Daniel Levitin
Daniel Levitin reveals the profound impact of music on our bodies, along with its surprising potential to foster diplomacy. He is a neuroscientist, musician, and the author of I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine. Find him at: www.daniellevitin.com
Transcript
Daniel Levitin:
Your brainwaves literally synchronize with brainwaves of other people listening to that music. And so we don't really know if having Beethoven at the Congress of Vienna led to the signing of a treaty that lasted for a hundred years... but it couldn't have hurt!
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Residential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. Joining me today is Dr. Daniel Levitin, the neuroscientist, psychologist, musician and bestselling author. His latest book is I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. We discuss the remarkable impact of music, examining how it not only stirs our emotions but delivers tangible benefits to our physical health, from pain relief to disease recovery. But the conversation also broadens to consider the role of music as a social glue, including its largely untapped potential to bridge political divides and even foster peace. It's a fascinating interview that I can't wait for you to hear. Dan, it's a pleasure to have you on this podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
Daniel Levitin:
Thank you for having me.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So it might be an elephant in the room to start this podcast because you are--this is the podcast about citizenship and leadership, and you are a neuroscientist and a musician.
Daniel Levitin:
Yeah. What the hell do I know about citizenship and leadership?
Ted Roosevelt V:
And so there may be a question of what are you doing here? But in fact, you've studied the important role music can play in healing in community, in conflict resolution and even diplomacy. So I'd love to know how you came to start this exploration of the power of music.
Daniel Levitin:
Well, I've been a musician since I was a little kid, and I was always interested in science, Ted. And so I was lucky that I was able to bring the two together. And perhaps relevant a bit to today's show is that when I studied neuroscience, I was interested in it broadly, general principles of how does the brain work? Why do we remember some things and not others? How do we organize our thoughts and the world around us? And I was thinking more about music because my own lab spends a lot of time looking at the neural correlates, the brain basis of musical behaviors.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And I'm curious about, just in broad brush strokes, why does music have such a powerful impact on humans?
Daniel Levitin:
The question of why it has the power over us is a bit complicated. It's probably not for one reason in that evolution doesn't really work that way. When we tend to have something like language or music, it tends to serve multiple evolutionary purposes. And so I think music is powerful for a confluence of reasons, but to narrow it down, I would say it's because it can express emotions better than words and better than facial expressions. And I think all of us have had the experience that we were feeling a little out of sorts, and maybe we couldn't put words on how we were feeling. And you kind of grasp at words, and I'm feeling happy, but I'm also sad and I'm also feeling cut off, but I'm feeling anxious. And then the right sequence of notes comes on your speakers and you go, oh, yeah. Yeah, that's how I'm feeling.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I guess what's always mesmerized me about it is what is it about vibrations or frequencies that creates these emotional responses for us?
Daniel Levitin:
Yeah. Well, that's really the puzzle. Paul McCartney had this nice thing that he said, which was that, "how is it that just a bunch of frequencies can move you to tears?"
But they have to be collected in a particular way, not just any frequencies. The frequencies that impinge on our eardrums, if you want to get to the physics of it, it's molecules in the air that are moving around and their movement usually signifies something. Very low, loud pitches indicate an avalanche or an elephant stomping towards you, and high pitch sounds tend to indicate something safer like birds in a tree or the babbling brook, that could be your source of water. The frequencies all mean something is why it has the emotional power. Really the magic of music is there are only 12 notes, and those 12 notes can be arranged in a bunch of different ways. And because it's such a constrained medium---it's so highly structured---we as humans learn to anticipate what will come next in a sequence of notes. The brain, if nothing else, Ted, is a giant pattern detector. It seeks to find order in what is a largely chaotic world. And so we build up these expectations. If I go [vocalizes a scale]--You have an expectation about what's going to come next: [sings the next highest note]. But if I violate it-- [sings a scale, ending with a lower note]--- you're a little surprised. But composers and performers play around with this set of expectations to meet your expectations, just enough of the time to hold your interest, but then to surprise you enough that you get really interested---"wow, this is going somewhere I didn't expect. I might learn something."
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love this idea of the act of listening to music is actually in fact sort of a learning process of what's happening. And I read something a little while back where there have been instances in history where new symphonies were played that were so divergent from what musical practices were before that it caused like riots in concert halls. Is this something that you've come across before. I'm pulling deeply from my memory here.
Daniel Levitin:
No, no, you're absolutely right. I remember I was having dinner with Paul Simon once and one of his albums, The Capeman had just come out and it was panned. He gave me a book called The History of Musical Invective by Nicholas Slonimsky. In it are reviews of now revered pieces. Reviewers hated Beethoven's 5th Symphony... which is for those of you that don't speak classical music, it's the: [imitates Beethoven's 5th]--- one of the most famous musical ideas we have still today. And people hated Sergeant Pepper, the Beatles classic, and they hated the White Album. If something's too new, we think it's no good until our brains catch up. Of course, the problem is that there are all kinds of things that sound bad to us and remain bad to us for decades or centuries.
