The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Can Music Help Us Heal?

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Daniel Levitin is fascinated by the effect of music on the brain, and he has written another book exploring that connection. It's called "I Heard There was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine," and he joins Steve Paikin to discuss how we can harness music to help us heal.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've had a lot of neuroscientists on this program over the years, but I dare say we've had only one who regularly hangs out with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Sting, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, and Bobby McFerrin, and can play the sax, guitar, and bass. Daniel Levitin is fascinated by the effect of music on the brain, and he has written another book exploring that connection. It's called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord. And it brings Daniel Levitin back to our studio tonight. It's great to see you again.

It's great to be back. I don't know how many appearances this is for you on our program. Probably four, five, something like that. Every time you come out with a new book, we like to have you in. Before I start with the book, you're from California, and you're wearing a Canadian flag on your lapel.

And I've got to find out why that is. I had been at McGill for a few years, and when Michelle Jean was governor general, she came to visit. Heather Monroe Bloom was principal and brought her to my lab. And Governor General Jean said, are you a citizen? And I said, no.

She said, how long you been here? I said, four years. She said, you have to become a citizen. And so I did. I said, no. She said, how long you been here? I said, four years. She said, you have to become a citizen. And so I did. I applied for citizenship. And she came to the ceremony and gave me this pin. Come on.

That's pretty special. It's a pretty special pin. I'm told it's not the regular pin. It means a lot to me to be Canadian. My grandfather was born in Toronto. I made my career at McGill and it's very important to me. Marvelous. All right, let's do an excerpt from your book as we start to think about the secret chord that you were referring to.

Sheldon, if you would bring the graphic up. We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another but they are bound by a common objective. Science seeks to find truth in the natural world. Art seeks to find truth in the emotional world. Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise,

and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy. It really sounds better when you read it. Let's start with music. Is it a science? Is it an art? Is it medicine? Where is it on that continuum? I think it's all of them.

Why does it have to be just one? Doesn't? I mean, there is. I mean, going back to Pythagoras, of course, there's the science of how the overtone series works. Certainly, musicologists take a scientific approach to understanding how music is composed and performed. Empirical musicologists and music neuroscientists like myself take a scientific approach to understanding how it creates the effects it does emotionally

and cognitively. And certainly it's unequivocally an art. And it's an interesting art form. It's the only art form that causes your body to move. You don't look at a painting and wanna twitch and dance. But you do with music. You do. All right, let's pursue this notion of music and the effect it has on the brain.

And you refer to this in your book where somebody sings happy birthday at a party. Someone starts it. They set the key. Everybody else pretty much joins in. And they join in in key. How does that happen? Isn't that fascinating?

It is. And there's no reason that it should. The Gestalt psychologists back in 1890 posed this problem. A song, they said, is an auditory object composed The Gestalt psychologists back in 1890 posed this problem. A song, they said, is an auditory object composed of pitches. But you can change every single pitch, and it's still the same song.

How does that happen? Well, the brain has giant pattern detectors. If nothing else, that's what the brain is. It is itself a giant pattern detector. And so it seeks to find order in the world. If you've ever laid on your back on a sunny day and looked at the clouds and you've seen bunny rabbits and things, it's your brain imposing some sort of order on what is a disordered world.

So we see the pattern of pitches. We create a mental representation of the melody. And then that is shiftable in pitch space and in temporal space. I can drag it out. Happy birthday. Doing really slow and you still recognize it. You sounded like Marilyn Monroe to JFK there for a second.

A little bit, a little bit. Mr. President. How is it possible that some very musical people can hear music, they dance perfectly to the beat, they know the songs, when they sing them every note sounds the same? Yeah, so there's been a lot written about this and I dubbed this back in the 90s a kind of tune deafness. It's not tone deafness because they can hear the difference

between the tones, but they're tune deaf, particularly when they're singing. So one possibility is that they just lack precise control over the vocal folds. But they just never learn how to match a pitch they hear in their head with their muscle. And it's like learning to bat when you're a kid, right? You don't always hit the ball.

