The One You Feed - Daniel Levitin

Episode Date: March 22, 2017

©Peter Prato Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Daniel Levitin Daniel Levitin is an award-winning scientist, musician, author and record producer. He is the author of three consecutive #1 bestselling books: This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind. He is also the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, where he runs the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Perception and Expertise. Dr. Daniel Levitin earned his B.A. in Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at Stanford University, and went on to earn his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Oregon. He has consulted on audio sound source separation for the U.S. Navy, and on audio quality for several rock bands and record labels (including the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan), and served as one of the “Golden Ears” expert listeners in the original Dolby AC3 compression tests.  He taught at Stanford University in the Department of Computer Science, the Program in Human-Computer Interaction, and the Departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Computer Music, and History of Science. Currently, he is a James McGill Professor of Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, and Music at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec), and Dean of Arts and Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI. His latest book is called Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era    In This Interview, Daniel Levitin and I Discuss... His new book,Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era Evidence-based thinking Critical Thinking The myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism The difference between correlation and causation Belief Perseverance The danger of adopting a belief before all of the evidence is in That we tend to make decisions emotionally rather than based on evidence Persuasion by association How important it is to question the status quo Information overload His book, The Organized Mind What's wrong with multitasking The effect of multitasking Rapid task switching Decision fatigue The benefits of restorative time for the brain His book, This is Your Brain on Music The 6 songs Daniel Levitin gave his friend who didn't really get rock 'n roll The songs he would add to that list now The role of music in our brains How music and the arts can regulate our mood The power of the arts to re-contextualize things for us Music therapy vs Music and emotion The role of opioids in experiencing musical pleasure     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

People think when they're working and they're attempting to multitask, they're getting more done, but studies show they're not. They're getting less done. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious,

consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Daniel Levitin, an award-winning scientist, musician, author, and record producer. He's the author of three consecutive number one best-selling books, This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, and The Organized Mind. He's also the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, where he runs the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Perception, and Expertise. Dr. Daniel Levitin earned his BA in Cognitive Psychology and

Cognitive Science at Stanford University and went on to earn his PhD in Psychology from the University of Oregon. His newest book is Weaponized Lies, How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has how to think critically in the post-truth era. supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. Hi, Daniel. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to have you on. You have written a number of different books, I think all of them bestsellers. A lot of different topics. Music, which we're going to get into because I love. You've talked about How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era. And we'll get into all that here in a minute, but let's start like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.

He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's an interesting way to begin a

conversation. I've been thinking a lot in the last few months about evidence-based thinking, and in some cases I feel like I'm pushing a Sisyphean rock up a hill. Yeah, I understand. Part of evidence-based thinking is trying to be precise with language and to look at the claims being made. And in this parable, the good wolf represents kindness, bravery, and love. I think we can all agree that these are desirable qualities. And the bad wolf represents greed, hatred, and fear. And I think that the way it's set up, we're meant to feel that these are undesirable qualities. But I'd like to challenge that assumption for a moment or that that view. And in the service of critical thinking, I think that hatred and fear are really important emotions.

We should hate racism and tyrants, for example. are really important emotions. We should hate racism and tyrants, for example. If there was an organization that was trying to minimize hate crimes and stamp out hate, a bunch of people who hate hate, I would join them. Hatred motivates us to resist. It motivates us and enables us to draw a line in the sand. We should fear poisonous steaks. We should fear airplanes flown by people who aren't licensed and may not know what they're doing. So I like stories, and I'm a storyteller. I had a short career as a stand-up comedian, which involves storytelling. But I think, not to rain on your parable parade, but I think that some parables take a simplistic approach, which squelches critical thinking.

They try to reduce life to simple sayings that some people will invoke mindlessly. And I'm advocating for the opposite, mindfulness. That's a great take. Well, let's move on and talk about critical thinking. and I'm advocating for the opposite, mindfulness. That's a great take. Well, let's move on and talk about critical thinking. Your book called Weaponized Lies, How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, it seems like every day that post-truth era becomes more and more upon us.

