I'm not an evolutionary biologist.

Okay. Give me any of the six.

Okay. My favorite of the six.

Okay. There you go. Your favorite. Think about the transmission of information within a culture and across generations. Now we do that by talking, but we also write things down. We've only had written language on this planet for about 5,000 years. In fact, it almost defines history.

Well, that's right, absolutely. But you know, humans have been on the planet for 40 to 100 or 200,000 years longer than that, depending on how you define human. And so for most of the time we've been on the planet, we did not have writing. And what we believe from studying contemporary hunter-gatherer societies that are cut off from Western civilization and industrialization—we have every reason to believe they're living the way they might have 20,000 years ago—we believe that they used music to encode knowledge. For example, it's a learning—they would have a song that would encode: this is the route to the well, right, and this is the roote you take to the other well if this one goes dry; or a song that says: don't go over that mountain because great-grandfather OG went there and the neighboring tribe killed him; and this is how you make a watertight canoe; or this is how you boil a plant so it's not poison.

Why music? Because first of all, the available evidence from my lab and now many others around the world—what's your lab, by the way?

At McGill University. McGill, up in Canada. Yeah. Yes. Okay. The uh, Laboratory for Music Cognition and Expertise. The available evidence is that the neural structures that encode music are phenetically older than those that encode speech.

Wow. So evolutionarily, we were musicians before we were talking to one another. That's what—so it seems from—from a—from a brain development standpoint.

Yes. And Steven Mithen has written a wonderful book called *The Singing Neanderthals*, where he posits that some sort of proto-language was music.

Sounds like a great punk group—by sing—the Singing—

Yeah. Are you suggesting that we made sounds if we don't yet have words—that we could imagine writing—or language as we now think of it?

Sounds can be put together into musical—yeah. So there's two parts to this. Let's talk about sound without language and sound with language. And if you don't mind, I'll go backwards in time.

Do so. Once we had language and we set the language to music—once we had words that we set to music—those words would become encoded and preserved in memory uh, with far greater resistance to distortion.

Oh my God. Right. Because you've got the mutually reinforcing cues of rhythm, accent, structure, meter, and rhyme scheme. So that there's a limited number of ways that you can fit words into that space. And so you look at the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*, which were orally transmitted very, very long poems; the Old Testament, the Bible—uh, Psalms are all songs.

That's right. And the Old Testament was sung, right, before it was ever written down, for a thousand years, and preserved, as far as we know, fairly accurately. And so songs are able to resist, to a large degree, distortions that simple speech is not.

Makes perfect sense, simply because we teach all of our children in song first: the ABCs. Yes. All of your nursery rhymes are sung. Little kids learn the body parts through a song, right? You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out, put right foot in, you turn—head, shoulders, knees, and toes, knees and toes. Everything we learn as a kid, we—I mean, a lot of what we learn is—that explains why it would have had evolutionary value because we can remember lessons—yes—for where the water hole is, where the food—how to not get eaten. Right? It's like the equivalent of the bee dance. We sang—like bees dance. That's how they give direction.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's how we give—the bees do the waggle—the wagle wag. So—so might you then suggest that among vertebrates at least—birds engage in song in this—oh, well, whale song—we call them songs. Maybe they're just angry and they're complaining. Well, this is—this is really humans which is the whale equivalent to get off my lawn—get—get the hell off my planet or I've got lomago.

So just to sharpen my question: what other animals offer any evidence at all for musicality, if not birds—when we think of bird song, whales—when we think of whale song—or other creatures that make what we think of as melodic sounds to one another?

So this is a very um, contentious question in the ethology community. Remind me what ethology is.

Uh, the study of animal behavior. That's called ethology, is it not?

No, I don't know—biology, let's say—no, but ethology—yeah, ethology—animal behavior. Yeah, cool. Thank you. So let's look at the characteristics of human music. For one thing, we'll sing when we're all by ourselves. Birds won't. Birds will only sing if they know there's another conspecific nearby bird. And whale song is communicative. It's—when—when we speak to one another, we are speaking with a specific intention, usually, and we're referring to things. All the animal calls that we know of are referential to some event in the world. They're either a meeting call or a call to distress: hey everybody, look out, there's a predator here; or hey, there's some food over here. Uh, they are specific, stereotyped communications that are used in the presence of others. They aren't, for the most part, changeable. We have an infinite variety of songs. Birds do not. They're not riffing on a—right—a melody. I have a bird song identifier on my—on my smart phone, and the only reason it works is because they can pull it out of the sound and because they don't change the song, right?