You've got to learn how to coordinate your movements. Another possibility, not mutually exclusive, is that they have what we call a self-monitoring deficit, which is that they don't realize they're not singing the pitches. Interesting. OK. Again, I know this singing the pitches. Interesting, okay. Again, I know this from the book. You said interesting, but it sounds like

you weren't really interested. Sounds like you were moving on. No, on the contour, well, I can find it both interesting and yet need to move on at the same time. This is the nature of an interview. Yeah, thank you. When I read about your wife, Heather, I thought, okay, she and I have something in common here,

because I'd be really good at that game, Name That Tune. You remember that? Yeah. Where I can pick it, I know a song after two or three notes. Da da da. Star Spangled Banner. I was thinking all of me, but. Oh, that too. Yeah. Okay, works both ways.

But lyrics, I am having a devil of a time remembering the lyrics to songs that I knew the lyrics of completely back in the day. How can I be so good at one aspect of memory but not at the other? Yeah, and my wife Heather doesn't know any lyrics at all. She just hears the melody. And she can do that, name that tune in three notes just from the melody. You know, different people have different foci, different things about music that grab them.

It can be rhythm, it can be the timbre, the sound of Johnny Cash's voice is just what you tune into. It can be the lyrics. And then I think what you're describing is a declining over time, cognizance or memory for the lyrics. Not for the tune though, the tune's there. Yeah. But the words. So for the tune though, the tune's there. Yeah.

But the words. So from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, the tune is a highly structured medium. There are only 12 notes and Carol Krumhansel and others have shown that even the average non-musician listener has a very highly sophisticated, basically statistical detector that knows which notes are likely to follow which.

And so that gives you a leg up because there are these statistical probabilities about what notes follow which. And then every once in a while, the composer surprises you and throws in a note that you didn't expect. And that's memorable because it's surprising. Lyrics are less constrained, they're less structured, and so that's probably one of the reasons that they slip out.

I feel embarrassed that you went, bum, bum, bum, and I didn't think of Sinatra and all of me. But it's because you're from the States, and so I immediately thought of the Star-Spangled Banner. Ella Fitzgerald's Mack the Knife. This is a great story. She forgot the words, and it ended up being utterly memorable. What happened?

This is one of the most extraordinary things and what cognitive neuroscientists like myself like to do is find failures of human cognition because it's a window into how the whole thing works. Usually when something breaks, you get a glimpse into the underlying mechanisms. So my colleague, Danny Kahneman, for example, I worked in his lab when I was a student. He spent his career studying the foibles of decision making by studying how people make bad decisions.

Here we've got a wonderful insight into memory by somebody who lost hers temporarily. Ella is singing Mack the Knife at Berlin in front of a live audience. She's at the peak of her career. And she forgets the words, but what does she remember? She remembers the melody, she remembers the rhythm, the beat, the accents. She's swinging along with the song. And she even remembers the rhyme scheme. So as she starts improvising lyrics,

she maintains the meter and the rhyme scheme. It's extraordinary. And it became so well known because of the, I guess, just the sheer imaginativeness and brilliance of her being able to ensure that the show must go on. She doesn't stop and ask somebody for the lyrics. She knows her job is to entertain, and boy does she. How she did that, like we'll never know, right?

Well, you'll know, because you know what's going on in the brain. You play guitar. I do. Carlos Santana says you play the guitar with an accent. What does he mean by that? He and I worked in the studio together in San Francisco and I had the privilege of being in the room

when he was recording, I was a recording engineer and producer, and one day we were in adjacent studios at the Automat, which was the old CBS studios in San Francisco. And he had come in to borrow something. I don't remember what. But he heard me out there playing the guitar. And we had known each other, and we had talked.

He'd never heard me play before. And he said, guitar's not your first instrument, is it? I said, no. He says, why was it? I said, saxophone. He said, you play with an accent. And I didn't, it's true, I started playing woodwinds when I was eight and the saxophone when I was 12.

And there is this well-known phenomenon that when you learn a language early or when you learn an instrument early, you speak it like a native. I didn't start guitar until I was 20 and Carlos heard the subtle difference. Now nobody else has ever accused me of starting guitar late. I've been playing for you know for 45 years now. Yeah. But he tuned into something and I don't know what it was but it was a testament to his ear that he heard kind of like a saxophone accent.