And we stay out of politics on this show in general, but I think that what you're talking about and what I really wrestle with is the idea that there are some things that do have a truth. You know, there is truth in certain things. You know, there are facts, not alternative facts, but real facts. And so your book is really about how to think critically through that. And I thought one place might be interesting to start because your book is, I loved it. It's really good. And I thought one place might be interesting to start because your book is, I loved it. It's really good. And I'd encourage anybody to look at it and read it and learn. A lot of it is not the sort of stuff you just summarize on a podcast really easily. There's some complexity there, which is the nature of critical thinking. But I thought that one way

to sum up a lot of the things in the book would be to talk about the case study on autism being caused by vaccines. And in that one, you really pulled together four different common errors that we go into. So I thought that might be a really succinct way to show four common errors in thinking around one particular case study. So could you walk us through that? Yeah, and I might ask for your help in the categorization of the four. Yep, absolutely. As we go, because I didn't know this was going to be on the test, but I certainly... Do you want me to give you the four? Maybe we can start, and you could rescue me when I start hanging to myself. All right, fair enough. And I know that this is going to make some people mad.

Yes. Some people have decided that the MMR vaccine, measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, causes autism, and they're suspicious of anyone who says otherwise. They assume that somebody who denies it is on the take, is getting money from special interests, or has their head in the sand and there's really a lot going on here one of the factors is there's a correlation that's undeniable between the administration of the vaccine and the diagnosis of autism the correlation is very high a relatively large number of people who are diagnosed with autism previously had the vaccine. But I think that one of the categories that is drawn out of this example is that correlation doesn't mean causation. So, for example, I had a cup of tea about 10 minutes ago and then you called me on Skype.

Every time I'm going to do it's going to happen every time, Dan. Right. Be careful with your tea. I don't think one caused the other. And we have to be careful here. In the case of the autism and vaccine link, it's unsafe to give vaccines prior to a certain age. The child's developing physiology and immune system isn't ready for vaccination. So we wait until the child's a certain age. Autism doesn't show up until a certain age because by definition, it's a delay in normal development. You have to wait

to see if the child misses some developmental milestones. Now, it turns out that in general, the shot is given some months before an autism diagnosis is possible. So there's a third factor here, which is causing both, the timing of both. And that's age, aging. But it doesn't mean that one's causing the other. Another factor here is that when many people first heard about the link, they were able to pull up examples of people that they knew who had autism and who had the vaccine first. And the human brain is sort of configured that we focus on these positive, positive associations. This happened and this happened. We don't focus on all the negatives. So how many people do you know who got the vaccine who didn't get autism?

Well, it's an enormous number of people. I mean, there's no way that if you looked at both of those, you would conclude that the vaccine caused autism. Another thing is there's belief perseverance. Am I hitting the four so far? Yep, you're right on target. Once people make a claim to you or a proposal about something in the world that might be true, your brain starts trying to think of ways that that might be possible. You try to generate examples. That's one of the things the human brain does. And so you start thinking, oh, well, yeah, I guess so. There could be some chemical in the vaccines that causes autism. It could be that the drug companies don't want us to know this because they make so much money selling vaccinations. before all the evidence is in. Belief perseverance teaches us that it's very difficult to unseat or unhinge a belief once it's taken hold. It takes a very deliberate effort on all of us, on all of our

parts, to adopt a new view. Very, very hard to do. You have to be aware that this bias exists. That one's so tricky because I think, like you said, we all have to be aware that this bias exists. That one's so tricky because I think, like you said, we all have to be aware of it. But, you know, there's so many studies that just show that, you know, we will, that we come up with a conclusion, we become emotionally attached to it, and then we look for the evidence to justify, you know, the confirmation bias, I think is a similar way to phrase it. There's two things at work here. One is that we tend to make decisions emotionally rather than based on evidence. And that serves us well for some things like jumping out of the way of a snake in the grass. But it doesn't serve us well for other things, any failed romantic relationship you had, where after the fact, you can see the

