1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine

1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:01] Daniel J. Levitin: There's not two kinds of medicine. There's not Western medicine and alternative medicine. If something's been shown to work, we call it medicine. If it's not been shown to work, there are some people out there who will call it alternative medicine. If we knew that it worked, it would not be an alternative. It would just be plain old medicine.

[00:00:25] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional mafia, enforcer, fortune 500, CEO, or Hollywood filmmaker.

And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, and of course I always appreciate it when you do that. I suggest our episode start packs. It's a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiations, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking about music. Hey, normally I'm not that interested in this topic, but as we will learn today, music is not just for jamming and relaxing.

It can actually help your immune system. It can trigger memory even in people with impaired memory or diseases. It can treat other diseases like PTSD and a whole lot more. Daniel Leviton has been on the show before. He has a knack for picking super interesting science topics and then just doing a killer job communicating his research on the show.

If you love music, you'll love this episode. If you love science, you'll love this episode. And if you love science and music, well you do the math. Here we go with Daniel Leviton. I read the whole book, by the way. Really enjoyed it. I think that stuff is just so fascinating. We, as humans, we kind of know music does something because we feel it, right?

When I play music in the gym, I feel like my workouts are a little bit better, a little bit more fun. When I play music, when I'm hiking, I'm less tired for some reason. But no one until recently maybe has really thought about why this happens. And you really do a good deep dive in the book on this. The book starts with this concept of, I think you called it fusion, where your awareness changes when listening to music.

Can you explain this for me? I've never heard of this.

[00:02:28] Daniel J. Levitin: Well, experiential fusion is a term coined by Richard Davidson at University of Wisconsin Madison, who works closely with the Dalai Lama about altered states and meditative states and such. And the idea is that it's sometimes referred to as flow, although it's slightly different, a flow state, you're in the zone if you're a basketball player or if you're a coder, you just lose track of time.

But the experiential fusion that you and I are talking about with music is that under the right circumstances, you forget that you're listening to music. You might even forget who you are. You become one with the experience and the brain basis of this gets to a circuit called the default mode network that my colleague, Vinod Menon discovered.

At Stanford, it is an altered state of consciousness where you're not in control of your thoughts, you're not directing them. They're self and internally directed, and we call it the mind wandering mode. And music can certainly activate that. And it's a healthful and restorative mode to get into, and it's a good antidote or reset button for the kind of hyper caffeinated work schedule many of us follow.

[00:03:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we've talked about the DMN, the default mode network on the show before. This is why I come up with great ideas in the shower mode. Is that right? Exactly right. Yeah. But why do we wanna enter that state besides coming up with great ideas in the shower? You mentioned that it's a restorative time for the brain.

[00:03:58] Daniel J. Levitin: So we talk about paying attention. It's an apt metaphor because attention like money is a limited capacity resource. And the cost of attending to something is metabolic. We use up blood oxygenated glucose in order to attend to things, to focus on things. And every time you make a decision, you're using a little more of that glucose and it gets depleted and you need to take a break.

What many of us do is we'll just have another cup of coffee or something, you know, the bump of caffeine and that doesn't really help the brain. It doesn't replenish the glucose, it just masks the symptoms of us being tired. Yeah. And it kicks the can a little farther down the road and all that. But what you wanna do is then take a break and this gets to the Pomodoro method of work and break cycles

[00:04:54] Jordan Harbinger: is so there, there is something to Mark Zuckerberg wearing the same clothes every day so he doesn't have to make a decision in the morning?

Or do you think that's hyped up?

[00:05:03] Daniel J. Levitin: My favorite example of that is Barack Obama wearing the same clothes every day. But yeah, sure. If you don't have to make that decision, there's a limited number of decisions you can make in a day. And no matter who you are, and there are a number of studies of this, now we're getting a little far a field from the music idea, but there was a study of Israeli court judges and they tended to hand out more arbitrary sentences at the end of the day.

So the message is, if you were gonna appear in court, you wanna be at the early days of the calendar, right? Oh, and you don't want to be right before the lunch

[00:05:35] Jordan Harbinger: break when they're tired. Oh gosh, I remember this study. It's like, if the judge is hungry, you're in trouble, man.

[00:05:42] Daniel J. Levitin: Exactly. They might be feeling hungry for food, but really their brain is hungry for glucose.

The fuel of the brain is glucose and it's what allows neurons to do their work. So you wanna get in the default mode as a way of. Allowing your brain to replenish its own resources, and you can do that in a number of ways. You can go for a walk in nature. You can meditate, you can take a nap. You can listen to music.

[00:06:09] Jordan Harbinger: I can just imagine that, your Honor, I'd like to submit this croissant for you to eat before we proceed here because my client really wants to stay outta prison and you're not you when you're hungry. It's like a Snickers commercial. May I approach the bench, your Honor? Exactly. Do you like grapes or you want an apple?

I brought a a few different items here for you to choose from. Yeah, that's really scary because of course we don't necessarily realize that we're in that state. I assume these Israeli judges weren't thinking like, I'm a real bastard before lunch, so that guy's in trouble. They probably just thought, well, this is how the day goes.

I assume unless you're paying attention, you have somebody studying your decisions, you're not necessarily paying attention to your emotional state. You think you're in the same emotional state while you're at work, until you go home.

[00:06:52] Daniel J. Levitin: And as your thinking becomes cloudy, you have less of an ability to assess your own thinking.

[00:06:57] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, yes. That is a little bit scary, especially the coffee thing.

[00:07:00] Daniel J. Levitin: Well, it's a version of the, uh, Dunning Kruger. Yes. The problem with people who lack intelligence fail in two accounts. One is they make bad decisions, but the other is they're overconfident because they don't realize that they lack the intelligence to make a good decision.

[00:07:18] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. In many ways, of course, we all think we're above average, but it must in some ways be kind of nice to see the world in this completely black and white way, where you go, it's not complicated. Just do this really obvious thing that I came up with because they don't understand any of the nuances to what's going on in front of me at all.

It seems like yes, your life won't work out the way that you probably want it to, but day to day your existence is probably a hell of a lot easier. I dunno, that's a paradox. I'm always finding myself caught in. Back to music, though, according to your work, it can reduce pain, it can enhance focus, pump you up in the gym.

You mentioned Parkinson's. Patients use it. Tell me about that. Because Parkinson's. Alzheimer's, a lot of this stuff, I have aging parents. I'm also not getting any younger. That stuff freaks me out. It sneaks up on you.

[00:08:03] Daniel J. Levitin: So I would start by saying that music is not a hammer, it's a toolkit. Different kinds of music do different things.

It's not a single tool, it's not a hammer or a wrench or a screwdriver. It's more like a Swiss Army knife. And different music will do different things for you, so you don't wanna lump it all together. So in the case of Parkinson's music that has the tempo, that is more or less your walking speed, your gait will help restore the ability of Parkinson's patients to walk.

When they've lost that ability due to degradation of circuits in the basal ganglia and other regions that control smooth continuous movement, Parkinson's patients often freeze. There's an internal clock or timer that allows them to time their steps. It's like a metronome. When that's degraded. If you play the music, we now know there are populations of millions of neurons that synchronize to the beat of the music, and that becomes an external stimulus for them to guide their movements and they can walk just fine.

Now you use the term metronome and the interesting thing is a metronome doesn't work as well as music and it, I think it's because music is a lot more engaging than a metronome, probably.

[00:09:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Than just the tick, tick, tick. For those who don't know that metronome is what, essentially a pendulum that makes a ticking sound.

