Daniel J. Levitin
Appearances
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's not two kinds of medicine. There's not Western medicine and alternative 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. If we knew that it worked, it would not be an alternative. It would just be plain old medicine.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I mean, they send them to these training camps so they can become ambassadors to countries where they don't speak the language, but they'll always speak with an accent. The accent has to be within this sensitive window. And the same is true with music. If you don't hear music before a certain age, you're never going to understand it. Oh, wow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Cochlear implants have to be implanted early. They have rather mixed results for adults who go deaf. But what's happening is the way the ear works is your eardrum vibrates in and out, and that causes activity inside a structure that's coiled up like a snail shell called the cochlea. And there are hair cells, neurons, that fire along. If you were to unwrap that thing,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
and make it flat at one end of it there are neurons that respond to low frequencies and the other end high frequencies and it's sort of laid out like a piano keyboard and when a high frequency like comes in this one vibrates and if it's a low frequency like this one vibrates and they send electrochemical messages on up to the brain if that whole apparatus isn't working
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
but the brain is still working. What they do is they implant electrodes in the brain to receive signals from an external microphone type thing that's inside the ear canal. The problem is that your actual brain has tens of thousands of these neurons and we can implant a couple of dozen of these little electrodes. And so the voices and the music you hear are not very high resolution.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
They're like a super bad MP3 that you're hearing from a distance with white noise embedded over it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
You could work as actors do with a speech coach. And you could learn to do a much, much better job. And some diplomats, if they need to, they get this training. It's very intensive, takes a lot of work. Things that would have come effortlessly to you as an eight-year-old are going to be a lot of work. It's not impossible. And you can get pretty darn good.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I think that a real native speaker will still notice just in the way that you as a Michigander, somebody in New York will probably predict you're from the Midwest.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
There's a little subtle thing about the vowels. I have a weird accent because I spent 40 years in California, but 20 years in Canada. Oh, yeah. And I used to have the neutral broadcaster San Francisco accent, which was the canonic American accent that all the broadcasters wanted. I was born into that. But 20 years of Canada ruined it. And people say, people can hear it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
You can train and get so much better that it would be that subtle. What's happening, though, in the brain is that in the early years of life, the primary mission of the brain is to learn as much as it can about the environment it's in because it doesn't know what it's going to need. So at the age of four... A toddler can learn any of the world's languages.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
It doesn't matter which country they were born in. It doesn't matter what their genetics is. And they can learn it natively. And so let's talk about the Japanese R-L distinction. Japanese don't make that distinction. We do. In certain Indian dialects, they have a different D. There's a frontodental D. So they wouldn't say Delhi as in New Delhi. They would say Delhi, New Delhi. I can make it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I can't really hear the difference. I learned to make it. In French, we've got all these different ooh sounds. There's ooh and there's ooh. And they mean different words. If I say I'm getting a book or I'm getting a book, it just sounds like I'm saying book with an accent. But in French, it would be something very different. Two versus two, different words, different meaning.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Yeah, Chinese has this because they have tones. They all mean different things. One 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And so it starts pruning out unused connections.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Well, experiential fusion is a term coined by Richard Davidson at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who works closely with the Dalai Lama about altered states and meditative states and such. And the idea is that it's sometimes referred to as flow, although it's slightly different, a flow state. You're in the zone if you're a basketball player, or if you're a coder, you just lose track of time.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
But the experiential fusion that you and I are talking about with music is that under the right circumstances, you forget that you're listening to music. You might even forget who you are. You become one with the experience. And the brain basis of this gets to a circuit called the default mode network that my colleague Vinod Menon discovered at Stanford.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 than will relieve anxiety.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. I 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
We've seen clinical studies, randomized controlled clinical trials like you would with a new drug where music really can work. But 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 he goes to the doctor when he gets back. It was awful. The doctor says, oh, we'll take this antibiotic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. But on the other hand, It's about the same as other drugs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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? If 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
It is an altered state of consciousness where you're not in control of your thoughts. You're not directing them. They're self and internally directed. And we call it the mind wandering mode. And music can certainly activate that. And it's a healthful and restorative mode to get into. And it's a good antidote or reset button for the kind of hyper-caffeinated work schedule many of us follow.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And the dancing and the community, and it would go on for hours. There 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 the control for dance? That involves body movement that isn't dancing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And what's the 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 witch 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,