signs were there. You just ignored them because we're trying to not be rational or you let your emotions carry you. I'm not saying that emotions are bad. I'm just saying that when you have a decision to make, let the evidence trickle in. Wait until you've got a mound of evidence that weighs the teeter-totter of decision one way or the other, and then use your emotions to be joyful or angry or, you know, outraged about whatever it is that you've decided. So emotional decisions are the first part, and the other part is that we're all overloaded. This is an age of information overload. We're deluged with factoids and pseudo facts and science and pseudoscience. And Dan Gilbert from Harvard and others have shown that when you're in a state

like that, you just don't have the gumption, the extra cycles to make a sound decision. So you throw up your hands and you go with your gut to your detriment. Now, I'm not sure we hit the fourth one of your autism. It was the persuasion by association. Ah, yes. So this is Andrew Wakefield. Yep. Andrew Wakefield is a British physician who wrote a paper claiming a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. We associate MDs with rigorous thinking. Generally, that's a good assumption. In this case, Wakefield lost his medical license. He had to retract the paper. He admitted to fabricating data.

And so the evidence that led anybody to form the opinion in the first place is now gone. But because of belief perseverance, we hold on to it. I just think it was a good example. It shows kind of how we get ourselves into believing certain things and some of the logical fallacies. The interesting thing here, Eric, is that if somebody is saying, I'm not sure I believe that there's no link. That's exactly the kind of skepticism

that I think you and I are promoting. Right. Question the status quo, question the claim, right? That's the basis of critical thinking. The problem is critical thinking requires some systematic follow-through. Okay, it's not enough just to raise the question.

You have to figure out what evidence can you get that will inform the question and then evaluate the evidence in a rational way. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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thing. I'm just kind of curious how you see this all playing out, this post-fact era. You know, I think a lot of it depends on President Trump. So far, as David Brooks said in his column yesterday in The Times, and I have a related piece coming out in The Daily Beast this weekend, so far Trump has, in his speech and in his actions, has led us to believe that facts are irrelevant to decision making. And he reflexively brands as fake or untrue anything that makes him look bad, anything he disagrees with. And he brands the media as liars. I think the media play a very important role here, and I would include you in this. You are the media, Eric, in trying to keep a civil and rational conversation going about issues of importance to citizens in a free country. As long as Trump keeps sounding the

clarion call for avoiding facts and information, there are a lot of people who are persuaded by him and who think that he is the person who's going to drain the swamp and fix some of the inefficiencies of government. And I think people on both sides of the political spectrum admit and agree that there are a number of inefficiencies and there's corruption and there's problems that need to be taken care of. I think we may disagree about how to fix it from one end of the spectrum to the other, but I don't think we disagree there are problems. But if Trump is willing to change the conversation and say, look, we want to build some infrastructure, we want to build some roads,

we've commissioned a study, here's where we actually infrastructure. We want to build some roads. We've commissioned a study. Here's where we actually need the roads, according to the study. That's fact-based. And I think if he models this kind of behavior, we'll get back on track. If he doesn't, we're already seeing that the judiciary is modeling that kind of behavior. When the panel of three federal judges threw out his initial immigration ban. I don't remember the exact quote, but it was the gist of it was there is no evidence for the administration's claim that these seven countries pose a threat to us. No evidence, which which elevates evidence to a position of primacy, which is, of course, the whole point of a judiciary. They should be making decisions based on evidence, not on hearsay or rumor or gut.