Right. Because you can—it could be a noisy environment, but if there's a bird in there, it will find that bird—and the bird in New York and its offspring and a bird in Illinois and a bird in Brazil—if it's the same species, they're going to sing more or less the same song their whole lives. And it's encoded. And you know how we know this? My colleague, Evan Balaban, did a study. He took embryonic—I don't remember the—let's—well, he took—yeah, he—he took—he took eggs—emic bir—he took fertile—he took—that's an egg—the egg is an embryo, right?

Well, yeah, he took fertile eggs. Okay, let's say it's a chicken, and he gets the auditory cortex of a zebra finch and he implants it in the developing brain of the chicken.

Wait, is the zebra finch a zebra or a finch?

It's a finch. It's kind of—kind of a bird—a songbird. I'm just being literal here cuz you know, you'll name stuff—you know—zebra finch—take a sber auditory cortex and puts it in the developing brain and vice versa. It's not zebra that looks like a finch; it's a finch that has zebra stripes.

Exactly. Exactly right. Got—and so the question is, are birds learning their song from their parents and from the environment, or is it hardwired? And what he found was the chickens started singing the song of the finches, and the finches started clucking like chickens.

Oh, because it's hardwired. That sounds like a great Pixar movie—somebody mixed up the eggs at the beginning.

You're not a chicken. I'll be a chicken if I want to. I could be whatever I want. The chicken goes scramble—the farm animals—that'll mess up the farm. So these are hardwired uh, actions in these anim—for everybody else, right? But not for us. Not for us. Everything that we know about animal communication is that it's not music the way we would define music. It's not infinitely generative. You can't model with a Markov chain.

Is there any evidence that we have always enjoyed music as entertainment? Because you know, when you talk about it, it becomes this directional medium; it's a medium of direction where we're telling each other stories or we're giving each other, you know, information. At what point do we have proof or evidence historically that it went from that—which it still is—which we just determined—to: man, this is my jam. I love this so much. What a great song. And—well—so one of the other uses of music is to create a bond between mother and infant because the infant would imprint on the mother's singing voice. And we now know that relaxing, comforting song can release prolactin, which is a soothing and tranquilizing hormone. So we've got a number of different reasons why music was there, and they're subserved by different neurochemical systems.

This works even in utero. Yeah. So by the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system is fully functional.

Wow. And the fetus can hear sounds. It's through the amniotic fluid. It would be like—it would change the frequency of it?

No, it would not change the frequency. It would change what frequencies you hear. So if you put your ears under water—that the same thing?

I—I don't get the difference. Oh, well, I mean, it's not like a prism that can change—isn't it exactly that—I can change the frequency by speeding up tape, but if I simply play music in a different medium, it doesn't change the frequency. It changes which frequencies are emphasized over others. If you stick your ears underwater in a swimming pool or a bathtub and music is playing, you'll only hear the—primarily hear the bass notes, though the frequency of those baits notes hasn't shifted appreciably, although water is a different medum—the mayor—but you could do the calculations and see—I think I have to think about this.

Okay. Okay. Let me table that for a moment.

Yeah. So the value of a lullaby, for example, is not just soothing auditorally; it's soothing chemically, as you described.

Yeah. And what's the—what is the chemical?

Prolactin.

And what does that do?

It's a soothing, tranquilizing hormone that calms you down. A neurohormone.

Yeah. So does different music then activate different parts of the brain?

Yes. Holy moly. Music activates every part of the brain that we have so far mapped.

Oh my goodness. That's astounding. When you activates—you mean all parts of your brain respond, but not—not all at once—not to every piece of music. Okay. So m—music re-wires your brain. Would this account for why—because they say this same—of smells—where you can hear a piece of music and it takes you right back to a time and a place and you—everything is explicit without you even trying to summon that memory?

Depends on the music uh, so uh, by that I mean the current theory of memory—the neurobiology of memory—is that everything you've experienced—your thought—gets in your memory. It's there. The problem is getting it out. And so what you need—and to get a memory out—is what we call a retrieval cue. And that retrieval cue should be unique. So if I sing you "Happy Birthday," that's not going to bring you back to a particular time—all associated with hundreds of—I heard that on my ninth birthday.

Oh my God. Not going to happen. But if I play you—"Na na hey hey kiss him goodbye"—and you haven't heard that in a long time—or "Tears of a Clown"—or something that you associate with a particular time in your life, you are brought back there because it's uniquely associated with that time in your life. Like PR's melins, right?

Okay. Or a smell. That's pretty cool. I mean, is that why—and then this just popped in my head because what you just said—Tony Bennett had Alzheimer's, and the thing that they said often about him was—even when he was in the midst of an episode where he could not remember even that he was Tony Bennett—he could sing his songs. You could start playing—"I Left My Heart"—and he would jump in.