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
is that just listening or playing seems to have a substantial and statistically significant effect.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. So I've been part of Soundbaths and I
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 Geraldine 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. And 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 bowl
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 Kissin or Alicia de Rocha or whoever it is, when they're playing a difficult piece, you'll see them do this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
So after they release a note, their hand will sort of go off into the air in some grand gesture. Now, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And 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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
But 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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
But if you're going to use that as a 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
There's not Western medicine and alternative medicine. There'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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. And when he changed his mind and saw it wasn't working, it was way too late for him to use actual treatments.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
So we talk about paying attention. It's an apt metaphor because attention, like money, is a limited capacity resource. And the cost of attending to something is metabolic. We use up blood oxygenated glucose in order to attend to things, to focus on things. And every time you make a decision, you're using a little more of that glucose. And it gets depleted and you need to take a break.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Who told him what he wanted to hear. Dangerous.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 Madeleines, 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
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
My grandmother used a very particular soap. I 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. Oh, yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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's sounds, it's smells, it's tastes, it's touch. Does it work for bad things as well as, oh, I remember this song.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 reinvoked or relived or experienced through the sound. This is why soldiers who come back from the war
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
With PTSD, if a car backfires, they duck for cover instinctively, and it can put them in a hypervigilant and traumatized state for days or weeks or years that they can't escape from. Just ordinary environmental noises. The wrong song comes on. Same thing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. Do I run towards it? Do I run away from it? Is this friendly or is this the enemy?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
It can be paralyzing.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
What many of us do is we'll just have another cup of coffee or something, you know, the bump of caffeine, and that doesn't really help the brain. It doesn't replenish the glucose. It just masks the symptoms of us being tired. Yeah, and it kicks the can a little farther down the road and all that. But what you want to do is then take a break.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 smart watch, 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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. But we also know there's music that does it particularly for you.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. And 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 in the horizon. And we haven't used the two letters AI yet.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I think what AI can do for us here is whatever music might be relaxing to you today, whatever 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And monitor in real time whether it's actually calming you down. And 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. It could become your new go-to thing and test it in real time. See whether your body really reacts.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And this gets to the Pomodoro method of work and break cycles.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. Some 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 we One changes and the other changes in response to it. So they co-evolved.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
But when we're singing, there's a time when the word has to come. And 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
My favorite example of that is Barack Obama wearing the same clothes every day, but yeah. Sure. If you don't have to make that decision... There's a limited number of decisions you can make in a day and no matter who you are. And there are a number of studies of this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 perfectly. with a cadence and work out ahead of time what the rhythm will be.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Tourette'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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 tics disappear, and it's an island of respite for them. They may not disappear completely, but they're certainly reduced.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Now we're getting a little far afield from the music idea, but there was a study of Israeli court judges and they tended to hand out more arbitrary sentences at the end of the day. So the message is, if you were going to appear in court, you want to be at the early days of the calendar. Oh, and you don't want to be right before the lunch break when they're tired.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Exactly. They might be feeling hungry for food, but really their brain is hungry for glucose. The fuel of the brain is glucose, and it's what allows neurons to do their work. So you want to get in the default mode as a way of allowing your brain to replenish its own resources. And you can do that in a number of ways. You can go for a walk in nature. You can meditate. You can take a nap.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Multiple sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease. that attacks the myelin, which is the insulating sheath around the neurons. Neurons 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 Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Your neurons are not speaking to each other properly. Memory trouble, movement disorders, fatigue, and music plays a role there in all of them, but for different reasons. Music motivates you through the dopaminergic system to help you get over the fatigue. It can help with memory problems to the extent that music can serve as a cue for some memory.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And in the way of Parkinson's, it can help people with MS to walk and move more continuously and speak better.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Because it was transmitted by saliva.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I'm not an epidemiologist, 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