Yeah, or anecdote or. Yep, exactly. Yeah, I just like I said, you know, on the on the political side, I'm I'm you know, I think I'm fairly moderate and I try and stay out of it. I just it's the dialogue that we're having that troubles me so much. Or lack of. Yeah, exactly. And look, I'm not going to come out as pro or anti-Trump. I want Trump to succeed. I want to see the country made better by this president. Yeah. If I were Trump, I would get down to business with elevating science, elevating the arts,

and elevating a kind of non-belligerent cooperative discussion based on facts. Yep. Let's move from facts and critical thinking, and let's talk about your book, The Organized Mind. The basic premise is we have way more information coming at us than we could ever handle, and that despite that, there are ways that we can become more organized and at least deal better with the deluge of information. Is that how you say it? Deluge

or deluge? I don't even know. It's one of those words that I read, but I don't know that I've ever heard anybody say out loud. I always say deluge, but I have a dictionary here. I'm happy to look it up. I think yours sounded more correct. So one of the big things that you talk about in that book is multitasking. And I'd like to talk about multitasking a little bit and what's wrong with multitasking and what is the effect that that has on us? It seems to be something, and I'm asking sort of from my own personal life as somebody who seems to engage in it more than I would like, even though I know that it's probably not the best idea. I'm just, I'm curious to hear more about it from you.

Let's say what multitasking is not. Multitasking is not playing a musical instrument while you're reading music and listening to the other musicians around you. Multitasking is not driving and listening to the radio at the same time, really. Multitasking is attempting to do a bunch of things at the same time that compete for your attentional resources with one another. And the problem with it is that it doesn't actually exist. It's an illusion. So if you think that you can text and drive at the same time or that you can be talking to somebody on the phone and doing your email at the same time, there's a lot of evidence that you can't. What's happening is that your attentional system rapidly shifts from one thing to the next. So you do one thing for a couple of seconds and then another and then another and another and then you come back around to the first one. You're fractionating your attention into

itty-bitty parts and pieces, not really devoting full attention to anything. And the danger here is that we find it very titillating and exciting to do this. All this kind of switching gives us a little bit of a high and we don't want to let go of it. There's ample evidence to your detriment. People think when they're working and they're attempting to multitask, they're getting more done. But studies show they're not. They're getting less done. Unitaskers, people who will immerse themselves in one thing, get more done and the quality of their work is rated as higher. The other thing I thought was interesting was you talk about how multitasking has been found to increase cortisol levels. You've also said elsewhere, and I mean not just you, but a lot of people have talked about how

raised levels of cortisol actually stops us from thinking clearly and thinking well. It gets in the way. Cortisol is an interesting hormone. So one of its primary missions is to help prepare you for a fight or flight response. And it begins a cascade of several things such as raising your heart rate, your respiration rate. You know, imagine being confronted by a tiger. You've got a couple of choices. You're either going to fight it or you're going to run. And you don't have a lot of time to make a decision. And there are a bunch of things that are sapping your bodily resources that aren't going to matter if you don't solve this problem. Among them are your libido. You don't need to have sexualesting your food because, you know, that takes up a lot of resources. And you don't need to be weighing different options in a kind of systematic way. You have to move quickly. So those three kinds of things get put on hold. Your libido, your digestion, your immune system is a fourth one, and systematic thought, so that you can act quickly. The problem is that it's not

just tigers that release cortisol now. It's the stress of multitasking. It's being yelled at by your boss, being cut off or given the finger by somebody in traffic. And you've got no way to work off the cortisol. It's not like you can run, you know, for a mile up a hill to get away from, It's not like you can run, you know, for a mile up a hill to get away from, you know, your boss or something like that. So toxic effects of it linger. Yeah. One of the other things you talked about, you say that neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload. And the thing about multitasking for me, and I know decision overload and multitasking are different things, but for me, the thing with multitasking that I get is that I feel like it really wears me out. And it takes an emotional toll on me in a way that I can't quite put my words on.

And by multitask, I mainly mean I'm looking at my email and then I remember, oh, I should check Twitter and then I got to get something on my calendar. And then I've got to, you know, several hours of that. And I feel very worn out or just I can't quite find the right word for it. But it takes an it takes an emotional toll. Well, I know what you mean. And I guess I think of this not as multitasking, narrowly defined, but multitasking broadly defined. And what you're really doing is rapid task switching, which requires that you redirect your attentional focus to one thing and then another and then another and then another. And usually each of those things require some decision making. And that's where this concept you raised of decision fatigue comes in. So let's just take email, for example.

