The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
Thu, 01 May 2025
Can music replace drugs? Daniel J. Levitin shows how your favorite songs can release natural opioids, restore memory, and heal neural pathways!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1147What We Discuss with Daniel J. Levitin:Music functions like a Swiss Army knife in the brain, not just a hammer. Different music triggers different neurochemical systems — dopamine for motivation and pleasure, endogenous opioids for pain relief — explaining why personalized music choices are crucial for realizing therapeutic effects.The brain's default mode network can be activated by music, providing a restorative mental break that replenishes depleted glucose levels — like nature's reset button for our exhausted, decision-fatigued minds.Music therapy shows clinical evidence for treating Parkinson's (by synchronizing movements), memory disorders, and pain management — sometimes reducing or eliminating the need for pharmaceutical interventions through our body's natural neurochemical responses.Musical processing uses different neural pathways than speech, which is why people with speech disorders like stuttering or neurological damage from stroke can often still sing fluently — offering alternative communication channels when primary ones fail.You can start your own music medicine cabinet today by creating mood-specific playlists for different needs — and counterintuitively, when feeling depressed, choose songs that match rather than oppose your mood. This validates your emotions and creates a feeling of being understood.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!This Episode Is Sponsored By:NordVPN: Get an exclusive deal at nordvpn.com/jordanharbingerIQBAR: Text "Jordan" to 64,000 for 20% off all IQBAR products with free shippingNorthwest Registered Agent: Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/jordanNotion: Try it free at notion.com/jordanAirbnb: Find out how much your space is worth at airbnb.com/hostSign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is Daniel J. Levitin and what is this episode about?
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. even the occasional mafia enforcer, Fortune 500 CEO, or Hollywood filmmaker. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, and of course I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. It's a great place to begin.
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Hey, normally I'm not that interested in this topic, but as we will learn today, music is not just for jamming and relaxing. It can actually help your immune system. It can trigger memory, even in people with impaired memory or diseases. It can treat other diseases like PTSD and a whole lot more. Daniel Levitin has been on the show before.
He has a knack for picking super interesting science topics and then just doing a killer job communicating his research on the show. If you love music, you'll love this episode. If you love science, you'll love this episode. And if you love science and music, well, you do the math. Here we go with Daniel Levitin. I read the whole book, by the way, really enjoyed it.
I think that stuff is just so fascinating. We as humans, we kind of know music does something because we feel it, right? When I play music in the gym, I feel like my workouts are a little bit better, a little bit more fun. When I play music when I'm hiking, I'm less tired for some reason. But no one until recently maybe has really thought about why this happens.
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Chapter 2: What is experiential fusion and how does music affect the brain's default mode network?
And you really do a good deep dive in the book on this. The book starts with this concept of, I think you called it fusion, where your awareness changes when listening to music. Can you explain this for me? I've never heard of this.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah. We've talked about the DMN, the default mode network on the show before. This is why I come up with great ideas in the shower mode. Is that right? Exactly right. Yeah. But why do we want to enter that state besides coming up with great ideas in the shower? You mentioned that it's a restorative time for the brain.
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.
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.
And this gets to the Pomodoro method of work and break cycles.
So there is something to Mark Zuckerberg wearing the same clothes every day so he doesn't have to make a decision in the morning, or do you think that's hyped up?
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Chapter 3: How does music help with Parkinson’s disease and physical exercise?
Yes, it always happens. Someone's going to write in and say, hey, I ran in the Olympics and I was not allowed to wear AirPods or something like that.
I've seen people train with them. That makes sense.
I just assume people train with music because it's more fun to train when you're listening to music than it is to spend an hour in dead silence while you're sweating in the sun. It's a tool that I don't know I'm using.
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.
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.
I love that. And what I find fascinating about this is some people are going, well, what kind of music? And I assume, let's say, the Parkinson's patients... They could probably listen to anything because they're syncing up their steps, but I assume older people want to listen to, I don't know, Elvis or something like that. Younger people want to listen to different things like Taylor Swift.
Whenever I go to the gym with friends, it's always one guy brings a Bluetooth speaker, and I'm like, God, do I have to listen to what you're listening to? Because he gets stoked for it, and I put my noise-canceling headphones in, and I have to turn the volume up because I want slightly different music. So I guess my question is... This has to be music that we choose that we like, right?
It can't just be there is music in general playing and it all has the same effect on everyone. The person who loves Elvis is probably going to have a better effect than the person who likes EDM but is subjected to Elvis. Is that accurate?
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.
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Chapter 4: Why is personal music preference important for therapeutic effects?
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
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.
They're like a super bad MP3 that you're hearing from a distance with white noise embedded over it.