Yep. Do the Parkinson's patients walk faster? If you play music with a faster BPM. So the

[00:09:28] Daniel J. Levitin: trick there is to get it at their normal gate, otherwise you become unsteady and could fall. Sure. But it's the same principle why we see Olympic athletes, especially runners and marathoners running with AirPods to music that's at one or two beats per minute faster than they normally would run.

Then they can synchronize to that slightly faster beat and actually increase their running times.

[00:09:53] Jordan Harbinger: So I wonder if each runner would have their track that is probably at the exact max they can go. Maybe it warms up a little at the beginning. I don't know anything about running, but I assume they start sprinting as fast as they can, but as their brain and everything gets synced up, they can probably pick up speed a little bit during the sprint.

I really don't know. That's fascinating. I actually never noticed that those people were wearing AirPods or earbuds at all. I guess during training they are. Yeah. Oh, I see. So during a match they're not doing this.

[00:10:20] Daniel J. Levitin: I don't think so. But I'm sure some of your million listeners will write in now and be very angry.

[00:10:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. It always happens. Someone's gonna write in and say, Hey, I've ran in the Olympics and I was not allowed to wear AirPods or something like that.

[00:10:33] Daniel J. Levitin: I've seen people train with them. That makes sense.

[00:10:35] Jordan Harbinger: I just assume people train with music because it's more fun to train when you're listening to music than it is to spend an hour in dead silence while you're sweating in the sun.

It's a tool that I don't know, I'm using.

[00:10:45] Daniel J. Levitin: Fun is important here. If you've got an exercise workout that's otherwise unpleasant or painful, we know that music can act as an analgesic, a natural painkiller, and it can act as a motivator. So these are two different tools in the Swiss Army knife of music and two different neurochemical systems.

The fun of music is driven by the dopaminergic system. Listening to music you like releases dopamine. Our lab was the first to show the analgesic painkilling effects. If you listen to music, your brain releases its own endogenous. That is internal opioids. So where you might otherwise be weightlifting or running and feeling some pain, the music raises your pain threshold, so that doesn't bother you

[00:11:31] Jordan Harbinger: anymore.

I love that. And what I find fascinating about this is some people are going, well, what kind of music? And I assume, let's say the Parkinson's patients. They could probably listen to anything 'cause they're syncing up their steps. But I assume older people wanna listen to, I don't know, Elvis or something like that.

Younger people wanna listen to different things. Like Taylor Swift, whenever I go to the gym with friends, it's always like one guy brings a Bluetooth speaker and I'm like, God, do I have to listen to what you're listening to? Because he gets stoked for it. And I put my noise canceling headphones in and I have to turn the volume up 'cause I want slightly different music.

So I guess my question is, this has to be music that we choose, that we like, right? It can't just be there is music in general playing and it all has the same effect on everyone. The person who loves Elvis is probably gonna have a better effect than the person who likes EDM but is subjected to Elvis. Is that accurate?

Absolutely.

[00:12:22] Daniel J. Levitin: You're the A student. Yet again, it has to be music you like and you can't say, oh well classical is better, or Elvis is king and he's better than Billie Eilish. We can leave that argument to musicologists, but if you're talking about brain effects, what your brain cares about is what it likes.

And so for a Parkinson's patient, if the tempo's right, it could be heavy metal or country or tube and throat singing, none of that matters. And same with a exercise workout or pain killing. And so we don't think of it in terms of genre of music or artists. Mozart is not special. Sorry to burst the bubble.

That whole Mozart effect was bad pseudoscience.

[00:13:05] Jordan Harbinger: What was that that, is that the baby thing where it's like, you gotta play this to your baby and they come out smarter? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. That's not true. But what do babies hear in the womb? Do we know that?

[00:13:18] Daniel J. Levitin: Yeah, we do. By the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system of the developing fetus is fully functional.

They hear through amniotic fluid, which is somewhat like for us to listen under water. If you're at a pool and there's music blasting, you'll notice here mostly the low frequencies, the notes, the percussion, the infant brain is wiring itself up to the sounds that it heard in the womb. Suppose you could say it's a womb with a view.

Uh uh. How do you use it? In every interview or we special? No, you're special. Thank you. It's funny, they're wearing themselves up to the base notes and to the rhythms, and there was a very clever experiment done by Alexandra Lamont in England many years ago where she had expectant mothers play music to their unborn children.

And then a year later she came back and played tracks from those same albums to the now one year olds, a year and three months later, let's say. And some of the tracks she played were ones they had heard. Some of 'em were by the same artists that they hadn't heard. And the 1-year-old showed a marked preference for the music they had heard in the womb and not heard since.

Really? That's

[00:14:27] Jordan Harbinger: interesting. That is shocking. I suppose just because the idea that the baby would internalize that, remember that at some level from being just in utero when they can only hear the underwater version. Now they're hearing the higher fidelity version. It's quite amazing because the time in the brain development and the fact that it would've sounded totally different, they still had a preference for that same track is crazy.

Actually. Really impressive. Brains are impressive and that's one of the reasons why we do so many shows about the brain is the more I learn about the brain, the more I'm just like, okay, we were designed by aliens or something. This is just too incredible. Is there a cutoff for learning in neuroplasticity for kids?

I know this is not directly on topic. The whole language thing, like if you don't learn it when you're a kid, you're never gonna learn it and all that stuff.

[00:15:15] Daniel J. Levitin: There's a phrase in developmental psychology called critical period, and that refers to a kind of a hard stop. If you don't learn something by a certain point, you'll never learn it.

And language and music are not like that. They're more like a sensitive period. They're a statistical distribution, meaning that most people have to learn some kind of language before a certain age or they never learn to speak. There've been these unfortunate, tragic events where a baby was locked in a closet.

Yeah. Or feral children. Yeah, exactly right. And if you don't learn to speak before, I mean, there are arguments about what age it is, but let's say it's eight to 10 and you're finally rescued and they try to teach you language, that window has closed. You'll never learn to speak in complete sentences. I'm not a develop neuropsychologist.

It might be six to 10, but it's a hard stop. But we see it in our own lives in a more gentle way, which is that if you try to learn a foreign language before the age of say 14, give or take a couple of years, you might very well learn to speak it without an accent and to become fluent just by osmosis, just by hearing it spoken in the home, we have lots of cases of bilinguals, trilinguals, multilingual kids who grew up in a multi-generational household speaking five languages, and they're equally fluent in all five.

By age 10, let's say, there's no additional cost for having learned more than one language. But if you and I were to try to learn Japanese right now at our age, it would be a whole lot of work and we might be able to at some point speak like a diplomat, which is what our ambassadorial service do. I mean, they send 'em to these training camps.

So they can become ambassadors to countries where they don't speak the language, but they'll always speak with an accent. The accent has to be within this sensitive window. And the same is true with music. If you don't hear music before a certain age, you're never gonna understand it. Oh

[00:17:13] Jordan Harbinger: wow. That's fascinating.

But that would be hard to test. Good luck finding a kid that hasn't heard music, although I guess feral children haven't heard music. Haven't heard a language or deaf children. Oh, deaf. Yes. Who suddenly have their hearing

[00:17:24] Daniel J. Levitin: restored.

[00:17:25] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. Duh. Cochlear implant or something that makes way more sense and is way less sad.

The opposite. The cochlear implant thing is actually like a miraculous piece of technology. Do you know how they work? Because I'm always mystified to how this thing on the outside of your head just tells your brain what you're here. It's like a fake ear. It's just amazing.

[00:17:43] Daniel J. Levitin: Cochlear implants have to be implanted early.

