Transcription
Memories that you have for music you heard as a child stay with you the rest of your life. My name is Doctor Daniel J. Levitin.
Most of us know what kind of music we like. But we run out of music that we like. I mean, we've heard it too many times. And so in the future, doctors, music therapists and others will help us to find music that will help us meet our therapeutic goals. In other words, if you want to relax, if you want to focus better, if you want to boost your immune system, we can get professional help at helping us to sort through the 200 million songs that are on streaming services.
We now think that everything you experience gets into your memory. The reason you don't remember it all is you have trouble pulling it out. But music is this special stimulus that has a lot of different attributes, a lot of features. There's rhythm and melody and harmony and lyrics and the sounds of the different voices and instruments. Each of those gets stored into your memory separately and together, meaning that it's a very robust system. It's a memory system that can last all through your life, even if you get a concussion or you experience cognitive decline due to aging or Alzheimer's disease.
In many studies, we put people in a brain scanner, in an MRI machine, and we asked them to listen to music, and we don't give them any further instructions. Other than that, they have to stay still or the scan won't work. And what we find is the part of their brain that would be snapping their fingers or tapping their feet is active. It's almost as though they can't help themselves. They're not actually moving, but the part of the brain that would cause them to move is active because the tempo of music, the beat of music, is something that captures our attention, and there are direct connections between your ear and the movement centers of your brain.
Another thing we find, we put people in an MRI brain scanner, and we find that their emotional centers become very active. The same parts of the brain that would be active if you were really thirsty and you had a drink, or if you saw some chocolate and you got to eat it. The pleasure center of the brain and the chemical dopamine is released when we have this pleasurable music play.
Another thing that happens in the brain is when you listen to sad music, the, there's a very interesting hormone called prolactin that's released. This is the same chemical released both between a mother and an infant during nursing. It's a soothing, tranquilizing hormone, which is why sad music sometimes is more healing than happy music.
One of the things that my laboratory has tried to study is where goosebumps come from, that, that, that feeling you get of your hair standing on end on your arms or on the back of the neck. We often get that in scary movies. We can get it from a really beautiful piece of music, and we don't really know why that happens. We're working on it. It seems to be related to the fact that the auditory system is connected to the reptilian brain. The the core emotional center of your brain and auditory system is connected to movement. And the kind of movement you'd have to make in a scary situation, like a tiger coming towards you that would make your hair stand on end and get your adrenaline pumping, seems to be activated by music as well, except not in a frightening way, in a pleasurable way. Pleasure and, and pain and fright are all somewhat related. They're they're only different in small ways as far as physiology is concerned.
My lab was the first to show that when people listen to the same piece of music, even if they're not together, their brainwaves literally synchronize. The brain activity is synchronized in time and in the regions of the brain. We're literally on the same wavelength, and we're, if we're in the same room with people while we're listening to music together, say, at a concert, not only are the brainwaves synchronized, but we're experiencing an exchange of oxytocin, this hormone that binds us together as a people. Oxytocin played a role in ancient prehistory, in caveman days, where we would sing around the fire all night to ward off predators or a neighboring angry tribe, and we became bonded to one another. It's the reason that armies have marches. It helps them to feel more cohesive.
I have a new book called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, and it's about how we can use music to cure ourselves of illnesses or to get ourselves in a situation where we don't get sick in the first place. So one example of music as medicine is that if you listen to music that you like, you can boost your immune system. If you learn to play an instrument, you can get better eye hand coordination and build up reserves in your brain that allow you to be in a better position to fight off infections and fend off disease. And if you're sick or in pain, music has been shown to be a natural pain reliever, to help us fight infections such as colds and flus.
Another example of music as medicine is we find that people who are depressed can use music to lift them out of the depression even more effectively in many cases than drugs or therapy. Most research starts with an observation. Your uncle tells you a story at a party, or, you know, you read something in the newspaper that's just, just a story. And you think, well, maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Let's test it. And so in the case of depression, people have been using music to cure depression for 20,000 years. But does it really work better than anything else? In collaboration with my colleagues at UCLA, for example, we get people who are depressed and have not, and the depression hasn't responded to drugs or to talk therapy or to something called TMS, which is a magnetic stimulation of the brain. We, we play the music and we find that they are able to recover more quickly from the depression.
Now, how might this work? How might music be causing us to get out of depression? Usually when you're depressed, it's because in some sense you feel misunderstood. Your friends, your parents, your family, the world has misunderstood you. And so the last thing you want is to hear happy music, because that's just somebody else who doesn't understand you at all. You put on the right sad music, and suddenly you recognize in the sounds of it, in the chords, in the, in the song, that's how I feel, often a feeling you can't put into words, and you realize, oh, I'm no longer sitting at the edge of the cliff by myself. There's somebody else there. They feel the same way I do. That's comforting. And then you realize, not only do they feel the way I do, but they somehow got through it, came out the other side and turned it into this beautiful work of art. That's inspiring.
One study that really surprised me when I was writing the book was, there's a disease called multiple sclerosis, which causes, it's a degenerative disease, meaning that it causes a loss of the ability to move. And there's a therapy that was shown effective that involves people learning to play the piano, or if they were already piano players, to continue playing the piano, using their fingers on the keys. And that helps to restore their muscle and motor control. Now, you might think, well, if it's the rhythm of the music, then typing ought to be able to do it, or a metronome going click, click, click, if they learn to move to the metronome or if they learn to type, that would help. But music is better. Why is that? It turns out it's the auditory feedback we get. Doing something and then hearing something strengthens the brain.
So we now know from 30 years of studies that learning to play an instrument actually confers a lot of benefits to brain, overall brain health. Musicians as a group tend to be healthier than non-musicians. Musicians' brains are wired differently than non-musicians. But really, anything you learn to do changes the wiring of your brain. If you learn to play paddle, you know the ball on the paddle with the rubber band, if you learn to cook. That's what learning is, learning is changing the brain. And so it's kind of a cheat to say, well, yeah, becoming a musician changes the brain. Everything changes the brain. Listening to this video changes the brain. Going to sleep and dreaming changes the brain. But what I think we really mean is, does it change the way, does it change the brain for better in ways that are special to music? And the answer is yes.
Learning to play an instrument or to sing strengthens the connections between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain, which allows you to integrate the more logical kinds of thought with the more exploratory, artistic kinds of thought. It enables better problem solving abilities. There are some studies that suggest that learning to play an instrument early, when you're a child, helps, helps children to learn to read at an earlier age and to read at a more rapid pace, to, to read more quickly. That's a good thing. And we've seen that children who learn a musical instrument show fewer behavioral problems in school. It's not the case that they start out with different brains. It's the music training that does it.
Another thing that music training does is it gives you a sense of of mastery, of being able to do something that's really cool and really difficult. And the act of pushing yourself, just like learning to do track and field or to throw a football, you realize, oh, I can do this. I don't have to be the best in the world at it, but I can do it. I don't know that being a musician has made me a better scientist, but I think it's made me a better human.