Ted Roosevelt V:
And I'm curious, just within music, if we break it up, do you know if it's harmony, the sort of ordering of chords or the frequencies---if I can break those into three different categories---that is having the impact that it's having?
Daniel Levitin:
Yeah, so this is--- you're right. If we try to break music up into its components, you've got the specific frequencies. You've got the melodies that those frequencies make. You've got durations of notes, and then the rhythms that they make. You've got a loudness profile-- the music crescendos or it decrescendos. It can be very loud and then it can suddenly be very soft. And you've got timbre, the sound of musical instruments--- Miles Davis's trumpet, Jimi Hendrix's guitar. The current thinking is that it can be just one of those things, but it depends. And most often it's the combination of all of them and that the sum of the pieces, the emotional impact of them is greater than the sum of the individual parts. They work together.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So I want to talk about your book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, because you spend a lot of time talking about music as medicine, which really speaks to the profound impact that music is having. It's not necessarily just making us feel a little happier or a little sadder. It's actually doing something even deeper than that. Can you speak to that?
Daniel Levitin:
Sure. There are a lot of different attributes of music and a lot of different styles of music, and they're not all doing everything at once. The brain has these special processing circuits that do specific things. All music isn't hitting all those circuits all at once. So it's really like a medicine chest where you don't just take a pill, you take one pill that's an antibiotic, you take another pill that's an antidepressant. These are different things with different mechanisms of action. Maybe the clearest case to start with, although it's not the most common, is Parkinson's disease.
So in Parkinson's disease, at some point people lose the ability to walk. Why is that? Well, walking is somewhat complicated. We're bipedal, so we're inherently unbalanced. Unlike quadripeds, it's easy for us to fall over, which is why toddlers and old people do. And with Parkinson's, you need to maintain a steady gait, and this requires circuits in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia that actually coordinate your steps. And these internal timing circuits become degraded. The disease destroys them, so you no longer have your internal clock telling you when to move. But if we play music with the same tempo as your gait--- [snaps fingers rhythmically]---circuits that are undamaged synchronize to that, and they act as an external timekeeper for your walking, and they build up the ability to then start walking smoothly. You're effectively rewiring the walking circuits by setting up new pathways. It's a very similar thing that happened with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. She was shot in the head and her language centers were damaged. She couldn't speak. Many times people with speech impairment can sing but not speak because the musical circuits are separate. So she was taught to sing things like [singing] "Show me to the bathroom," or [singing] "I need a glass of water." By singing them over and over again, the brain rewired itself and built new speaking circuits to replace the damaged ones, and then she speaks almost entirely normally now.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You do spend some time talking about music as a pain reliever. How does music dampen pain for humans?
Daniel Levitin:
My lab showed some years back, the brain produces its own endogenous, that is internal, opioids in response to pleasurable music. And of course, opioids are analgesics. So it's partly that, it's not entirely that--- music can also be distracting. We know that if you can be distracted from pain, like soldiers are in wartime, you temporarily dampen the pain. And music can also be a mood alterer. If it puts you in a good mood, you're more resilient to pain than when you're in a bad mood. I would say in every case in which you're listening to music, any kind of music, you'll get the deepest impact from it, the greatest medical or health benefit or spiritual or emotional benefit if you can surrender yourself to it. If you can let down your guard and just let it take you away, entering what we call the daydreaming mode of the brain, a state of consciousness that I write about--- the technical term is the "default" mode. My lab discovered the switch in the brain that takes you in and out of it. And we discovered that when you listen to music, that's one of the most reliable ways to get into that daydreaming mode where you're not in control of your thoughts, they're loosely connected. Something else is guiding you. It's a restorative and healing mode of the brain. It's similar to some forms of meditation. And in order for music to do that, you have to let go of your anxiety and suspicions.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I find when I am listening to a song that is particularly impactful, I usually go from a point of not actively listening to all of a sudden it sort of sweeps the legs out from underneath me. I don't know if that makes sense to you or that resonates as an experience, but---it's not that I'll be doing other things, but it'll be somewhat in the background and that I'm not thinking other thoughts necessarily, but I'm not actively listening to it. And then there's some progression of music where all of a sudden the floor drops out and I go, whew.
Daniel Levitin:
It captures you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It just gets you.
Daniel Levitin:
That's what every composer and performer wants. That's what they're going for. But we don't all like the same thing. We don't all hate the same thing, and from moment to moment, our brain wiring and activity is changing. And so a song that will do that for you at 10 o'clock this morning may not do it at three in the afternoon. It may do it every day for a week and then stop doing it. You never know.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I continue to be baffled. And I think what's really fun about the study of neuroscience is how little we know about the brain right now and how much there is to learn about it. It seems like just a wide open space.