Let's add another wrinkle to our conversation here. Music, the brain, and disease. How is it possible that a profoundly disabled person who cannot pick up a piece of food with a fork and get it to his mouth can sit behind a piano and sound like Oscar Peterson. How does that happen? Well, so we studied this with Williams syndrome.

This is one of the first things I studied in my career. I profoundly developmentally disabled people with bad motor control. But somehow, musical circuits exist separately from other circuits in the brain. This leads us to believe, contrary to what Steven Pinker has said, that music is simply auditory cheesecake

and an evolutionary accident, it leads us to believe that music ability was an adaptation, an important part of our heritage genetically. And this is what allows music to be medicine in the case of Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis. It's what allows musicians to overcome stuttering when they sing, even though they stutter when

they speak, such as Elvis Presley. Meltylus? Meltylus, Kendrick Lamar. So the music circuits act as a secondary way of expressing oneself and they co-opt the brain and overtake the damaged circuits. Trey Gray is a drummer. He's got Huntington's disease. What impact does his continuing to drum have on his disease?

Well, it's the same story. Those circuits are preserved. And it's allowing him to set to the side, to set at bay some of the effects of the disease. And drumming requires limb independence, depending on how you drum, but usually four limb independence. Your two hands and your feet are doing different things. And music has this internal momentum, what you might call in a movie

or a piece of literature, narrative momentum. It's moving on whether you're going along or not. And I wouldn't say that it pushes you or pulls you. When you're playing or when you're listening it's just happening and once musicians start playing the piano like a Williams syndrome person or Trey the drummer or take the example of Glen Campbell who was in the Throws of Alzheimer's and still touring once you get that what we would call a motor action plan in your brain, that well-worn, well-studied sequence, it just takes over and you can do

it. And it's the reason why if you miss a note and you're trying to practice, you can't just go back to any place in the piece arbitrarily. You have to start at the beginning of a phrase because we rehearse and learn these things in chunks. Bobby McFerrin. Don't worry, be happy. He's got Parkinson's. He does.

He's still performing. What does that do for him? You know, I've known Bobby for a long time. He's visited the lab at McGill. We've performed together. And I knew when I was writing this book that I wanted to talk to him because his music has been healing for so many, including me.

And I was devastated to learn when I called him that he had just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. He was very depressed when he learned it. One of the things that led to the diagnosis was that he couldn't do things with his voice that he wanted to do, that he had always been able to do. And his voice is a percussion instrument, right? In a way that others is not. It's an everything instrument. It's an amazing instrument.

And he didn't start singing until he was 20. So, you know, Cody Carlos, maybe he sings with an accent. But what it does for him is it sets the disease aside. He performs not so much for the audience anymore but for himself. It's very difficult for him to get up in the morning and get, he does shows now at noon because the evenings are bad time for him.

He sings from noon to 1.30 at the Frayton Salvage in Berkeley. And I know it sounds extravagant, but anybody here in our listening audience who can get there, it is a once in a lifetime opportunity. No two concerts are the same. It's all pure improvisation. Audience members can join him on stage. And what it does for him is, although it's hard to get there,

once he starts singing he comes alive, certain sequences of neurochemicals are released, dopamine, a motivating chemical, serotonin which boosts his mood, cortisol decreases, the stress hormone which would otherwise make it hard for him to function because of the stress of knowing that he's going to die of this disease. All of that lasts for days after he sings and it's a wonderful self medication. Having said that, Linda Ronstadt has Parkinson's. She doesn't sing anymore and apparently the music is not helpful to her. How come? Linda and I talked about this. She lost so much. Parkinson's manifests differently in every person.

And Linda, years ago, lost the control over her voice that she needed to have to do what she does. And it's tragic for her, it's tragic for us. But she's a very engaged, bright, intelligent person who reads a lot. She has a full life, but yeah, not involving music. Joni Mitchell, you know Joni very well. You visited her place frequently after she had her stroke

in hopes of helping to bring something back. What did you two do? Well, it goes back to the early 2000s when Joni was asked to make a Starbucks record label, if you remember that, a Desert Island disc. What are her favorite songs that she would want? She had me over to her home. We spent many late nights spinning her records, going through her CDs, and just having the

greatest time listening to music we both loved. And then I was a fly on the wall, and she kind of said, well, maybe I'll put this on the CD, maybe this. And Dan, do you think it would be weird if I put on two songs by Deep Forest? Can I do two of one artist? And can I put on one of my own? And we had a great time.