I. They have rather mixed results for adults who go deaf. But what's happening is the way the ear works is your eardrum vibrates in and out and that causes activity inside a structure that's coiled up like a snail shell called the cochlea. And there are hair cells neurons that fire along if you were to unwrap that thing and make it flat at one end of it, there are neurons that respond to low frequencies and the other end high frequencies, and it's sort of laid out like a piano keyboard.

And when a, a high frequency like comes in, this one vibrates. And if it's a low frequency like this one vibrates and they send electrochemical messages on up to the brain, if that whole apparatus isn't working, but the brain is still working, what they do is they implant electrodes in the brain to receive signals from an external microphone type thing that's inside the ear canal.

The problem is that your actual brain has tens of thousands of these neurons, and we can implant a couple of dozen of these little electrodes, and so the voices and the music you hear are not very high resolution. They're like a super bad MP three. You're hearing from a distance with white noise embedded over it.

[00:19:08] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So it's better than not being able to hear it all because you can hear the car honking or the people talking to you, which is life changing, but you're not suddenly going to be able to hear like you or I through these earbuds getting a cochlear implant with today's technology. Right. Yeah. Okay.

That makes sense. 'cause I was just like, you just put wires in the brain and the brain goes, I know what to do with these. I mean, that to me is still amazing, frankly. Now back to language learning. I speak several foreign languages, none of which I learned as a child. I learned them all after the age of 17.

I think. German, Spanish, Serbian, Mandarin, Chinese in an English, and uh, Alma. Yeah. Yes, Al. So the language thing is it drives me nuts because I can hear my accent, especially in German where I'm the most fluent and there's almost kind of nothing I can do about it. I'm very good at imitating voices. I'm very good at imitating accents, doing video game voice characters.

I just can't get every single nuanced syllable in a German word unless I practice each one over and over and over and over again. And then when I say them fast in different combination, it just falls apart. But then there'll be a kid who had a German nanny growing up and is taking German in college, and I'm like, oh, you bastard.

You sound better than me even though your vocabulary is a 10th of mine. And so there's definitely something to that. I've been studying Mandarin for about a dozen years. I can read and write, and one of my friends said, no matter how long you study this, people will be able to tell that you're not Chinese.

And I, I had to laugh because I'm pretty sure it's not merely the language proficiency that's gonna give me away as somebody who's not Chinese. But it's just, yeah, you're right. There's this sort of impossible barrier that you just can't cross. My son can speak Mandarin really well. My daughter can understand Mandarin really, really well, Spanish as well, and they will have a much easier time, I think, becoming fluent and possibly accent free in those languages just because we've started them so early.

I grew up in Michigan. Nobody spoke of foreign language in my house or near me anywhere, pretty much. Maybe some Arabic or something like that in Persian, but not in my home. It's amazing though that your brain can still learn it, but it just can't mimic it perfectly, which it's almost like the physical control that your brain has over your ability to speak, it degrades somehow or cuts off somehow.

That's the part I don't totally understand because I can still dream in German. I can still think of things completely in German. I can still construct grammatically perfect German sentences. I just can't say the damn words in the way that Germans do.

[00:21:44] Daniel J. Levitin: You could work as actors do with a speech coach.

Sure. And you could learn to do a much, much better job. And some diplomats, if they need to, they get this training. It's very intensive. Takes a lot of work. Things that would've come effortlessly to you as an 8-year-old are gonna be a lot of work. It's not impossible, and you can get pretty darn good. I think that a real native speaker will still notice just in the way that you as a Michigan or.

Somebody in New York will probably predict. You're from the Midwest.

[00:22:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. They always say Canada. But yeah, it's basically,

[00:22:18] Daniel J. Levitin: I mean, there's a little subtle thing about the vowels. I have a weird accent because I spent 40 years in California, but 20 years in Canada. Oh yeah. And I used to have the neutral broadcaster, San Francisco accent, which was the Canon American accent that all the broadcasters wanted.

I was born into that, but 20 years of Canada ruined it. And people say people can hear it. You can train and get so much better that it would be that subtle. What's happening though in the brain is that in the early years of life, the primary mission of the brain is to learn as much as it can about the environment it's in, because it doesn't know what it's going to need.

So at the age of four, a toddler can learn any of the world's languages. It doesn't matter which country they were born in, doesn't matter what their genetics is, and they can learn it natively. And so let's talk about the Japanese RL distinction. Japanese don't make that distinction. We do. In certain Indian dialects, they have a different D.

There's a fronto dental D, so they wouldn't say deli as in new deli. They would say, deli, new deli. I can make it. I can't really hear the difference. I learned to make it in French. We've got all these different ooh sounds. There's ooh and there's ooh. And they mean different words. If I say I'm getting a book, or I'm getting a book.

It just sounds like I'm saying book with an accent, but in French it would be something very different. Two versus two different words. Different meaning, yeah. Chinese has this because they have tones, they all mean different things. One of 'em means mother, another means lamp, another means gunpowder. Yeah.

But to us it's the same sound so the infant can learn at all. But a funny thing happens around age 10. The primary mission of the brain shifts to get rid of all that unused capacity to make room for other stuff. And so it starts pruning out unused connections.

[00:24:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's such a bummer. But it makes perfect sense, right?

Because the child's brain doesn't know where it is, and the environment, as you mentioned, doesn't know what it's gonna need, right? So it says, okay, maybe I need really sharp hearing because that's what we're doing here. I need to learn this language. I need to be able to decipher this kind of communication.

And I suppose that makes sense why young kids who are born into traumatic or unstable environments suffer so much throughout their lives, right? Because they essentially prune. A lot of neurons that they probably would've needed to, I don't know, go to college and be a successful doctor, but they retain a lot of qualities that keep them safe or alive in an environment where people are doing drugs or there's violence around them, or they don't get food regularly or something like that.

What ages does that sort of stop happening? Do we know? Did you tell me this already?

[00:25:10] Daniel J. Levitin: It's

[00:25:10] Jordan Harbinger: variable, but say 10 to 14. Okay, so it's similar to the whole language thing A as well. Discounts on the fine products and services that support this show. Music to my ears. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Nord, VPN.

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[00:28:02] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, researchers, scientists, creators, every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself over@sixminutenetworking.com.

This is a course, it's a free course. It's not a schmoozey course. There's no upsells in the course. It won't make you or other people cringe when you use the tactics. It's very practical. A few minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to this course, so come on and join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find it again, it's free. No tricky stuff. Six minute networking.com. All right, back to Daniel Leviton. I'd love to talk about music and pain relief because the pain relieving effect of music is fascinating. You touched on this earlier, but if we're listening to music and it can help with pain, can it help with not just workout pain, the burn and the muscle?

I just had back surgery. Now I'm an Oxycontin. Do I need less Oxycontin if I'm playing some good jams? Probably. Really?

[00:29:01] Daniel J. Levitin: Yes. You may not need Oxycontin at all. That would be great. Depending on how bad the pain is, you might need Tylenol or ibuprofen, Advil. The brain releases its own opiates in smaller amounts than pharmaceutical levels.

That has to be music you like. One thing that music can do, again, it's a Swiss Army knife. Different music may will relieve pain for you. Then we'll relieve anxiety. But a lot of times pain is exacerbated by anxiety or stress. We become more sensitive to it. The mechanisms are still being worked out, but they're at a sufficient point that I wrote my new book, I heard there was a secret chord links in the show notes in the uk.