Suppose you're working on something. Maybe you're working on your weekly budget, or you're writing a letter to your grandma, or you're doing a report for work, and your email program's open, because who knows, something urgent could come up, and you hear that ping. So right away, you've got to make a decision. Do I look at my email or not? Then, once you look at it, you have to decide, am I going to deal with this now or later? Is it something that I can forward then somebody else can deal with? Is it spam? Do I need to do a little bit of research in order to answer this question? That's five decisions right there. Each decision comes with a metabolic cost. It depletes glucose in our brains that is required

to keep neurons functioning properly. So after an hour or two of this kind of rapid decision-making, you've literally depleted your neural resources. And I think what you're describing is what many of us feel after a couple hours in the morning of work, just depleted and worn out. Fortunately, the cure is to take a break. And I don't mean a break where you check Facebook or you check, you know, your news feed. I mean a break where you allow your mind to reset itself, what I call the mind-wandering mode, by walking in nature, exercising, looking at art, listening to music, taking a little nap, closing your eyes, just something restorative like that.

It effectively hits the reset button in your brain and restores the depleted chemicals. The idea of doing work in focused bursts, you know, doing, I think I've heard people refer to it as pulsing, or but of, you know, setting the timer for 20 minutes and only doing one thing, turn off email, the amount that I get done when I do that is just staggering in comparison to the amount I normally get done when I'm kind of just doing that, sitting at my desk, working on whatever comes up. And I just notice things like I flip over to my calendar and then I don't remember why I'm even in my calendar. There was something that made me want to go there. And that's what happens when I'm in that check email, do calendar and you know, I'll check my feed, all that stuff. I just more and more as

time goes on and recognizing the challenges that cause. And elsewhere in the book, I think you said something like, you know, make no mistake, Facebook and all those things are a neural addiction. Yeah, I believe they are. And, you know, in writing Organized Mind, I had the opportunity to debrief and interview and shadow some people who are really productive, Nobel Prize winners, great artists, CEOs of some big corporations, members of the Obama White House. I mean, you know, highly productive, efficient people. And the trend there, the pattern that I observed was that they turn off the Internet for a couple hours at a time and focus. And if somebody needs to reach them, they've got to get them some other way. And, you know, they're all different techniques that we can talk about for,

okay, well, I have to be reachable. Okay, well, but manage it, right? Don't allow just everybody to interrupt you all the time. Manage it by having a second cell phone or a second email account, or something like that. Set up a white list for your email or what, you know, on the iPhone, you can set up a list of people that get through the do not disturb. That's right. Yep. Yep.

So, you know, there are all these little things you can do. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's turn our attention to music. You were a engineer, a producer, you played music, I'm sure you still do play music. And you wrote a book called This Is Your Brain on Music, really exploring kind of what happens in our brain as we listen to and make music.

And listeners on the show know, you know, Chris and I are both musicians. All the music breaks in the show are always something we've written. So big passion of mine. I loved the book. And I have to start, though, there's so much to get into and we don't have a lot of time, but I have to start with at one point you were meeting with somebody who didn't really understand rock and roll i can't remember the gentleman's name but john r pierce the inventor of satellite communication there you go lover of music didn't understand rock and roll and you went to dinner and you brought with him six songs and so i'm going to read the six that you brought and then you did say that i get

a lot of mail about this because people are mad are they do you is this a source of controversy i'm happy to look i before you read the list i i want to say i'm not purporting that this is the perfect list of the six songs that explain rock and roll. It's the best I could come up with on short notice. And you said even when you wrote this book, which was a long, I mean, how long has it been? 10, 15 years, this book? 12 years. So, you know, you said all are great songs, but even now I'd like to make some adjustments. So I'm just going to read the list and then ask you for a couple more.