And so years later when she is home recovering from her aneurysm stroke and can't yet speak, I suggested to the nurses, play that Desert Island disc. We know by definition that is her favorite music. And she really had previously not responded to much going on in the environment, being so disoriented. But when those songs came on, Steve,

it allowed her to reconnect with a self she had lost, to find herself, her core again. And then after listening to that for a couple of weeks, I suggested that they dig deep, you know, there's Edith Piaf on there, play a whole Edith Piaf album. This is where it is in her living room. It's on this part of the shelf, I remember.

Play Steely Dan, she loves Steely Dan, this is where you'll find that. And they did, and I wouldn't go so far as to speculate that music was the reason for her extraordinary recovery. But it was certainly the catalyst, coupled with an indomitable will, an intensely driven personality that she was gonna beat this.

Does it make sense to you that music can have that much impact on somebody's recuperative powers? It certainly makes sense for somebody who's a musician and whose life is music. And I would say musician includes a lot of us, people who are not necessarily performers or writers. If you are moved by music, I would say you have great musicality and you can call yourself

a musician. My former student, Susan Rogers, who was Prince's recording engineer, doesn't play an instrument. But when Miles Davis came in to collaborate with Prince, he said to Susan, you are one of the greatest musicians I ever met. That's all right. And she doesn't play an instrument. Hmm. This is a very weird stat, or maybe not.

You tell me. The seven in 10 British musicians who suffer from panic attacks or depression suffers it at a rate three times that of the general population. Why? Being a professional, we don't really know. But being a professional musician

carries with it a lot of hazards that being a good amateur musician don't. Trying to make your living as a musician, being subject to scrutiny in front of a crowd, wondering if you still have the respect of your peers. Have I sold out? Am I still relevant? Ensuring that you are somehow being true to your artistic self and also pleasing your

public, your audience. That's a very stressful job. You referred a moment ago to music that can make you cry. And I want to ask you that question. What song, when you play it or when you listen to it, can make you cry? Well, there are so many. One of them is the Randall Knife by Guy Clark,

a song about his dead father and throwing the ashes out to sea. And realizing what his father stood for. It's a very powerful song. And I knew Guy, and he recorded it three times because he felt that he hadn't quite gotten it right. The third recording is the one you want. Another one is Joni's Amelia.

That last line, maybe I never really loved. I guess that is the truth. I spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes. And looking down on everything, I crashed into his arms. Oh, Amelia, it was just a false alarm. Even that wasn't really love. Are you getting more emotional because of the lyric or the tune? Because you didn't sing it right now, you just set it.

So I wonder which it is that has a more profound influence on you. Well for me, the lyric is so poignant. And I remember right before David Crosby died, we were talking about that song and how much it meant to both of us and how it made both of us cry so deeply. And we asked ourselves that question. Is it the lyric?

Is it the music? Is it her voice? Is it the music? Is it her voice? It's the whole package. Because I've heard other people do Amelia, and it doesn't get me. And I've heard people recite the line, and it doesn't get me the same way. It's all of it.

It's all of me. Why not take all of me? Did you see Tracy Chapman do Fascar at the Grammys a couple of years ago? I was crying like a baby. Right. And especially that, what was the name of the singer who escapes me? I didn't give it because I didn't know him.

Now I know he's huge in country music right now, but I didn't know him. I'm embarrassed that I've lost his name, because I knew it, but the fact that he didn't change the gender in the song, I have a job as a checkout girl, I mean, that spoke a lot. Say it again, Sheldon. Luke Combs.

Yeah, Luke Combs. Fantastic, and Tracy is very reclusive. She bought herself 10 acres in Northern California off the coast, she doesn't like doing interviews, she didn't like being a celebrity. This was a real triumph. And what an amazing, I spend pages dissecting the song. What a song that is.

