THE READING ROOM: Daniel Levitin Goes Back Inside the Brain for ‘Music as Medicine’

Most musicians recognize the transformative power of music and the ways it can stir up listeners’ emotions. During a concert, a band might play a defiant anthem that has the crowd jeering angrily about the song’s subject; at another moment, a different song might send waves of harmony through the crowd, with listeners singing along arm-in-arm and momentarily feeling that all is right with the world.

Music can foster community and introspection, too, and for many thousands of years, artists, writers, shamans, and philosophers have valued its healing properties. The Greek philosopher Plato wrote that “more than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take strongest hold upon it.” In the biblical story that tells how David came to be king, David plays gently on his lyre to quieten King Saul’s volatile emotional state. The Chinese philosopher Confucius, who carefully laid out a plan for balancing human relationships in an ideal world, recognized that “music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.”

By the mid-20th century, neuroscientists and psychologists had begun to investigate the relationship between music and healing in a more intentional fashion. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel J. Levitin has spent most his career drawing on biology and neuroscience to understand the brain and neural networks and explore the depths to which music can shape our natures. He laid the groundwork in books such as This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Now, in I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, Levitin draws on MRIs and other medical technology to look inside the brain and to discover music’s capacity to stimulate parts of the brain that have been damaged by illness or areas where neural deficiencies might be causing depression, PTSD, or other trauma.

Daniel Levitin (photo by David Livingston)

Early in the book, Levitin touts the inextricable ties between music and neurology and cognitive psychology: “Music affects the biology of the brain, through its activation of specialized neural pathways, its synchronization of the firing patterns of neural assemblies, and its modulation of key neurotransmitters and hormones,” he writes. “Together, these drive a range of changes that are important to our survival and well-being. Music promotes relaxation when we’re stressed; it can reduce blood pressure or make diabetes management easier; it soothes us when we’re depressed and energizes us for exercise. Music reduces pain, increases resilience and resolve, and can actually change our perception of time.”

In his chapter on Parkinson’s disease, for example, Levitin uses case studies and the results of various studies to illustrate that rhythmic auditory stimulation has often improved gait and the pace of walking. When patients or their therapists program music that “meets an individual’s musical preferences, and with a tempo consistent with the cadence of their normal, undisturbed walking,” the patients often “increase stability and speed, and reduce freezing [a characteristic feature of some Parkinson’s patients in which they suddenly stop walking in mid-gait].” Moreover, Levitin observes, “when Parkinson’s patients had their brains stimulated by transcranial alternating currents over the motor cortex using rhythmic pulses, an almost 50% tremor reduction was achieved.”

Listening to music can release dopamine in the brain, and using music as a therapeutic treatment of Parkinson’s may eventually reduce the need for patients to be treated with L-dopa, the drug regularly given to these patients because it converts to dopamine in the brain, Levitin writes, though he admits there is no research to substantiate the claim. This is only one example of an area in which music therapy might one day replace pharmacological treatment as a way of healing body and soul.

Following a richly detailed journey into the ways music and the brain are imbricated, Levitin concludes, in part: “I think of music as a stream that endlessly branches with each new listening into tributaries and distributaries. Instead of presenting a straightforward narrative, music offers a dynamic interplay of sound, structure, and meaning, continually prompting our brains to adjust and reinterpret. …This stimulates neuroplasticity, growth of new brain pathways, and healing or rerouting of damaged ones.”

Levitin’s book contains a glossary that will aid interested readers not steeped in neuroscience or medicine or cognitive psychology. The book’s appendix lists types of musical therapy. As Levitin points out in that section, “musical therapy techniques fall into two broad categories: passive or active. In passive (or receptive) music therapy, the therapist plays live or recorded music for the client to respond to in words or other artistic responses such as drawing or dance. Active (also called creative or expressive) music therapy involves composition, improvisation, or re-creation (imitation of music created by the therapist).”

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine takes its place alongside Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia and Awakenings as books that expand our understanding of the power of music and its capacities to heal us emotionally and physically. Levitin’s melodious writing captures the imagination, encouraging readers to look more deeply into the relationship between the human brain and music. His book might even encourage patients or their caregivers to ask about incorporating music therapy into their program for healing.

Daniel J. Levitin’s I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine was published by W.W. Norton & Co. on Aug. 27.