It's called Music as Medicine, but it's the same book, different title. I wrote it now because I've been working with the National Institutes of Health and the White House Science Office for 10 years. And there really is a body of literature that not only shows that all these things work, but something in the underlying mechanisms.

We can talk about the neurochemical signaling, we can talk about the brain, the biology of the brain that's involved. And we've seen clinical studies, randomized controlled clinical trials like you would with a new drug where music really can work. But again, not in every case. A friend of mine just got a terrible gastrointestinal infection from eating bad food in Pakistan.

Oh my gosh, that sounds horrific. So it goes to the doctor when he gets back. It was awful. The doctor says, oh, we'll take the antibiotic. He's had to take five different antibiotics, you know, and if you get strep throat, they'll give you an antibiotic. It doesn't always work. So medicine doesn't always work and music doesn't either.

It's a trial and error, but I'm mentioning it because it's not like some wonder drug that's gonna solve all our problems on the one hand, but on the other hand. It's about the same as other drugs. Sometimes they work, sometimes

[00:30:55] Jordan Harbinger: they don't. Is there an addiction treatment angle for people who are hooked on things like opioids?

Can we use music and addiction programs to help this, or is it just that by the time you're addicted to Oxycontin, what the body produces is not gonna ever be enough?

[00:31:13] Daniel J. Levitin: Music is a part of a lot of addiction recovery centers now, whether it's AA or Narcotics Anonymous or various treatment programs. Yes, music is a part of this, and it's a part of it for different reasons.

It's not just the release of endogenous opioids, but the dopamine that motivates you to want to get better and follow healthful practices.

[00:31:35] Jordan Harbinger: I know that shamans and medicine people throughout history, throughout the ages have used music as part of ceremonies, as part of healing. I. Did you manage to research that at all?

I mean, it seems like an obvious connection. They obviously knew music did something back then, and maybe some of it was just to show how serious the ceremony was. But from what I've heard from friends, when you do something like psychedelics or some sort of medicine journey, there's a lot of music and drums and banging and things that go along with some of these ceremonies, and they're there for a reason.

[00:32:06] Daniel J. Levitin: So you're asking the question that any serious scientist would ask. How do you fractionate out the effects of the music versus the dance and the community? If you could assign a percentage, how much is attributed to the music per se, versus these other Paramus aspects? And it's hard to say. It's very hard to come up with a controlled experiment.

So in the shamanistic tradition, either contemporarily or 20 or 40,000 years ago, it was almost always the case that there was a large group of people. There was a leader, the faith healer, who was a very revered person in the community who had special knowledge and special skills. There were often herbal supplements of one kind or another, and the dancing and the community, and it would go on for hours.

They were typically trance states induced. So we try to do these experiments where we'll give people music or not music, and we'll give it to them with dance or not dance, but what's a control for dance that involves body movement that isn't dancing. What's the control for a large group of people that are really pulling for you to bring a bunch of your enemies together and have them sing songs that they, you know, ding Dong The Witch is Dead.

Get Outta here. It's very complicated to partition these out, but the fact is that the way we use music now in clinics and VA hospitals and even for self remedy is that just listening or playing seems to have a substantial and statistically significant effect.

[00:33:42] Jordan Harbinger: That's really good news and very fascinating.

I do wanna separate the sound healing from what we're talking about right now. I wanna separate music and therapy from nonsense pseudoscience like this bowl produces a frequency that will shrink your tumor. Can we do that briefly?

[00:34:00] Daniel J. Levitin: Yeah. So I'm a scientist as well as a musician, and when I'm wearing my scientist hat, I just wanna see what the data have to say and I go in with no preconceptions.

The data are there to tell a story. My job is to figure out what the story is. My job is also not to be distracted by shiny things and stories that don't fit the data. So I've been part of sound baths and I've been to particular sound baths that play Tibetan bowls or crystal alchemy glass bowls, and they're very emotionally moving.

I agree. Spiritually moving. I have a friend named Gerald Glass who runs a therapy practice. She has a company called Crystal Cadence. I brought her to perform in front of directors from, I think there's 27 institutes of the National Institutes of Health. A year ago, the director of the NIH was there and a lot of scientists, and I would say.

All of us were very moved. Now, if you ask her what she's doing, she'll say, well, and I'm gonna get this wrong. This bowl is tuned to C sharp, and so it's supposed to lift your mood. And this B flat bowl is for treating this and that. And the a bowl that's made out of this particular crushed gemstone thing is supposed to treat anxiety.

I don't believe that any of that's true. I also don't believe that when a great pianist like Horowitz or Keine or Alicia de Rocha or whoever it is, when they're playing a difficult piece, you'll see them do this.

[00:35:39] Jordan Harbinger: They're waving the hand in front of the face. Yeah. For people who aren't watching, they're waving the hand off to the side in the circular motion.

[00:35:45] Daniel J. Levitin: So after they release a note, their hand will sort of go off into the air in some grand gesture. Now, the physics of the piano is that once your fingers have hit the keys. The way you release it has no impact on the sound at all. And what you do with your hand after has nothing to do with it, but maybe it has something to do with the mood they're in or the embodiment of the emotion or something.

But I think it's mostly for the audience's benefit. Sure. That they do these grand gestures with their hands. They can believe anything they want to believe. I've met really wonderful musicians who think that the music is in their fingers. I. Not in their brains. And I have to say, well, if we scoop your brain out of your head, you're not gonna be able to play anymore.

And they say, oh, yes, I would because it's in my fingers. I say, no, you wouldn't. I can't believe they argue with you on this. It's a bold argument. I play music. I work with musicians who are brilliant and I don't wanna say anything that's going to interfere with their process. Sure. How they get there in a way that will move me and make me remember a performance for 40 years, or transform my mood for a week or more.

I don't care how they get there. And so when we're talking about the bowls, if a bowl player believes that this frequency is gonna have that effect, whether it has that effect on me or not, it's having some effect. But I do wanna say there is no science at all that says that particular frequencies are associated with particular mood states or particular therapeutic things.

And there's this whole pseudoscientific. Nonsense about how you have to listen to 438 Hertz tuned music instead of 440 or 4 32. It's a magic number. And if you look at 4 32 and you multiply it, it's the distance between here and the moon and it's the number of seconds that it takes the earth to revolve around the sun and it's the heartbeat of your cells or some nonsense.

It's no, it's none of those things.

[00:37:46] Jordan Harbinger: I also don't have a problem with going to a Tibetan sound bath with a group of friends after we went on a hike. We did this recently, I was in Laos and it was like, oh, this person's gonna play the bowl. I. It was relaxing. I slept well afterwards. Might have slept well anyway, 'cause I hiked all day, but it doesn't matter.

The only beef I have with this stuff is where people go, you don't need harmful drugs. That's western medicine. Or you don't need big pharma to pump you full of chemotherapy. You just need to listen to this sound and it will help you. That is where this stuff gets dangerous. When people stop looking for real, he cures or get confused between what is actually effective medicine for a thing that can kill them or hurt them.

That's where I sort of have to draw the line. I'm not trying to reign on people's parade because they have a. Brass bowl in their living room that has a little thing that they like to do in the evening that's harmless. It's a fun hobby. Go for it.

[00:38:42] Daniel J. Levitin: But if you're gonna use that as a cure for cancer instead of using medicine, you and I talked about this eight years ago or so when we were talking about my book, A Field Guide to Lies, and I remember the conversation and my recollection is that we talked about, and I think you were provoking me by using the term Western medicine.

Sure. There's not two kinds of medicine. There's not Western medicine and alternative medicine. There's just medicine. If something's been shown to work, we call it medicine. If it's not been shown to work, there are some people out there who will call it alternative medicine, but it's not an alternative.