You might add to that list if you were to do it again. Very nice. Thank you. All right. so first was uh long tall sally by little richard rollover beethoven by the beatles all along the watchtower by jimmy hendrix wonderful tonight by eric clapton little red corvette by prince and anarchy in the uk by the Sex Pistols. So that was the list 15 years ago or so. What are some things you'd add to that list today that are rock songs that you really either love or think are important? This is a what-do-you-love question more than a, you know. I was trying to be systematic and scholarly about it, trying to be systematic and scholarly about it and um i felt that i i wanted to define rock and roll broadly as the kind of popular music i listened to which pretty much spans 1940s

to the present and i thought well you know you got to have something to represent the one of the architects of rock and roll you you know, like Little Richard or Chuck Berry or the Beatles. I mean, there are all these these, you know, touchstones you want to get. The Beatles were great writers, but they were also a great band. Having them do roll over Beethoven is a way to get Chuck Berry and the Beatles in one choice. You know, it was complicated and wonderful. It was complicated. And Wonderful Tonight was an attempt to try and capture the soft rock of the 70s, you know, that included the Carpenters and James Brown, James Taylor. Right. And I mean, it could have been any of them. I knew that John Pierce had worked on in developing the vacuum tube. worked on in developing the uh vacuum tube and so i wanted to also the other constraint is that i wanted him to be able to experience a range of different guitar tones yeah so he could see what

his invention had wrought i think today i would add hallelujah the leonard cohen song Hallelujah, the Leonard Cohen song. I mean, it's not rock and roll, but it's popular music. And I would add it in probably in the version by Jeff Buckley or by Rufus Wainwright. I mean, there are a lot of possibilities there. It's been covered so much. Certainly, I would add something that's from hip hop. And I'm not sure what, but I would probably go back to the basics like Houdini, or Sir Mix-a-Lot, or, you know, LL Cool J. You know, just in terms of the origin story. I also like Naz and Ludacris. So, I mean, that's Hip Hop is Dead would be an interesting choice. You might want to get some Moby in there.

I was sick that I wasn't able to include Stevie Wonder or Led Zeppelin. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's preposterous to try and think of six songs to represent. What would you add, Eric? Oh, man, boy, that's a... Well, I love the Sex Pistols choice. I really like the Prince choice, too. I think that's a great one.

I think I probably would have to get the Rolling Stones in there somehow. Yeah, Little Red Rooster. Yeah, something like that. Or the one that you reference in the book a lot, you know, Honky Tonk Woman. This is a discussion we could do for hours, so we'll leave it there. But I just found it fascinating to—well, I didn't find it fascinating. What I found, it was fun to read the list and to think about it. It was fun to read the list and to think about it.

I want to talk a little bit about music and the role it can have in our brains and in helping us to live better lives. You say that current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and effect with increased dopamine levels. Music is clearly a means for improving people's moods because music is acting on the dopamine system. Can you talk a little bit more about that and maybe anything else that you would add since you wrote the book then about what we've learned about how music can help us with mood regulation? Well, already so many of us use music to regulate our mood in the way we use drugs like caffeine and alcohol.

We've done surveys of thousands of people talking about how they use music. And it's a typical thing is that people use a certain kind of music to help them get going in the morning. Another kind of music to relax before bed. If they have a fight with someone close to them, there's a music that they know will soothe them and comfort them. These different uses of music are what I explored in my second book, The World in Six Songs, music as medicine. I do want to be fair here and say that I think that in general, the arts confer all these benefits. It's not just music. role, the arts, confer all these benefits. It's not just music. I happen to study music, but there's engagement with literature and theater, with painting, dance, depending on which art forms speak to you. These things all improve your mood. I think the arts give us a broader