Yeah. And then he would start singing in St. Louis. Right? Almost worked. That's messed up, man.

I know. That's messed up. We should probably cut that.

I don't—no, don't cut that. That's—that's hilarious. That's St. Louis's comedy gold. You kidding me? But so I mean, do we—I mean, that—that's pretty wild. Is that the reason we saw it with Glen Campbell too, which is why he was able to perform well into the affliction that he suffered?

Yeah. And I've had the opportunity—the privilege—to see his brain scans from when he was on the tour. Half of his brain was offline. The Alzheimer's had really made it so—half of his brain—literally half his brain—was not functioning, but he was still the best guitarist on the planet, arguably, and could still remember the songs. He might do them two or three times in a row cuz he couldn't remember he had just done it, but the act of doing it was intact.

Yes. Is he drawing from the part of his brain that works? He must be.

Well, so the interesting thing about brains is they are massively—any sentence that begins: the interesting thing about brains is that—everything—here's an uninteresting thing about brains.

All right, go on. Give—tell me something.

Interesting about brains: they're massively redundant. That's what I came to learn in recent years. So whatever circuits there are, they're massively redundant, uh, and it makes evolution sense. If you get a hit in the head, you don't want to lose the ability to do important things.

The other thing we talk about a lot in my field is cognitive reserve. By analogy, if you're a marathon runner and you can run 26 miles on a bad day with COVID and a sprained ankle, you can probably still run five miles faster than I can. You've got all this athletic reserve built up—musculature, uh, air capacity, not to mention willpower, right, to work through it. Musicians have cognitive reserve in the musical domain, and they have so much of it that you can lose lots and lots of circuits, and the other redundant circuits are still intact. Interesting.

And so what I said in my book, *Successful Aging*, and reiterated it in this, Chuck, when you lose half your brain, you might still be able to tell jokes. I am right now. What are you talking about? Might be able to—this is how I've made my entire living. So the—the expression, "If you had half a brain, you'd be dangerous," I do have half a brain. Okay, go. I interrupted. Sorry, go on.

If you learn an instrument at an older age—I write about this in *Successful Aging*, which was the previous book, but also reiterated it here—it's never too late to learn an instrument. NE, if you're 70, 80, not too late. And I'll tell you a story about that in a second, but it's neuroprotective. Your neuroplasticity is the fancy word for making new neural pathways. Right, we do that our whole lives. If you—if you ever heard that, "Oh, you don't grow new neurons after a—" No, not true. So even if you learn music at a later age, yeah, that will help this neuroplasticity. It's neuroprotective, and it means that by building up all this cognitive reserve, all these new pathways, for one thing, it's invigorating, and—and you get a sense of agency and—uh, really self-efficacy by learning something new, and you can then engage with some of the greatest works made by some of the greatest minds in history.

The story of my grandmother, I think, is a—a very personal illustration of this. My grandmother was born in Berlin in 1897 and had to leave under the—under the Nazis. My grandmother escaped with her three daughters and her husband; the rest of the family were all killed. On her 80th birthday, my grandmother, uh, told my mother and I that she was so grateful to be here in the United States, to have been able to raise three children here, to have a country that would take her in. And she said that she ever since she came over in 1939, every single morning in gratitude, she sang "God Bless America," a song written by another Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin. So she would sing the song, sing it. So my mother and I went out to Radio Shack and got her an $80 keyboard, electronic keyboard, and we put little pieces of tape on it with numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, so she could play the melody. And she played it every morning. And when we saw her on her 81st birthday, she had taken the tape off, 'cause she had memor—memorized the right-hand part. On her 82nd birthday, she had worked out a rudimentary harmony with the left hand, and she played that song every morning until she died at 97. And I think that having learned the instrument, having a way to express gratitude, had a lot to do—it's an N of one, but it's a very powerful experience.