So mononucleosis, Epstein-Barr, as far as I know, same virus. Mononucleosis is a manifestation of the virus. Some people have a recurrence of it later in life, that 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. So Captain Kirk used to say space, the final frontier. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I think the brain is the final frontier. Yeah. It's a vast, undiscovered, uncharted territory.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 broke his 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. She used what was a technique called melodic intonation therapy.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
You can listen to music.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
It turned out she, this has been well known for a hundred 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. It'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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 100 neurochemicals.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And by the way, the neurochemicals don't do anything. I see. Themselves. We say a dopamine motivates you and oxytocin makes you feel bonded. That's a very sloppy shorthand. Okay. Your listeners are going to hear this first because most neuroscientists won't tell you this.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 component binds with receptors and activates the opening of those circuits. So we think of it as like a key in a lock.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Yes, a key. Yeah, that makes sense. But 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
May I approach the bench, Your Honor?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Yeah, four neurochemicals would do the trick, but we have 100.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. Okay.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Poor guy. But he could sing happy birthday perfectly fine. And so Bob Knight taught him, you know, the guy is 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Yeah, yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Man, that would be... Today, could you give me some pork loin? Yeah. Tomorrow, I'd like some hot dogs.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
We cannot cure dementia. We can possibly slow it down with drugs. And there are some experimental drugs for this and some standard drugs. Rivastigmine 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-1s that gave us Ozempic.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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, and they may not even recognize themselves in a mirror. It's profoundly disoriented. Yeah. Jeez.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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, could be aversive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. If you play music of their youth, a principle of memory, and I know you're fascinated by memory. You should have my colleague on who just wrote a book about memory. Whose name you can't remember right now?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
One of the principles of memory is that the memories that get in earlier are the strongest and the most robust in many cases. You 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And as your thinking becomes cloudy, you have less of an ability to assess your own thinking.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 completely. 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. It can also guide the movement so that the sex becomes like a dance.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
The tempo, you 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. And 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Well, it's a version of the Dunning-Kruger. Yes. The problem with people who lack intelligence fail in two accounts. One is they make bad decisions, but the other is they're overconfident because they don't realize that they lack the intelligence to make a good decision.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 that People would use different kinds of music that's meaningful to them for these different experiences.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
It is, and it needs to match the state you're in. Okay. If you're depressed, you need to play depressing music. What? Really? You 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Depressing music allows you to feel that you are understood. It allows you to live with that experience and thus overcome it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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?
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
You're right. I should have an Alzheimer's playlist and a chemotherapy playlist.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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. I just saw a demo of it a few days ago, and it was very impressive.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
The problem is that it's so much more fun that we get deceived into thinking we're doing better, but we're not.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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 Panama when nothing else worked. We turned off the water, the electricity, the air conditioning. blockaded the food.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
The only thing that made him give up was heavy metal music blasted at 160 decibels. He couldn't take it.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I think it was Van Halen. There'd be some poetic justice if they played Jump. That's right.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Oh, my God. Yeah.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I don't know what that's about, but it was very obnoxious and unpleasant, and I left.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Or it's just that you're so self-absorbed, you don't care what other people are doing or think.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
We've seen increased recognition that this is a real thing by health care providers, state 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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
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.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Thank you, Jordan.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