It's interesting when I asked you the question, you gave me three examples of sort of modern popular music, at least modern by our standards. You didn't say anything classical. Is there anything of classical music that can make you cry? Absolutely. You didn't say anything classical. Is there anything of classical music that can make you cry? Absolutely. Mahler's Second by Tilson Thomas makes me cry with awe,

because it's a piece I never understood until I heard him conduct it live with Edwin Outwater conducting the backstage supplementary orchestra. Is Michael Tilson Thomas? Yeah. Where'd you see him do it? In San Francisco. Okay.

Certainly Beethoven's seventh. And part of that is because I played it in school and I feel a more intimate connection to it. But yeah. And anything by Debussy. Okay. Some of us are into Frank Sinatra, others among us are into alternative garage grunge.

Is there something different about our brains that accounts for that? No, well, yes. Well, no. Which is it? Our brains are literally wiring themselves up to the music we hear in the womb because we hear through the amniotic fluid. You might say it's a womb with a view. Hear through Thursday, try the veal.

Okay, yeah, but no from the first 15 years of life. We're creating massively Creating new neural pathways wiring ourselves up to the experience of the world that music gets in there And it shapes the music we will want to hear the rest of our lives We all have a sort of adventuresomeness dial some of us want to expand out of that some of us want to hue very closely to it. But some people like heavy metal. Some people like country. Some people like classical.

And there are distinct brain activations going on with the different genres. Certainly hip hop activates the more rhythmic centers in the cerebellum. Classical, the more tonal centers in the frontal lobe. But when you look at the emotional centers in the cerebellum, classical, the more tonal centers in the frontal lobe. But when you look at the emotional centers in the limbic system, activation is virtually identical regardless of the genre, if it's music you like and you're responding to emotionally. And that is the reason, that's the core reason

why music has medicinal value. It's that any kind of music that works for you can boost your immune system, it can boost your mood, it can help T cells and NK cells travel to the site of an infection because of that emotional impact it has on you, not because of the notes or the rhythms per se. We've got a couple of minutes left here. I want to do one serious question and I want to do one not so serious question. At the end of the book you reference Northrop Frye who's a big deal in this country and composer Kent Nagano or in Nagano?

Nagano. A conductor Kent Nagano. Conduct. Montreal Symphony. To hammer home the point that the arts are a fundamental part of being human and we know that when school boards run into trouble, one of the first things they cut if they need to find money is the music program. What do you think we lose if society loses music and the arts? Well, I mean, I'm just a simple country neuroscientist.

This isn't really my domain. But Northrop Fry and Kent Nagano and others who have thought deeply about this would say, without the arts, we cannot connect to people whose thoughts and experiences are different from our own. We reject them intellectually, but the arts can open our hearts, and when that happens, the mind follows. Without the arts, we cannot engage

in acts of imagining a world different than the one we're in, and if we can't imagine a better world, we can't create it. That's pretty sweet. Do you want to end with the Calvin Coolidge joke? Which is? I'm not going to tell it. It was in here. Yeah, so Calvin Coolidge was touring

a farm with his wife. Former president. Yeah, in the United States, president of the United States. And his wife is out looking at the chickens, and he's out looking at the sheep. And she sees that there is this rooster in this cage of hens. And she asks the guide, she says, that rooster seems pretty busy.

And the guide says, yes. Do you only need one rooster for these 200 hens? Oh, yes. He can go at it all day long. And she said, would you tell that to Mr. Coolidge? So they send an aide over to President Coolidge. Mrs. Coolidge wants you to know there's a rooster in there, and he's going at it all day long. And Coolidge says, same hen?

No, sir, different hens. Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge. I thought we had to end from the sublime to the ridiculous. So there we go. I tell the story because it illustrates the idea that we are omnivores in terms of music, that you should not listen to the same song all the time. Same song, no, listen to different songs.

So I've gotta change the station occasionally from seriously Sinatra to something else. I would say so. You would urge it. Daniel, you've done it again. I heard there was a secret chord, music as medicine. This is your brain on music. We remember we had you here for that before.

Keep it going. That's Daniel J. Levitan in here from San Francisco, but he's also a Canadian citizen as well. Yes, I am. Thank you.