Speaking of Psychology - Music and your health (SOP11)

Episode Date: June 9, 2014

Can music make us healthier or even smarter? Can it change how we experience pain? In this episode, former rock musician and studio producer Daniel Levitin, PhD, talks about how music changes our brain’s chemistry and affects our health. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What kind of music helps you relax? Maybe something classical? How about this? Different kinds of music can certainly alter how we feel or even how fast our heartbeats. But what effect does music have on our brains or even our health? In this episode, a neuropsychologist discusses how research is changing the way we understand the power of music. I'm Audrey Hamilton, and this is speaking of psychology. Psychologist Daniel Levedon is a professor of psychology.

behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal. A former rock musician and studio producer, he now studies the neuroscience of music and how music impacts our mental and physical health. He's also the author of the bestselling book, This Is Your Brain on Music. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Levedon. Thank you for having me. I don't think it's surprising to most people that music can impact us emotionally. You know, music moves people. But when it comes to our health, such as pain management or stress. How does music impact our brains? Can music even replace medicine in some situations? Well, it depends on what you mean by medicine. Lots of things that we do affect our physiology. Exercise does, and so we could say that exercise replaces medicine when it has the desired outcome

in terms of our physiology, our mental and our physical physiology. And we've seen evidence now that music can alter brain chemistry and even the production of cytokines, immunoglobulin A, and other components of the healthy immune system. When we talk about music therapy and music interventions, you know, what's the difference? In other words, what does the term intervention mean? In the literature, there's a tendency to talk rather loosely about music therapy without respecting the definition of music therapy by the American Music Therapy Association.

So I've tended to use the word music intervention as a term more broadly to talk about musical interactions that aren't necessarily music therapy. Just to clarify, music therapy is the evidence-based use of music in clinical situations to help people reach desired health outcomes. and it's normally practiced by a licensed music therapist, a music therapy practitioner, and there are special training programs for that.

So if we use the word music therapy generically, the way we use Kleenex to refer to any tissue, we're not being precise. So a number of us in the field have opted for the word to reserve music therapy for things that fit that definition that involve a licensed music therapist and use musical intervention just to mean anything else. So if somebody's listening to music or they're engaged in guided imagery or they're playing an instrument in a therapeutic context or an experimental context, but it doesn't conform to the definition of the American Music Therapy Association, then it's music intervention. Can you give me an example of what a music intervention, I mean, I know you said it's a very broad term, but in your research, what would you consider a music intervention?

Well, a music intervention would be in a hospital where you're doing an experiment and you might randomly assign some people in a pre-operative staging area to relaxing music and other people to a Valium and other people to a placebo. That's not being conducted, if it's not conducted by a licensed music therapist and it's not following their protocols, then it's an intervention and not music therapy. But a lot of what the work that, you know, I know that you have analyzed and looked at, at and conducted yourself is focusing on just more evidence-based research on how music affects us.

Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned the evidence-based part because there's been a lot of pseudoscience and just a lot of anecdotes about music, but relatively little actual experiments, true experiments in science. But the direction that it's going is that in the last five years, people are increasingly conducting controlled experiments with proper controls and with proper methods. And we're finding that early evidence, you know, there's not a whole lot of work on which to base this, but early evidence is that music can alter pain thresholds,

that it can increase immune system function. There's stronger evidence that it can affect mood and heart rate and respiration rate. So fast-stimulating music stimulates the production of adrenaline. and other hormones that get your heart racing faster and your pulse increases and blood pressure increases and then soothing relaxing music has the opposite effect. The interesting thing here is that what I'm calling stimulating or relaxing music is relative. It's subjective to the listener. It doesn't work so well if the experimenter or the therapist says, I'm playing you some stimulating

music. The person has to find it stimulating themselves. And how do you determine that? How do you determine what someone finds more relaxing than another person? Well, we usually just ask them. We ask them to bring in a piece of music that they find stimulating or relaxing. So that part of it's subjective. And people are pretty good at that. What do you find the most intriguing about where this research is going? I think that it's, in some cases, it's going to confirm intuitions that many people have about how music can function in their lives. So we're already in a place in a time where people are using music as medicine.

They're using music much as they use drugs. The average person hears five hours of music a day, and many people instinctively reach for a certain kind of music to suit certain occasions. So if you're having a party, you play one kind of music. If you're relaxing after a long day at the office, you play another kind of music. The kind of music you play when you're trying to wake up in the morning is different than the kind you play when you're trying to go to sleep at night. Now, not everybody does this, but a large number of people report in surveys that they're in effect programming

music to suit a desired mood outcome. And so in that sense, they're using music for mood regulation. Right. Is it really the music that's affecting us, or is it the act of listening to music? You know, sometimes people listen to it for distraction purposes. There has been some work where people try to find something that's equally distracting. So you can, you can, you can, hold distraction constant and intentionally engaging, something equally intentionally engaging. And it seems as though I wouldn't say music has special properties, but it has the ability to distract or engage in ways that other stimuli don't. But it's a very complex multidimensional stimulus. There's a lot going on there.

You've got rhythm and you've got timbre and you've got pitch and loudness and they're all changing. They're correlated changes, but they're changing. And so it's a very highly structured medium. You often hear about how listening to classical music can make us smarter, you know, even babies. Is that true? What have you learned about how music affects our cognitive abilities? I think you're, yeah, you're referring to the paper that came out many years ago by Rousher and her colleagues that music, listening to Mozart for 20 minutes makes you show improvement on IQ tests was the headline. And there had been a lot of studies by a number of people, including Bill Thompson and Glenn Schellenberg and others, that have pretty much debunked that.

But there are tantalizing clues in the literature that music is doing some things. I think the people in the field disagree about the size of the effect and the importance of it. But the emerging picture is that not so much listening to music, but learning to play an instrument and being a player can confer some advantages in other areas. It seems to provide attentional training, and on the social side, kids who play in musical groups in elementary school and grammar school tend to be more well socialized. And you can sort of spin a story about why that might be, although that doesn't mean it's science. But a kind of post facto story would be well. If you're playing an instrument in a little ensemble, you've got to coordinate your actions with other kids.

You've got to listen to what they're doing in order to make your part fit. And so you've got to step outside yourself and become a little bit more empathetic. In that respect, it's kind of like team sports and they confer the same advantages, as opposed to passive listening, which doesn't appear to confer those advantages. That's interesting. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Levin, and I really appreciate you taking the time, and this has been very, very interesting. Thank you.

Thank you. For more information on Dr. Levitin's work and to hear more podcasts, visit our website at speakingofpsychology.org. With the American Psychological Associations, Speaking of Psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.