So, Daniel, you have a recent book, uh, published with W. W. Norton. W. W. Norton, that's—that's who your publisher is? Yes. Anyone over 70 will get that reference. Okay. No, yeah. If you're an Eddie Murphy fan, you'll get it too. Oh, yeah. You'll get that from that one skit he did. Yeah. I'm with W. W. Norton. I'm very happy, uh, yeah, yeah. I have a few books with W. W. Norton. That was one part of the attraction for me. Oh, is that right? Yeah, really? Yeah. Do I get 10%? No, don't—a bet—the publishers, uh—so in it, which has a—the beautiful title, *I Heard There Was a Secret Chord*. It's great. That's a—that's a—that's a beautiful song by—who wrote that? The—um, Leonard Coh—Leonard Cohen. He's got that, "I heard there was a secret chord that pleased the Lord," and he just hears it. It's like, "Oh, I gotta—" Yeah, it gives me the—not the willies, but even—even without knowing the song, it makes you feel very Gwyneth Paltrow-y, you know. Okay, like, "I—at this book, for some reason." Yeah, it just—it draws you to it. So yeah, we should—we should bundle this with sales of Goop. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So you—you refer to a default mode network. What is that? This 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 you know, a lot of things we thought we knew turned out not to be true. And so the job of behavioral scientists—we have a little bit easier than—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—and all the rest. So the idea that the mind wants to wander, uh, as opposed to paying attention, now has some neural biological, uh, basis. It takes energy to pay attention to something and to keep your mind from wandering. And by energy, I mean, uh, 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—so now 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—and the phrase "paying attention" is actually quite accurate. You're—you're paying with glucose, and it's a limited-capacity resource. When 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—um, if I'm trying to solve a problem and it eludes me, it must mean, in most cases, that the solution is—is nonlinear; it's not just connecting A to B, two things that I knew; it's having to come up with a nonlinear 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.