If we knew that it worked, it would not be an alternative. It would just be plain old medicine. So this is what killed Steve Jobs. Yes. Steve Jobs got pancreatic cancer and he went to this charlatan named Dean Ornish. Who said, oh, I can fix that with yoga and diet. And maybe there were bowls involved, I don't know.

And you know, it killed him. He was gonna die anyway. But he put all his faith in this weird thing and when he changed his mind and saw it wasn't working, it was way too late for him to use actual treatments.

[00:39:50] Jordan Harbinger: Did he have a really bad prognosis? Because I swear I read somewhere that he had a very treatable cancer initially and it just spread because he didn't do anything real to treat it.

[00:40:00] Daniel J. Levitin: I haven't looked into this in 10 years, but I know that he didn't like what the doctors told him.

[00:40:06] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:40:06] Daniel J. Levitin: That makes sense. So he found another doctor?

[00:40:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Air quotes.

[00:40:11] Daniel J. Levitin: Who told him what he wanted to hear?

[00:40:14] Jordan Harbinger: Oh,

[00:40:14] Daniel J. Levitin: dangerous.

[00:40:15] Jordan Harbinger: Dangerous. Tell me about music and memories. I find that I will listen to a song and immediately be transported back to a time where, I don't know, maybe that song was popular when I lived in Germany, or maybe it was popular when I went to my high school prom or something like that.

And you get those feelings come back, they come rushing back. That's why so many couples have a song, things like that. Is music generally anchored somehow to memories?

[00:40:45] Daniel J. Levitin: Very much so. Not all music, but music that's associated with a particular time and place. And this is what Marcel Proust was writing about when he wrote about the madeleines, the cookies, or what we write about with smells, particular odors.

If there's an odor that's ubiquitous and familiar to you and part of your life every day, that won't do anything, but every once in a while you get a whiff. My grandmother used a very particular soap. I associated that smell with her. And when she died, she had two or three unused bars of this soap, and she died in 1987.

And I would use the soap now and then, and it would instantly bring back a flood of memories of what she was like and what it was like to be with her. And it's because our senses are a trigger for memories, and most everything that you've experienced is in your memory system somewhere. The trick is to pull it out from all the things that are in there.

And so you need something unique. The nature of music, at least in the last 60 years or so, is that we have popular music, we have songs that get played a lot for a relatively short period of time. Oh yeah. And happy Birthday in the national anthem, things like that, where you hear them all the time, they can invoke certain memories.

They're less likely to than that song you heard the summer you were 13, or the song that was playing when you had your first kiss or the song that was playing in that new country you were living in. Those get attached to the memories and all the sight and sounds and people and events are attached.

Memory is multifactorial. It's pictures, it sounds, it smells, it's tastes, it's touch. Does it work for bad

[00:42:35] Jordan Harbinger: things as well as, oh, I remember this song. I loved it. We used to play it in college and go cruise around in the car and meet girls. Does it also function for bad things? Can you hear a song and you're like, oh, this is when my parents got divorced.

This song was on the radio. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:42:50] Daniel J. Levitin: absolutely. It absolutely works for that. And a lot of people who have had traumas, if there was music playing or a sound. A non-musical sound, the trauma can be re invoked or relived or experienced through the sound. This is why soldiers who come back from the war with PTSD for car backfires, they duck for cover instinctively, and it can put them in a hypervigilant and traumatized state for days or weeks or years that they can't escape from just ordinary environmental noises.

The wrong song comes on. Same thing.

[00:43:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. One of my earlier memories that I'll never forget, 'cause I'd never seen anything like this. A friend's dad was driving us to lacrosse practice. This is sometime in the early nineties, and we were stopped at a red light and the cars behind us started to honk. And my friend was like, dad go And he froze and he goes, you guys hear that?

And we were like, yeah, the horns. And he goes, no, you guys hear that he had been in Vietnam and he got so triggered by this helicopter that was quite loud and it was low. So it was really extra loud and he just froze. He forgot like where he was seemingly, he didn't know anything about what was going on in that particular moment.

I emailed my friend about this and I said, do you remember that? And he goes, that definitely checks out as something that would've happened with my dad. So that was really disturbing. Well, of course, in a

[00:44:16] Daniel J. Levitin: dangerous zone, a low helicopter can mean the matter of life or death. It could be somebody coming to rescue you.

It could be somebody coming to kill you, and you have to freeze and take an assessment of the situation that really could kill you. And that moment, it's so horrible, the decision you have to make. Do I run towards it? Do I run away from it? Is this friendly or is this enemy, it can be paralyzing.

[00:44:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that was one of those things where I just remember looking at my friend and being like, what the hell dude?

And he was just like, I don't know, whatever. And I remember his mom drove us the next time and we were like, what was that about? And she was like, oh. Yeah, something about Vietnam and it happens. It's very rare, but he never drove us to the cross practice again. I have a feeling of when I told my parents, they were probably like, look, they're not letting my kid in the car with you.

I mean, I feel bad for him. Obviously this is something that affected him deeply, but I just found that to be so strange and it makes sense that the trauma and that sound are linked. I hope he's in a better place now 'cause helicopters are everywhere. Alright, if music can do all of this can help us recall good memories, bad memories, help us calm down, help us get amped up.

If music can do all that, why doesn't Spotify take my heart rate and physiological stress levels from my Apple Watch or my aura ring and suggest something to calm me down or to help my workout get better? I feel like Daniel Eck needs to get on this. They will. They are working on it. Are they

[00:45:44] Daniel J. Levitin: okay? And Apple has Apple music.

That makes sense. In the foreseeable future, you will be able to opt in to letting the streaming service you listen to music on. Communicate with your aura ring or your smartwatch, your smart device, and maybe it'll alert you and say, Hey, your blood pressure's getting a little high. Would you like me to play you relaxing music?

Or maybe you'll opt into the automatic whether you want it to or not. It'll start playing you relaxing music to lower your heart rate. And we know there is music that can do that in general for most people most of the time. But we also know there's music that does it particularly for you. They already know this, I'm sure, or could know it if they wanted to, because many of us have these devices that are monitoring.

So I imagine a world in which music as medicine becomes invisible to us, oh, you're on your way to the gym. The GPS knows you're on the way to the gym. It knows from past activity that you're about to get on the treadmill. It also knows that that cup of coffee you had this morning didn't really do the trick.

You're a little bit sleepy, and so it'll play you AC DC or Van Halen or whatever, pumps you up in the car on the way to the gym. And then you get there and it'll keep playing it. You've had a fight with somebody and it'll know what music will calm you and the horizon. And we haven't used the two letters AI yet.

I think what AI can do for us here is whatever music might be relaxing to you today may not always relax you all the time because your brain is constantly changing different events and different physiological occurrences can lead you to have different kinds of anxiety, let's say. And so ideally what AI would do is it would start with a tried and true.

This always calms Jordan down. Monitor in real time, whether it's actually calming you down and if it's not, it would get something else from your playlist or there are now 200 million songs across all the streaming services. It would find something you haven't heard that could become your new go-to thing and test it in real time.

See whether your body really reacts.

[00:48:01] Jordan Harbinger: Seems like AI could actually just make music that it knows I will like in that moment. Probably could. Yeah. That'll be interesting. I think it's quite fascinating that music therapy is not only effective because let's say it's pleasurable, it actually is doing something in the brain.