Daniel Levitin:
It is. It really-- you know, James T Kirk used to say "space, the final frontier." But the way I think about it is that, "the brain, the final frontier." We're at the level of Magellan. We're making maps of where certain things are and we're getting some of those things wrong. Most of what we know about brains comes from animal studies because you can actually cut an animal's head open under anesthesia and put electrodes in there and measure activity and stuff. The ethics committee frowns upon the idea that we would cut open a human brain, even if it's an undergraduate. Go figure. You're not allowed to cut open an undergraduate's brain. There are probably a hundred different neurochemicals, and we can only measure about seven of them in the human brain. Yeah, we're not getting good data.
Ted Roosevelt V:
A couple weeks ago we interviewed a climate expert on the four things that people can do about climate change, and one of his four answers was to sing together, which is sort of what started us down the path of reaching out to you, was the power of music and the power of singing together to solving these macro challenges that seemingly are completely unrelated. And you talk about in your book the role of intergenerational choirs, even just a choir at all, and how they may be quite a bit more important than we realize.
Daniel Levitin:
Well, so choirs have a power that is part of an ancient evolutionary story. One of the early uses of music was for people to sing around a fire at night to ward off predators, either animal predators or neighboring violent tribe. And when we sing together, we sound like more people than we actually are, especially when we're singing in harmony. And so the story might be that those early humans who sang around the fire together we're more likely to survive and pass on that propensity for wanting to sing. In order to sing in a choir, you have to step outside your own head. You have to be thinking about what the other people are doing and coordinate what you're doing with them, which is really a selfless act to some degree. You also have to be self-monitoring to make sure that the thing that comes out of your mouth is what you intended in terms of pitch and timing.
That kind of coordination builds trust among a group, and it makes you feel good. It makes you feel part of something larger. And a lot of us spend a lot of time in our own heads and in our own worlds, and we listen to music increasingly alone. So singing in a group helps us feel connected to something bigger than us. Music can really tip your balance because music can open your heart to an idea that your mind isn't ready to accept. It can open your heart to the idea of peace, for example, or resolving an argument. And then where the heart goes, the mind follows.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Have you looked into the songs played at political rallies?
Daniel Levitin:
Well, I think that one of the reasons they're ubiquitous at political rallies is this idea that they bond people together. They create a bond. It's why we have them at sporting events too.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I imagine that bond could have an even greater impact than if applied in other contexts. So today, for example, thinking about some major national and international conflicts that are happening, is there a way in which music could help facilitate some kind of resolution?
Daniel Levitin:
I talked about the resonance project where musicians will go and play prior to negotiations. They could be mediation or arbitration, it could be divorce proceedings. You get somebody there to put you in a different state of consciousness through music that allows for understanding. So typically when we are in a conflict, whether it's political or interpersonal, the role that music can play here is that if it works, it can help you trust the other person. It can help you to realize that they have constraints just like you do. They're responsible to shareholders or to governments or whatever, to their constituents. And the two of you are really playing the same game. And I think the role that music can potentially play even in those cases is to soften the resolve of people who have been intractable and not willing to give up anything.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, it seems like it's a very powerful tool to developing empathy for the people that are in the proximity of the music. I did really enjoy your Washington Post editorial this late summer, early fall about the role of music and diplomacy and the Congress of Vienna. I'd love to hear you share with our listeners that moment in time and why you feel like music was so impactful in the diplomatic process at the Congress of Vienna.
Daniel Levitin:
Well, so for the Congress of Vienna, a bunch of different European countries came to negotiate a treaty. Beethoven was commissioned to write a piece for it, and it was played for all the participants. I mean, I don't really know what the organizers were thinking, but I think it was a way to make it more relaxed, to make it less combative. I mean, by definition, if you need to sign a treaty with somebody, you are having some disagreements. But we now know primarily from my laboratory and then other work that's followed, that when you listen to music together as a group, it does two interesting things. One is it promotes the release of oxytocin, which is a neurochemical that unlocks circuits that encourage you to feel more connected to the people around you, to feel bonded and more trustful. The other thing that listening to music together does, and again this comes from my lab, is that your brainwaves literally synchronize with brainwaves of other people listening to that music. If you were at a Grateful Dead concert, you'd go, "Hey, we're all on the same wavelength, man," but you literally are, your brainwaves are locked. And so we don't really know if having Beethoven at the Congress of Vienna led to the signing of a treaty that lasted for a hundred years... but it couldn't have hurt!
Ted Roosevelt V:
In the example of the Congress of Vienna, is it important that they're all European cultures together and sharing that music, that they all have kind of a shared musical language at that point?
