Preceding the new book I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine by Daniel Levitin were two others of his pertinent to music as therapy, This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession (2006) and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008). In addition to being a neuroscientist, you see, Levitin is also a musician. (And he’s also authored a lot more on other various topics.)
Selected quotes from This Is Your Brain on Music:
Music communicates to us emotionally through systematic violations of expectations.
Even just a small exposure to music lessons as a child creates neural circuits for music processing that are enhanced and more efficient than for those who lack training. Music lessons teach us to listen better, and they accelerate our ability to discern structure and form in music, making it easier for us to tell what music we like and what we don’t like.
The common neural mechanisms that underlie perception of music and memory for music help to explain how it is that songs get stuck in our heads. Scientists call these ear worms, from the German Ohrwurm, or simply the stuck song syndrome.
(Regarding the latter, see my previous post on earworms.)
From The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin:
We create because we cannot stop ourselves from doing so. Because our brains were made that way.
Music has historically been one of the strongest forces binding together the disenfranchised, the alienated…
Children’s penchant for music seems to begin in infancy. By seven months, infants can remember music for as long as two weeks and can distinguish particular strains of Mozart they’ve heard versus very similar ones they haven’t, suggesting an innate—and evolutionary—basis for music perception and memory.
And now, Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, declares I Heard There Was a Secret Chord to be Daniel Levitin’s best. “‘I Heard There Was a Secret Chord’ is inspiring and illuminating, as deep as it is delightful. I couldn’t put it down. So full of great ideas and delicious stories, it made me want to rewind my entire life and spend more of it making music.”
Many readers will instantly recognize the title as a famous Leonard Cohen opening line (“Hallelujah“). The book’s subtitle, on the other hand, indicates the topic of music as therapy.
Kirkus Reviews: “Listening to music activates certain areas of the brain, and the aim is to use that increased stimulation to help areas that have been damaged by illness or are malfunctioning to produce depression or other mental problems. Levitin has had significant success using music as a form of treatment, although he acknowledges that there is still much about neuroanatomy that is unknown.”
Not just listening, but playing music is also helpful. Levitin “tells memorable stories about Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Glen Campbell, Bruce Springsteen, Bobby McFerrin, Joni Mitchell, Keith Jarrett, Linda Ronstadt and other popular music icons. In an analysis of compositions by Beethoven and the Beatles, he also speculates about how and why music resonates with virtually all of us” (Glenn C. Altschuler, PhD, Psychology Today).