I see. So it's better than not being able to hear at all because you can hear the car honking or the people talking to you, which is life-changing, but you're not suddenly going to be able to hear like you or I through these earbuds. getting a cochlear implant with today's technology. Right.
Yeah, okay, that makes sense, because I was just like, you just put wires in the brain, and the brain goes, ah, I know what to do with these. I mean, that to me is still amazing, frankly. Now, back to language learning. I speak several foreign languages, none of which I learned as a child. I learned them all after the age of 17, I think. German, Spanish, Serbian, Mandarin Chinese, and an English.
And... Ni hao ma. Yes, hao ma. So the language thing is, it drives me nuts because I can hear my accent, especially in German, where I'm the most fluent, and there's almost kind of nothing I can do about it. I'm very good at imitating voices, I'm very good at imitating accents, doing video game voice characters. I just can't get every single nuanced syllable in a German word
unless I practice each one over and over and over and over again. And then when I say them fast in different combinations, it just falls apart. But then there'll be a kid who had a German nanny growing up and is taking German in college, and I'm like, oh, you bastard. You sound better than me, even though your vocabulary is a tenth of mine. And so there's definitely something to that.
I've been studying Mandarin for about a dozen years, I can read and write, and one of my friends said, no matter how long you study this, people will be able to tell that you're not Chinese. And I had to laugh because I'm pretty sure it's not merely the language proficiency that's going to give me away as somebody who's not Chinese. But it's just, yeah, you're right.
There's this sort of impossible... barrier that you just can't cross. My son can speak Mandarin really well. My daughter can understand Mandarin really, really well, Spanish as well. And they will have a much easier time, I think, becoming fluent and possibly accent-free in those languages just because we've started them so early. I grew up in Michigan.
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Chapter 5: What do we know about fetal and early childhood music exposure?
Yeah, they always say Canada, but yeah, it's basically...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And so it starts pruning out unused connections.
Yeah, that's such a bummer. But it makes perfect sense, right? Because the child's brain doesn't know where it is in the environment, as you mentioned. Doesn't know what it's going to need. Right. So it says, okay, maybe I need really sharp hearing because that's what we're doing here. I need to learn this language. I need to be able to decipher this kind of communication.
And I suppose that makes sense why young kids who are born into traumatic or unstable environments suffer so much throughout their lives, right? Because they essentially...
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Chapter 6: How does neuroplasticity and language learning relate to music?
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Chapter 7: Can music be used as medicine for pain relief and addiction treatment?
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.
Did he have a really bad prognosis? Because I swear I read somewhere that he had a very treatable cancer initially, and it just spread because he didn't do anything real to treat it.
I haven't looked into this in 10 years, but I know that he didn't like what the doctors told him. Okay, that makes sense.
Yes. Air quotes.
Who told him what he wanted to hear. Dangerous.
Dangerous. Tell me about music and memories. I find that I will listen to a song and immediately be transported back. to a time where, I don't know, maybe that song was popular when I lived in Germany, or maybe it was popular when I went to my high school prom or something like that. And you get those feelings come back. They come rushing back.
That's why so many couples have a song, things like that. Is music generally anchored somehow to memories?
Very much so. Not all music, but music that's associated with a particular time and place. And this is what Marcel Proust was writing about when he wrote about the 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
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.
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Chapter 8: What is the scientific view on sound healing and pseudoscience in music therapy?
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.
That's incredible. So it must feel so good for somebody who is... constantly suffering from these tics to play music and sing as much as possible. Yeah, it does. Man, that Tourette's stuff is fascinating. What many of you may not know is that I also have Tourette's, but it doesn't happen when I'm podcasting. How weird is that? F***ing s***! F***ing f***! Balls! We'll be right back.
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Chapter 9: How is music connected to memory and emotional recall?
A lot of people like making love with music on. There are a lot of different kinds of sexual activity. There's quickies, there's longies, there's different tempos to sex, both in the act itself, the movements, but also in the arc of it.
Is this something that we only have 10 minutes before the kids get home, or we've got a nice evening, let's take our time and explore each other for an hour or so, or two. Music can fill the silence 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 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.
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.
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.
I love the idea that we can utilize music for things like this. What about depression? So many people suffer from this, whether it's severe or minor. Can you share some insights into how music interacts with our brain to ideally alleviate symptoms of depression at some level? Is that a thing?
It is, and it needs to match the state you're in. 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.
Depressing music allows you to feel that you are understood. It allows you to live with that experience and thus overcome it.
If I were to jury-rig this on my own, right, oh, I'm feeling down, I probably would just say, all right, Spotify, happy music, and then I would just be annoyed that this happy music was playing while I felt like crap. So it makes sense. You almost need to start from a point where the music is relating to me on my level. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense.
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