You mentioned the immune system in the book you mentioned that music discovery can affect our immune system. What's going on with music discovery and our immune system? Why would we even evolve something like that? That ability, the why question with evolution is always tricky.

[00:48:30] Daniel J. Levitin: We know that music can affect the immune system in several ways.

Listening to pleasurable music can increase levels of immunoglobulin A, an important antibody that travels to the site of mucosal infections and help fights them off. We know that music that is pleasurable to you can increase the production of natural killer cells and T cells. Also important for fighting disease and infection.

Some music can lead to reductions in inflammation. Why music does this and why the immune system responds to it, we don't know, but it does. And so evolutionary reason, my guess, is that we evolved over tens of thousands of years with music, and music co-evolved with us so that the kinds of music we made and gravitated towards.

Was the kind of music that made us feel good and was a sort of iterative process where one changes and the other changes in response

[00:49:34] Jordan Harbinger: to it. So they co-evolved. I mean, music is ancient. I suppose it makes some sense. It just is sort of mystifying to me why we would integrate that. So music so thoroughly into our brains, I just don't understand.

And I suppose we, maybe we never will. I've heard people who stutter normally don't always stutter when singing. What's going on here?

[00:49:57] Daniel J. Levitin: So stuttering like Parkinson's is a motor disorder. It's a failure to regulate movements in a particular order and at a particular time, people who stutter are unable to get the words out in the right order and at the right time.

The thing about music is that it has its own intrinsic tempo to it language. Normal spoken language doesn't. We sort of say things the way we want when we want, but when we're singing, there's a time when the word has to come. And so if you can sing and not have any disfluency, it's because of music's internal clock that carries you along with it.

So Elvis Presley, who we talked about earlier, was famously a stutterer. When he spoke, he didn't stutter. When he sang, he also acted, but he probably, when he was acting, memorized the script with a certain cadence. James Earl Jones, the actor, is very disfluent and stutters when he gives interviews, but when he's in a role like in Star Wars where many of the other great roles he had, he has to be able to memorize the script with a cadence and work out ahead of time what the rhythm will be.

And once he does that, these rhythmic circuits in the brain, which are separate from the language circuits take over, they effectively hijack the speech system.

[00:51:21] Jordan Harbinger: And you're in the music mode. It seems like a miracle in me. My mom is a speech therapist. I know teaching people how to manage a stutter is very tricky.

It doesn't always stick. It's easier when their kids, going back to what we discussed earlier in the show, so this seems like a really good insight into how to get around something like that or manage something like that. What about Tourettes? You mentioned this in the book as well, is it? Is there's a similar effect here as well.

[00:51:47] Daniel J. Levitin: Tourettes is by definition a motor disorder characterized by ticks, unwanted movements. There are some versions of Tourettes that include swearing uncontrollably, and at least with the ticks, musicians who have Tourettes such as Billie Eilish, the ticks almost disappear when they're performing. Again, because the music system in the way that singers can bypass the speech system, the music system takes over the motor system in its service, in the service of playing music.

And so the ticks disappear and it's an island of respite for them. They may not disappear completely, but they're certainly

[00:52:27] Jordan Harbinger: reduced. That's incredible. So it must feel so good for somebody who is constantly suffering from these ticks to play music and sing as much as possible. Yeah, it does. Man. That Tourette stuff is fascinating.

Uh, what many of you may not know is that I also have Tourettes, but it doesn't happen what I'm podcasting. How weird is that? F*cking sh*t. F*cking f*ck balls. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting a business shouldn't feel like taking the bar exam.

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[00:54:04] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Notion.

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[00:55:11] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb. I gotta give a shout out to Brian McDonald, who listened to the show and absolutely hooked me up in Vietnam.

Recently, Brian runs a taste of Hanoi, and I had this layer over in Hanoi, and he's like, I got you. Set me up with one of his guides for a motorbike food tour in Hanoi, which is awesome. Now, if you've never been in the back of a motorbike in Vietnam, it's something, man, you're weaving through scooters and traffic like a video game where you can actually die, and then all of a sudden we're inside someone's house.

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We're riding through someone's living room. Not even kidding, like actually someone's living room to get to this little courtyard kitchen where this auntie is making fa. That'll just ruin your life. No fa will ever taste as good. And Vietnamese egg coffee upstairs on the balcony. I don't even know how to describe it.

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Now for the rest of my conversation with Daniel Leviton, what about ms. Multiple Sclerosis in Music? I've got friends who've had this. It's something that scared a lot of us because we were all getting older and some of my friends just suddenly had symptoms of this. Can you describe what this is and what it does to your body?

[00:57:10] Daniel J. Levitin: Multiple sclerosis is a neurodegenerative disease that attacks the myelin, which is the insulating sheath. Around the neurons, neurons are sending electrical signals and like the wiring in your house or in that microphone that's in front of you, they need to be insulated so they don't short circuit or arc.

The wires in your home have rubber around them or some rubberized plastic or insulating material wires, as it were in your brain, have myelin, which is a fatty white substance, and that's why we call it white matter. It's after the white insulating sheath. When that sheath becomes degraded due to the disease, it causes a lot of things, memory, trouble.

Your neurons are not speaking to each other properly. Memory, trouble, movement, disorders, fatigue and music plays a role there in all of them, but for different reasons, music motivates you through the dopaminergic system. So to help you get over the fatigue, it can help with memory problems to the extent that music can serve as a cue for some memory and in the way of Parkinson's, it can help people with MS to walk and move more continuously and speak better.

[00:58:22] Jordan Harbinger: It's very scary. I've read some research that this comes from the same virus that causes mononucleosis, which I had that in college. Epstein Barr virus. Yes. So I think I got it from like, I don't know, going abroad and kissing girls in bars or something in Panama. Who knows? They called it the kissing disease.

Yeah. 'cause it was transmitted by saliva. Yeah. That is just really scary. Why do some people get this and other people don't? Do you know, I'm not an epidemiologist, right?

[00:58:51] Daniel J. Levitin: Caveat, and I'm not a physician. I'm just a simple country neuroscientist. But what I do know about Epstein Barr is that if you were to test the entire population, something like 90% of us would have Epstein-Barr antibodies.

I see. Even still now you would have them. The question is whether you become symptomatic, so mononucleosis, Epstein Barr, far as I know, same virus monocle is a manifestation of the virus. Some people have a recurrence of it later in life. That mono can come back 10 or 15, 20 years later. Sometimes it's diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome.

Sometimes it can become narcolepsy if there are other factors, but most of us are able to live with it and keep it in check. Some of us can't. We don't really understand the body's ability to fight these invaders very well. I see. Which is why long covid is still a thing. We haven't figured that out. Some people get it, some don't.

Seems not to be particularly related to which strain of covid you got or how severe your case was. So Captain Kirk used to say space, the final frontier. Yeah. I think the brain is the final frontier. Yeah. It's a vast, undiscovered,

[01:00:12] Jordan Harbinger: uncharted territory. It can be a little bit scary for those of us that are up in our forties and stuff happening to our friends, and it just, it starts to get real.

You mentioned with the stuttering and the Tourettes that there's almost like an alternative pathway in the brain for some of these things. I think a decade ago or so we talked about paradoxical kinesia. So how an old grandma can fly into action and maybe move super fast in an emergency, or how someone can lift a car off of their baby if it's trapped under the car.

Is this the same kind of thing? How does this work?