perspective on the world than we get through, say, journalism. They help to break down our resistance and our barriers to understanding other human beings because they reach us emotionally. Right. They have the ability to go a little bit below the conscious, hypercritical mind. That's right. And I think that the real power of the arts is to recontextualize reality for us, to help us see things in a different way. And being able to exercise that part of your brain, being, you know, the ability to see things in a different way, is of course crucial to problem solving. Whether you're talking about solving a personal problem or making a decision about a relationship or where to invest your money, or whether you're talking about solving a personal problem or making a decision about a

relationship or where to invest your money, or whether you're trying to get involved in politics, how are we going to make the world a better place? What can we do about climate change? What can we do about the unequal distribution of wealth and hunger and poverty? How can we stop aggression across countries? These are problems that require creativity to solve. If they were easy to solve, they'd have been solved already. And I think the arts play a fundamentally important role in that. I agree. You say that as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to. So a lot of people, when they feel sad, right, they reach towards sad music. And there's a there's a comfort in that. Is there anything that shows that listening to say,

happy music makes you happier? I'm just interested in what what kind of things we're seeing there, because normally my reaction is I feel down, at least certainly a lot of my life, I would go to the sad music, I found myself as I've gotten older and maybe romanticize feeling crappy less than maybe I did when I was younger. I move towards more positive things now as a way to lift myself out of that. Well, you know, I think that the terms happy and sad are broad and there are a lot of different ways to be happy and things to be happy about. There are a lot of different neural signatures to them. And I think it's important to understand that variability in some sad states, happy music will soothe and comfort you. And in other sad states, sad music will. Yeah. In a lot of cases, when you're feeling sad, it's because you feel

in some way fundamentally misunderstood. But the right sad song, when you're feeling sad, it's because you feel in some way fundamentally misunderstood. But the right sad song, you'd go, oh yeah, that person understands me. And I have somebody to sit on the edge of the cliff with. That's exactly right. Yep. Yep. I was curious if you know who are some of the thought leaders in using music for therapeutic purposes? Like, who might I look to, you know, that are real experts in this space? Or just still doing research today around music and emotion? Your lab, I think, just released a paper, so you're still, you still got your hand in. I sure hope so. I mean, that's my day job. I would say music and emotion is different than music therapy. That's true. On the music therapy front, there's Suzanne Hanser at Berkeley College

of Music. There's Ed Roth at Western Michigan State University. Michael Tott in Colorado, T-H-A-U-T. Connie Tomaino in New York. On the music and emotion front, this is a more scholarly endeavor that's really about basic research, usually. And some of the leaders in that field include William Ford Thompson at Macquarie University in Australia. My own lab, I don't know if we're at the forefront of it, but we've published several studies on music and emotion along with my students. And there is Patrick Uslin, J-U-S-L-I-N, another leader in that field. And so you guys had a recent paper that was published in Nature. What was the most recent paper that you guys did? I think it was a paper that came out a week ago in the Nature Journal called Scientific Reports. And in that one, we showed this did have to do

with music and emotion. My doctoral student, Adil Malik, a postdoc named Mona Lisa Chanda, and I administered a drug to people that temporarily blocked one of the neurochemicals that we know is associated in the brain with pleasurable experiences such as taking drugs or having an orgasm. And we were curious to know if that drug also served the music system. So people take a pill, it's either the opioid blocker or it's neutral, inert, and they don't know it, and they listen to music, and then we had a number of ways of measuring whether they were experiencing normal musical pleasure or not. which was the first demonstration that I know of that opioids, the brain's own endogenous opioids, in particular the mu opioids, for those of you who are neurochemists, are responsible or at least implicated in musical pleasure, just like food pleasure, sex pleasure and drug pleasure. So that old saying about sex, drugs and rock and roll going together is true. Yeah. Yeah. at a chemical level.

Well, Dan, thanks so much for taking the time to come on. Like I said, I could probably talk about several of these subjects for a long, long time, but I really enjoyed your books. Thank you so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to have you. Thanks for having me on. It was really great to talk to you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.