With only one week until the 2024 presidential election, Americans across the political spectrum are experiencing mounting stress and anxiety. The remedy, according to Dr. Dan Levitin, is to tune out the noise—and into music. An award-winning neuroscientist and four-time bestselling author, Levitin has long studied the impact of music on the brain, health, productivity and creativity. His lab at McGill University was the first to show that the brain produces internal opioids in response to pleasurable music; his latest book, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine, details how the mind-body connections between music and the brain can be used for healing.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Levitin shared insights into his three decades of research on the brain, shedding light on the power of music in mental health care, productivity, and pain relief.
The Daily Beast: We all want to learn how to manage our stress in the run up to the election—and we want to understand more about how music can help.
ADVERTISEMENT
Dr. Daniel Levitin: Oh, so this is a therapy session?
A therapy session for all of us! There is an enormous amount of stress in the run up to the election. People are really anxious. People keep saying, “Oh, I can’t watch the news. It’s too much.” What is a good way to calm down using music?
Levitin: I’ll start out really broad and then narrow in because I don’t want to pin everything on music. I mean, music is a way, it’s not the way.
There are two major modes of wakeful consciousness in the brain. One of them is when you’re focused and paying attention—you’re directing your own thoughts. The other… I call it the daydreaming network. It’s when your mind starts to wander. And that’s a really critical thing.
All of us have had the experience, I think, when you’re reading a book and you find your eyes have been following the words, but you’re two or three pages past where you were, and you realize you don’t remember anything you had read. That’s your daydreaming mode taking over.
We often view daydreaming as unproductive, or that zoning out is a detriment. You’re saying it can be the opposite?
Levitin: Attention is a limited capacity resource. You have a certain amount of it allotted to you in your waking day... After a certain number of decisions, you reach decision fatigue. What we typically do is we reach for another cup of coffee or we try to push on through, but sooner or later our brain rebels and it starts mind wandering.
And getting into that mind wandering mode is important. It effectively hits a reset button in your brain that allows you to let attention release its grip on you. A 10 or a 15 minute break can restore your decision making capacity.
So how do you (consciously) get into that mode? Music is one of the most reliable ways—not just any music, but music that you know will soothe or calm or inspire you. For some people it’s Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. For other people it’s Enya or Taylor Swift, or Bach or Miles Davis. It doesn’t matter.
So what is it about music—as opposed to, say, reading— that allows for this reset?
Levitin: That’s what people in my field are trying to figure out. What is it about the music? Is it the tempo? Is it the rhythm? The pitch or the harmony? Well, it’s not any one of those things. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And in different pieces of music, it’s different things.
Because music has a tempo and its own internal pace, it takes you along with it—pulling your brain along from note to note. And that allows you to relax into it, if you will. The fact that it’s moving forward keeps your brain occupied with figuring out what’s happening next.
The music you like has to strike the perfect balance of being familiar enough and repetitive enough that you don’t feel completely lost. And yet there has to be enough surprise to hold your interest. “Baby Shark” is so repetitive that adults hate it. But for an infant or toddler just learning the structure of music, it’s amazing.
What are the ways people can incorporate ‘music therapy’ into their lives as a form of supporting mental health and wellness?
Levitin: If music is medicine, what’s the prescription? What’s the dose? Is classical music better than heavy metal? The right music is music that helps you meet your own therapeutic goals, whether that’s to focus better or to relax, to reduce your anxiety and stress, motivate you through an exercise workout or act as a social lubricant at a party.
My lab was the first to show that the brain produces internal opioids in response to pleasurable music. We’ve seen that music is an analgesic; if (you’re experiencing) temporary pain, music can act alongside, say, an aspirin or a Tylenol and you don’t need an opiate. Or if you really have severe pain and you need the opiate, you need a much smaller dose. And for a much smaller amount of time.
80% of doctor visits in this country, somebody says, “Doctor, this hurts. That‘s why I’m here.” And pain science has not gotten very far. The ways that we treat pain now, basically we give you stuff we’ve been doing for thousands of years—the bark of a tree, which is aspirin or its synthetic equivalent, or something from a poppy or its synthetic equivalent, which are opiates. Music had been used a lot longer than those things. But we’ve somehow, I think, lost touch with that.
Are there studies or clinical trials that have shown these results?
Levitin: Take Parkinson’s—Parkinson’s disease is characterized by a breakdown of neural circuits that govern smooth continuous movement… Many Parkinson’s patients have difficulty walking. They either can’t get started or once they start, they freeze or they start walking and then end up running and falling over because they’re unstable.
We’re bipeds, not quadrupeds, so we’re inherently unstable. We need to have a smooth, continuous gait. It turns out we have an internal metronome or timekeeper in the brain; when it’s damaged, you can train (other) circuits in the brain that are not damaged to an external metronome. But for reasons we do not understand, although a metronome is effective at getting Parkinson’s patients walking again, music is more effective.
Here’s a man with Parkinson’s who has trouble walking, for example. He’s going to hear music—it takes him a couple of seconds; I mean, he’s got entire populations of neurons firing in synchrony with the tempo, but it takes a few seconds to lock into that. Then watch what happens. He’s got a walker now, and he’s taking these shuffling steps that are synchronistic. Now he’s walking. That’s a real difference. Now he doesn’t even have the walker.
Are lyrics important in this context of music as healing—or can they be a distraction?
Levitin: People differ on this. Some people are lyric oriented, some are not. I know people who can name a song in three notes, but they don’t know the lyrics. And then there are some people who, if the lyrics are bad, they don’t care how good the melody is.
How about the usage of ASMR or ‘white noise’—sounds that aren’t technically music?
Levitin: Putting on my scientist hat, I have to say we’re just at the beginning of trying to understand the interaction of music in the brain. So the question is, what is music? If we’ve got a Venn diagram and this circle has music in it, what are we going to allow into the circle? I say if somebody intended it as music, it’s music. Who am I to judge?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