[01:00:47] Daniel J. Levitin: No, I think this is different. I think. That is attributed to a sudden burst of adrenaline and some other factors. We're not talking about adrenaline here in a fight or flight emergency response. I think a better analogy is what happened with Gabrielle Gifford's, the congresswoman from Arizona, shot in the head in 2011 and she was shot, the bullet entered a part of the brain that is involved in speech, broke his area and she could not speak after the injury, but she learned to speak and you can hear her give speeches now in 2025, and she sounds quite fluent.

She used what was a technique called melodic intonation therapy. It turned out she, this has been well known for a hundred years. Some people who can't speak can still sing, and so she was taught to sing things, simple things, but necessary things like, show me to the bathroom, or I need a glass of water.

And by repeating these songs. In the Intact Music system, the musical circuitry is separate from the speech circuitry. You're still making very similar movements with the jaw and the lips and the tongue and the larynx, but it's music, so it's a different system. And this gets to a fascinating evolutionary issue, which is the brain wasn't designed.

It's a Swiss army knife that evolved to solve a bunch of different adaptive problems. And so there's a speech system that evolved separately from the music system. And of course, if you were to design it now, you'd design it entirely differently. You'd make them a single system. Why wouldn't they be? They use a lot of the same capacities, a lot of the same operations, but they evolve separately for that matter.

The neurochemical system that evolved there are a hundred different neurochemicals. Crazy. You don't need a hundred neurochemicals. And by the way, the neurochemicals don't do anything. I see themselves, we say a dopamine motivates you and oxytocin makes you feel bonded. That's a very sloppy shorthand.

Okay. Your listeners are gonna hear this first, because most neuroscientists won't tell you this. What they do is there are circuits in the brain that relax you, circuits that make you feel bonded to other people, circuits that motivate you. Those circuits evolve separately from one another, and it just so happens that they evolve so that a very particular neurochemical binds with receptors and activates the opening of those circuits.

So we think of it as like a key and a lock. Yes. A key. Yeah, that makes sense. But if you were to design it from scratch, you might only need four neurochemicals. Huh? An excitatory one that is short acting. Like adrenaline, it doesn't stay around for a long time. An inhibitory one that's short acting. And then a long-acting excitatory and inhibitory.

Long-acting things like immune function. Yeah, four neurochemicals would do the trick, but we have a hundred.

[01:03:46] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. All because they evolve separately at different times, different ways. So it's just redundant. But hey, it works out for somebody who has a little bit of brain damage, right? Because they can use that other system to communicate in ways that the other system is now damaged.

So is that why if someone has a stroke, similar to a gunshot wound to the head, they can maybe sing what they need or sing communication and something along those lines, as opposed to speaking if they can't speak anymore.

[01:04:13] Daniel J. Levitin: There are a lot of demonstrations of this and some recent work being done at uc, Berkeley by Robert Knight, my colleague there where, you know, a patient came in just recently.

Who had a stroke and spoke in what we would call a word salad. He could not say the words to happy birthday when he tried. He said words that didn't belong in it and he couldn't get full words out. And he was like, just, huh, closet. Okay. Poor guy. But he could sing Happy Birthday, perfectly fine. And so Bob Knight taught him, you know, the li guy, his grandfather, he likes going to the meat counter, the butcher to order pork loin.

So Bob taught him a little song, go to the meat counter, sing the song when you wanna order pork loin. 'cause you can't speak to the butcher. So the guy goes

[01:05:00] Jordan Harbinger: and he sings to the butcher. I'm trying to imagine what that is. I'd like pork line. Does he have to finish the whole thing or is it just like one line?

[01:05:07] Daniel J. Levitin: Yeah. Yeah,

[01:05:08] Jordan Harbinger: because the butcher could be like, I got it. I see you every Tuesday. I know already, man,

[01:05:13] Daniel J. Levitin: that would be today. Could you give me some pork line? Yeah. Tomorrow I'd like some hot dogs.

[01:05:21] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, we're laughing at somebody who had a stroke. We are terrible people now. I'm not laughing at that person. Well, he laughs about it too. Of course. I would hope so. Look, he can communicate after a stroke. It's amazing. There's nothing more awesome than that. What about music instead of, or in addition to drugs?

I mentioned the painkilling thing earlier, but what about conditions like dementia? There's drugs for this. Do they work well? I don't really know. I don't think there are cure roles or even highly effective at this point. Are people working with music on this or is it just in the research phase?

[01:05:54] Daniel J. Levitin: We cannot cure dementia.

We can possibly slow it down with drugs, and there are some experimental drugs for this and some standard drugs. Rivastigmine is one of the promising approaches. The last time I looked, which is about four years ago, there are other things coming down the pike. These new GLP ones that gave us Ozempic the next three to five years.

I think we'll see some really dramatic movement there. But the role of music is, that's most apparent is that oftentimes people with dementia are experiencing a loss of memory such that they don't recognize loved ones, they don't know where they are or how they got there, and they may not even recognize themselves in a mirror.

It's profoundly disoriented. Yeah, geez. And it causes many of them to just crawl into themselves, fold in on themselves, because nothing makes sense. Or it can cause them to become violent because people are approaching them and kissing them and they don't recognize them. And why are you kissing me? I don't know.

You depending on your personality and how you respond to being kissed, you know, could be aversive or why are you talking to me? Like, you know, in that familiar tone, it's disrespectful. We've just met. They can become very agitated, violent if you play music of their youth. A principle of memory, and I know you're fascinated by memory.

You should have my colleague on who just wrote a book about memory, whose name you can't remember right now,

[01:07:23] Jordan Harbinger: actually. Char and Roff. Oh, he was on, yeah, he was on recently. Good. That was episode 1002. So it was actually June, 2024. Yeah. Super interesting guy. I will never not be fascinated by it because it's almost like this superpower that humans have that works in all these funny, mysterious ways and now we're finding it interacts with music.

[01:07:44] Daniel J. Levitin: One of

[01:07:44] Jordan Harbinger: the

[01:07:44] Daniel J. Levitin: principles of memory is that the memories that get in earlier. Are the strongest and the most robust. In many cases, you play a person with Alzheimer's or dementia's, profound memory loss, a song from their youth, and it suddenly reconnects themselves. They reconnect with the self they thought they had lost.

[01:08:02] Jordan Harbinger: That must feel like a massive relief in some ways to somebody like that.

[01:08:06] Daniel J. Levitin: And the relief can last for a long time. It can pull them outta themselves if they were catatonic or withdrawn and make them social again, or if they were aggressive, it can calm them.

[01:08:17] Jordan Harbinger: That's good to know. It seems like that stuff should be on play from wake up until bedtime in any care home instead of some of the depressing silence, frankly, or loud ass TV that you hear in those places.

What about music and sex? How can that help asking for a friend? I.

[01:08:36] Daniel J. Levitin: A lot of people like making love with music on. There are a lot of different kinds of sexual activity. I've heard there's quickies, there's longie, there's different tempos to sex, both in the act itself, the movements, but also in the arc of it.

Is this something that we only have 10 minutes before the kids get home, or we've got a nice evening, let's take our time and explore each other for an hour or so, or two. Music can fill the silence in the background in a way that allows you to feel like you can relax and slow down if that's what you wanna do.

It can also guide the movements so that the sex becomes like a dance. The tempo you can synchronize to it. It can also help invoke that default mode network. I think there's goal oriented sex and non goal oriented sex, and by that I mean most things. We do have goals. There can be orgasm, motivated sex, and just.

Sex that's motivated by a desire for closeness and a connection with another person. It may end up in an orgasm or it may not. And the goal of it is not necessarily to have an orgasm, and it can still be very pleasurable and fulfilling and as rewarding as non orgasmic sex, believe it or not. And so the music gives you permission to have that more leisurely kind.