Daniel Levitin:
Yeah, that's the complicated part. So every culture develops its own language and they develop their own music. And so European culture has a musical tradition, and Beethoven was not only very much immersed in it as a student, but helped define the European music culture that followed. If you were to have a treaty signing now with the Palestinians and the Israelis and the Russians and the Chinese and the Pakistanis and the Indians and the Americans, and you know what I mean... there is no one music that would hit them all the same way. Yes, Western music has become a major export. Every country that you could imagine knows Hotel California for some reason.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's a great song.
Daniel Levitin:
I've been to places where people don't speak English, but they can phonetically recite every lyric in the weirdest of accents, but it doesn't mean it's their culture's music or that it'll have the same effect. So music is culturally idiosyncratic, as language is.
Ted Roosevelt V:
That's so interesting. I'm curious about artificial intelligence and music, and we're at a moment in time where there's quite a bit of work going into creating music that's fully generated by AI, and I'm wondering if you feel like that music is equally as powerful or maybe more powerful than music touched by a human at some point?
Daniel Levitin:
So to a neuroscientist, all of your thoughts and hopes and desires and beliefs are the product of the brain. There is no other magical force up there in the clouds putting ideas into your head. And so this is what's called a reductionist model, in that if we could--- we don't have the technology to do it, but in theory, we could map every one of your thoughts, beliefs, hopes, desires and experiences in patterns of neural firing. And so if we could do that, we could create music that we know will elicit certain patterns of neural firing. And so in theory, AI should be able to replicate human thought and it should include the ability of humans to think about how to write music. We're not there yet, and I don't think we'll be there for quite some time. Right now, there is AI music and it's mostly being in the background.
A little bit of it is creeping into commercials, advertisements, and so I think of AI music now as sonic wallpaper. It's that painting on the wall at a Holiday Inn or a Best Western, and you're not going to stand there for an hour and try to figure out the meaning of that painting. That's not why it's there. You might stand at the Louvre or at the MoMA at a painting for an hour or even 10 minutes. It's not wallpaper. It is art. Will there be AI art music at some point? I suppose, but it's a long way off.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm glad to hear that. The idea of removing the human component of music is disturbing to me because the kind of key feature is the shared human experience. That somebody else had an emotional experience that you can share with that person. That seems to me sort of fundamentally important in the power of music.
Daniel Levitin:
Well, I think so too, and there is a thread, although not all popular music is this. Certainly there is a thread of popular music going back really to the early sixties, maybe even late fifties, that we want authenticity and we can name artists whom we consider to be authentic. In my generation it was Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel and Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell. It's people who are having an authentic emotional experience and conveying it to us. I believe that they are authentically performing what they feel. That's key to what their audience expects, isn't it?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think that's right, and whether it's discovering that Milli Vanilli is lip syncing or that Taylor Swift is writing her own songs, they both produce a visceral reaction that has to do with how authentic we perceive the music to be. As we wrap up this wonderful conversation, I do want to ask you the question we ask everyone on this podcast, which is, what does it mean to be a good citizen?
Daniel Levitin:
Well, I think about that a lot. I think it means to a certain extent, to set aside your self-interest and do what is best for the community and to do it with an open heart and without any expectation that you'll be rewarded for it or recognized or get some kind of good citizen award, right? I mean, you're doing it for the wrong reason then. And I would define community as your home, your street, your block, your city, your town, village, your county, your state, your country, the world. We are citizens of all those things at once. We are members of a family, we're members of a local community, and we're members of the planet community, and that's what it is for me. What is it for you?
Ted Roosevelt V:
I've had the chance to hear a number of people answer it, and I think I come back to service leadership, which is just a sort of a shorthand for what you said, which is contributing to your community in a way that is impactful, supportive. But I think if I boil it down even more, it's just participating in the community, just being a member, an active member of a community is sufficient.
Daniel Levitin:
I think it's knowing your neighbors, saying hi to people in line at the grocery store. There's this phenomenon of called micro-interactions,
And it turns out it's not well appreciated, but people who have a series of micro interactions throughout their day, you're standing in line at the grocery store, you just say to the next person, hi, and they say hi back. You say to the checkout counter, have a nice day, or that's become a little bit automatic, and so maybe you say, you change the wording a bit: "I hope you have a good rest of your shift" or something, or you pass people on the street. These micro-conversations that we have---knowing the name of your postal carrier and saying hi, that kind of thing---the little things that seem insignificant, are a huge predictor of life satisfaction and quality of life, and that is part of being part of a community.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love it. Thank you very much, Dan. It has been an absolute pleasure to chat with you.
Daniel Levitin:
You too, Ted. Thank you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Dan, thank you for being here and taking this discussion in so many interesting directions with me. As a music enthusiast myself, it's been thrilling to explore how music interacts with the brain and profoundly impacts our bodies. And listeners, it's the perfect time to pick up a copy of I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine for that special person on your list. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.