So I think everything we've described thus far has been known to us—all the—the mood-setting, the memory-jogging, the—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 start a YouTube channel? They get a—all of them. All of them. That's every YouTuber that you—yeah, just turn on YouTube, and you're looking at that. Yes. Yeah. No, no, the—the evidence was weak, and I didn't want to go there. It's—it's 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. So 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, which is COVID or colds. Music also boosts the production of natural killer cells—NK cells—and T cells, which travel to the site of an—to fight an infection. The most sickly people in the world—people who never listen to music—is that—well, we—is the inverse true as well? We—well, we're talking about significant, uh, but small effects. I mean, and certainly there are always exceptions in the tails of the distribution, of course. So quantify your statement that it improves your resistance, your wellness. Quantify that. You mean like P less than .05? No, I mean, how much of an effect does it have on your immune system, for example? It can boost the immune system, uh, 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. The—these—well, you get five colds, but they just won't be as bad. Well, well, well, that's right. I mean, that can happen too. Yeah, we don't really know, uh, and I can't—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—point whether they're successful at fending off a disease or not, there's a lot of other variables. Okay, so there'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—cause you expect the loog—logical, right? So that's one thing. So your wellness. Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is characterized by a degradation of cells in the basal ganglia. I've seen brain maps—brain back here—yeah, at the—underneath there—basal gang—ganglia. Yeah, a group of subcortical nuclei that are connected to the brain's own internal clock. So what happens is, uh, dopamine is normally used for signaling and transmission of information in this cluster of neurons—wa—in dopamine—in a 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. Interesting. When you're experiencing pleasure, and dopamine is released in the lymbic system, including the ventral tegmental area, you feel pleasure. So dopamine does different things in different places, and it helps to maintain a steady gait and synchronized circuits that are required for—for walking, for movement, uh, 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, um, an inability to maintain a steady gait. Sometimes 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 festination. 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, right? 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 Thaut at University of Toronto. He was at Colorado State when he developed it. And let me guess, that's where you play the—bgs—you can tell by the way I use my walk—that's exactly right. And—or any music by—in sync. 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 give—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, 'cause I—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. Let 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 US. Oh, well, then music doesn't stand a chance. It's the number one reason people—I'm surprised it's only $680 million. Yeah, I mean, when you think of painkillers, pain relievers, pain—people with chronic pain, right? And the whole—it's all about pain manag—conservative number. Yeah. It's the number one re—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 equivalence, which is aspirin, or you know, something from a poppy, uh, or 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. Remind me what endogenous means. Internal to the brain. Its own—you could just said 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. Huh. Okay, we like—tell it like we see it. But the sun calls them endogenous sunspots. Okay, so it's endogenous. Keep going. The brain's producing its own opioids, uh, 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, right? If you do it in—you can do it either way. It can either—it can be the painkiller or it can just assist the painkiller. It doesn't make a difference. That's right. It doesn't make a difference. Wow. Yeah. How about any other sort of neurokinetic afflictions that might be touched by music? Multiple sclerosis arises—you know, the—the neurons have an insulating sheath, like the wiring in your house is insulated, 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—a white fatty tissue, which is why we call it white matter. And, uh, multiple sclerosis is a loss of myelination. Ouch. Ooh, that sounds terrible. So—so you have cross-circuits—yeah, short-circuiting—yeah, of your brain signals. But music can help with the movement disorders of multiple sclerosis. And 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—ay. 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—I'm ready for that to fix everything. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's—it's astonishing what—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 human what we've been doing for 100 years in animals, which is to measure from single cells at a time. And so, you know, it's not far off. Well, we will figure out where the stuttering cells are and maybe be able to treat it—treat that. And how about Tourette's syndrome? Yes. Yeah. But tell me about that. Tourette's disease is debilitating. It, uh, in almost every case, is accompanied by tics—unwanted motor movements, facial tics, and—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 thought—yeah, I—I read somewhere that was the rarest of the—yeah, it is. Oh, that right? That's the rarest of Tourette's where people actually swear uncontrollably. The tics and often what they do is make sounds instead of swearing. They like—that's right. That's right. You know, something like that. Music can help that too, it seems. So—so I write about—um, the musician—it seems so—you're a scientist sitting in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. Don't you—you're supposed to lie. I don't ask you a question—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. She has Tourette's, and she finds that when she's singing, the Tourette's seems to go away—seems to, because she's not keeping a log, she's not being observed and monitored, uh, 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—yeah, yeah. Francis Collins has been a big promoter of this work, though no longer—ah, head of NIH, is that correct? He's—he's been in the White House Science office now. Okay, uh, and he's working on eradicating Hep C. But he convened a meeting of, uh, 50 scientists in DC last December on music and medicine. Oh, and—uh, he entrusted me to help him choose the scientists who would be there. We also invited professional musicians. You get to tap some of that budget that's allocated to a non-traditional medicine. Yeah. So there's an Institute for Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and Emily Edwards, uh, runs the place, and she is terrific, because the NIH has a budget line—oh, they do—for that, right? Yeah. So they—but it's also the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke—the NI—the addiction agency, National Cancer Institute. I think most of the 26 institutes now are interested in music is medicine, for one thing, because it's a 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—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, you know, overhead. 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—interesting—that has the opposite effect. So I—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? I used to know, but I forgot. That was too easy; that was really low, low, so low. That was windfall on the ground, right? That’s not even right. Yes, that’s called bending down and picking up an apple; it’s not even low-hanging. 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, uh, this is the idea of the connectome, which Sebastian Seung at Princeton and others have been working on. That’s a recent term, right? The connectome? Yes. And the idea is it’s parallel to the genome. Uh, it’s not enough to know where all the neurons are, 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 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 it’s the experience is delivered to you beginning with uh some stimulation impinging on your sensory receptors, setting off a cascade of neurochemical neuroelectrical activity. And so there’s some group of neurons that are delivering that experience. If it’s wine, it’s the taste buds uh and your olfactory system and the olfactory bulb, and it presents it to somewhere in your brain that has self-consciousness and awareness—in the the prefrontal cortex—of what’s happening. If you were to later remember that experience, uh, 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. This 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, yeah, of you getting punched in the nose? Yeah. So what, what then of the—what’s that movie with Arnold was in it? Um, Total Recall. Total 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. Yeah, yeah. And that would be just as good. Oh, remember we were on the beach, and we found the shells, and and yeah, that was great, and it cost you 20 bucks instead of $2,000. My colleague Danny, and collaborator Danny Kahneman—recently passed away—Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who won the Nobel in economics for his study of studies of how human beings um are irrational, how the brain is irrational. And he documented—did he need to have a study to show that we’re irrational? Come on now. Well, he had he he cataloged the different kinds of irrationality. That’s pretty cool. Okay, it’s not good enough just to know we’re all irrational. What category 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, uh, but it’ll be free; or it’ll 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. But 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 um 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 with where people told me I had a good time, but I for sure cannot remember. Was uh, it was single malt Scotch involved very much so.

One 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. You didn’t smoke enough. Smoke enough, me. This is called state-dependent memory retrieval. It was discovered by my one of my teachers, Gordon Bower at Stanford. And when when did that happen? Oh, we discovered it in the 70s. I’m I’m I’m I’m old enough to have been in college in the 70s, and that’s what I remembered this coming out. This was a big finding. I mean, the idea is if you study in one classroom, uh, 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—he had a term: state-dependent memory retrieval. One of the experiments they did was parachuters: you learn a 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. And it turned out the finding wasn’t as strong as they thought, uh, because it was not the actual physical state of of being in an airplane; it was the state of arousal, of being that energized. Okay, so not a complete duplicate of your scenario, just it’s a duplication of your emotional state. 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, right? 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. It’s just like, oh, it’s 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 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.

So Daniel, this has been a delight. Thank you for having me here at the Hayden Planetarium. Uh, 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. [Music]