So I would start by saying that music is not a hammer. It's a tool kit. Different kinds of music do different things. It's not a single tool. It's not a hammer or a wrench or a screwdriver. It's more like a Swiss army knife. And different music will do different things for you. So you don't want to lump it all together.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
So in the case of Parkinson's, music that has the tempo that is more or less your walking speed, your gait, will help restore the ability of Parkinson's patients to walk. When they've lost that ability due to degradation of circuits in the basal ganglia and other regions that control smooth, continuous movement, Parkinson's patients often freeze.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
There's an internal clock or timer that allows them to time their steps. Like a metronome. When that's degraded, if you play the music, We now know there are populations of millions of neurons that synchronize to the beat of the music. And that becomes an external stimulus for them to guide their movements. And they can walk just fine. Now, you use the term metronome.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And the interesting thing is a metronome doesn't work as well as music. And I think it's because music is a lot more engaging than a metronome.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
So the trick there is to get it at their normal gait. Otherwise, you become unsteady and could fall. Sure. But it's the same principle why we see Olympic athletes... especially runners and marathoners, running with AirPods to music that's at one or two beats per minute faster than they normally would run.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Then they can synchronize to that slightly faster beat and actually increase their running times.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I don't think so. But I'm sure some of your million listeners will write in now and be very angry.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
I've seen people train with them. That makes sense.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Fun is important here. If you've got an exercise workout that's otherwise unpleasant or painful, we know that music can act as an analgesic, a natural painkiller, and it can act as a motivator. So these are two different tools in the Swiss army knife of music and two different neurochemical systems. The fun of music is driven by the dopaminergic system.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Listening to music you like releases dopamine. Our lab was the first to show the analgesic, pain-killing effects. If you listen to music, your brain releases its own endogenous, that is, internal opioids. So where you might otherwise be weightlifting or running and feeling some pain, the music raises your pain threshold so that it doesn't bother you anymore.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Absolutely. You're the A student yet again. It has to be music you like, and you can't say, oh, well, classical is better, or Elvis is king and he's better than Billie Eilish. We can leave that argument to musicologists, but if you're talking about brain effects... What your brain cares about is what it likes.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And so for a Parkinson's patient, if the tempo is right, it could be heavy metal or country or tube and throat singing. None of that matters. And same with an exercise workout or pain killing. And so we don't think of it in terms of genre of music or artists. Mozart is not special. Sorry to burst the bubble. That whole Mozart effect was bad pseudoscience.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Do we know that? Yeah, we do. By the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system of the developing fetus is fully functional. They hear through amniotic fluid, which is somewhat like for us to listen underwater. If you're at a pool and there's music blasting, you'll notice you hear mostly the low frequencies, the notes, the percussion.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
The infant brain is wiring itself up to the sounds that it heard in the womb. Suppose you could say it's a womb with a view. Do you use that in every interview? Are we special? No, you're special. Thank you. It's funny. They're wearing themselves up to the bass notes and to the rhythms.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
And there was a very clever experiment done by Alexandra Lamont in England many years ago where she had expectant mothers play music to their unborn children. And then a year later, she came back. and played tracks from those same albums to the now one-year-olds, a year and three months later, let's say. And some of the tracks she played were ones they had heard.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Some of them were by the same artists that they hadn't heard. And the one-year-olds showed a marked preference for the music they had heard in the womb and not heard since. Really? That's interesting.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
There's a phrase in developmental psychology called critical period, and that refers to a kind of a hard stop. If you don't learn something by a certain point, you'll never learn it. And language and music are not like that. They're more like a sensitive period. They're a statistical distribution, meaning that most people
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
have to learn some kind of language before a certain age or they never learn to speak. There have been these unfortunate, tragic events where a baby was locked in a closet. Yeah, or feral children. Yeah, exactly right. And if you don't learn to speak before, I mean, there are arguments about what age it is, but let's say it's 8 to 10. And you're finally rescued and they try to teach you language.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
That window has closed. You'll never learn to speak in complete sentences. I'm not a developmental psychologist. It might be six to ten, but it's a hard stop. But we see it in our own lives in a more gentle way.
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
which is that if you try to learn a foreign language before the age of, say, 14, give or take a couple of years, you might very well learn to speak it without an accent and to become fluent just by osmosis, just by hearing it spoken in the home. We have lots of cases of bilinguals, trilinguals, multilingual kids who grew up
The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
in a multi-generational household speaking five languages, and they're equally fluent in all five by age 10, let's say. There's no additional cost for having learned more than one language. But if you and I were to try to learn Japanese right now at our age, It would be a whole lot of work, and we might be able to, at some point, speak like a diplomat, which is what our ambassadorial service do.