And if you're having trouble getting into that zone, the music can create a separate space in the way we might light incense or change the lighting. Or if you're not somebody who has a glass of wine all the time, the wine sets this apart as a separate event and a separate thing we're gonna do together.

So it's all about setting a space and a consciousness and an intention. People would use different kinds of music that's meaningful to them for these different experiences.

[01:10:31] Jordan Harbinger: I love the idea that we can utilize music for things like this. What about depression? So many people suffer from this, whether it's severe or minor.

Can you share some insights into how music interacts with our brain to ideally alleviate symptoms of depression at some level? Is that a thing?

[01:10:47] Daniel J. Levitin: It is, and it needs to match the state you're in. Okay. If you're depressed, you need to play depressing music. What? Really? You think it'd be the opposite? If you're depressed, you're typically in that situation because you're feeling, to some degree misunderstood.

Okay. Happy Music is just a bunch of other people who don't understand you.

[01:11:06] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Yeah.

[01:11:07] Daniel J. Levitin: Depressing music allows you to feel that you are understood. It allows you to live with that experience and thus overcome it.

[01:11:16] Jordan Harbinger: If I were to jury rig this on my own right? Oh, I'm feeling down. I probably would just say, all right, Spotify happy music, and then I would just be annoyed that this happy music was playing while I felt like crap.

So it makes sense. You almost need to start from a point where the music is relating to me on my level. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. How can someone incorporate music into their daily life as a form of maybe self-care for mental health? Do you just wake up and assess your mood and play music according to that mood?

Is that helpful at all?

[01:11:47] Daniel J. Levitin: Yeah, it's helpful to have go-to playlists if you're a real planner, as I am, I have a playlist that I have as part of my advanced medical directive that if I'm in the hospital and I can't speak for myself and I'm just languishing there, play me these songs. They're songs from your youth?

Not all. No. I'm not talking about if I have Alzheimer's, but songs that are meaningful to me and that will comfort me and help me to feel part of something larger rather than stuck in my own self. I see. To help me feel connected to the universe or to my own past and hopefully future.

[01:12:28] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So this isn't something where you're incapacitated and this music will break you outta it.

It's maybe something that'll just make you feel better.

[01:12:34] Daniel J. Levitin: Uh, you're right. I should have an Alzheimer's playlist and a chemotherapy playlist

[01:12:39] Jordan Harbinger: before you forget to make it. Yeah, exactly. All jokes aside, but yeah, before you can't make it. This is all, man, this is amazing. What about lo-fi beats? Are you familiar with this?

Of course you are. There's a whole channel lo-fi girl, right. When you're studying or something, you put this on. This has just gained massive popularity for studying and focusing. Is there something in the structure of this that makes it effective or is it just happen to be trendy?

[01:13:02] Daniel J. Levitin: There is something about entraining gamma waves of your brain to music.

It's still early days, I would say. It's not pseudoscience, but it's not yet in the evidence base. Got it.

[01:13:16] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I just wondered if the simplicity of lo-fi music maybe allowed the brain to enter some kind of flow state more easily. I don't know. Stabbing in the dark. Some people claim that lo-fi music enhances memory and learning.

Also, no evidence for this yet.

[01:13:31] Daniel J. Levitin: Psyche. Louie at Northeastern University, a tremendously talented researcher in this field with her collaborator. Ed Large University of Connecticut has a new treatment for Alzheimer's that involves gamma wave lights flashing and music that has activity in the gamma wave as a way of slowing the progression of Alzheimer's.

I just saw a demo of it a few days ago and it was very impressive.

[01:13:58] Jordan Harbinger: Are there scenarios where certain types of music might hinder rather than help learning or focus? Is it, Hey, we don't know if lo-Fi music helps you focus, but we do know that heavy metal sure doesn't, or something like, is there anything that's anti focus, anti learning, or is that not a thing?

[01:14:14] Daniel J. Levitin: There is no evidence that listening to music while you study will help. There have been a thousand papers on this, literally a thousand papers, proper music, not lo-fi, beats music like you would have on the radio, heavy metal, jazz, classical, no evidence that it actually helps you study, and in fact, evidence that it creates a state of divided attention where the results are worse.

The problem is that it's so much more fun. We get deceived into thinking we're doing better, but we're not.

[01:14:45] Jordan Harbinger: I see. That's funny. I never thought about that. I think for me, I would listen to lo-fi beats when I'm trying to focus on something, but what it does is it blocks out the A-holes talking in the library that are distracting me.

So that might be the only use of it, but honestly, a good pair of noise canceling headphones or something where I couldn't hear anything is probably actually better. This is all amazing stuff. Music can heal you. It can help you in some ways, help you get rid of pain, help you get laid. Excellent. What about bad or even evil uses of music?

Is there music being used for the dark side at all? Speaking to James Earl Jones,

[01:15:23] Daniel J. Levitin: certainly we use music to intimidate. Okay. Army bands may have. The A of Jericho with the walls came doubling down. The idea is that loud music that is not the music of your tribe.

[01:15:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:15:38] Daniel J. Levitin: The Americans drove Manuel Noriega out of his compound in Panama when nothing else worked.

We turned off the water, the electricity, the air conditioning blockade, the food. The only thing that made him give up was heavy metal music blasted at 160 decibels. He couldn't take it.

[01:15:53] Jordan Harbinger: Wasn't it Van Halen or was it Metallica?

[01:15:56] Daniel J. Levitin: I think it was Van Halen. There'd be some poetic justice if they played jump.

That's right.

[01:16:01] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Yeah, that's right. I remember reading about this and it's funny, man, he's in there. He can't wash his hands, can't sleep, and he's finally, he's just, I can't take it with the guy with a leather body suit, just, I'll go to prison for the rest of my life.

[01:16:14] Daniel J. Levitin: Yeah. The less obvious one is that although the music may not be intended to intimidate, I.

Or disturb. It often does when we ask people what are among the most unpleasant features of modern life, often in the top five is unwanted music in public places piped in music,

[01:16:37] Jordan Harbinger: or the guy with a Bluetooth speaker on the subway, they know who they are.

[01:16:41] Daniel J. Levitin: Oh my God. Yeah.

[01:16:42] Jordan Harbinger: They're doing this on purpose, right?

This is an attention thing. What do you make of that? I know they're way off topic, but those people, they have to know I'm the most annoying person here. I don't know.

[01:16:50] Daniel J. Levitin: I, it was a beautiful pastoral afternoon in the countryside and some guy came in with what must have been 2000 watts of subwoofers in his pickup truck, and you could hear him coming from half a mile away and then he just parked his car in the next to the reservoir and played his loud music and it made it miserable for everybody.

I don't know what that's about, but it was very obnoxious and unpleasant, and I left.

[01:17:15] Jordan Harbinger: There's a special place in hell for people who decide to ruin environments for everyone else. It's gotta be an attention thing. I would love to hear people's theories. If you're a person who does this or used to do this, please email me and tell me why you did that.

I gotta know. It's gotta be an attention thing. I can't think of any other reason.

[01:17:31] Daniel J. Levitin: Or it's just that you're so self-absorbed, you don't care what other people are doing or think.

[01:17:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, possibly. Yeah. Some sort of disorder, I suppose. Where do you see the future of music therapy and neuroscience heading in the next decade with this stuff?

[01:17:45] Daniel J. Levitin: There is an evidence base now for music therapies and music interventions. Music therapies are those done by a therapist. Music interventions are what you might treat your loved ones or how you might treat yourself, or a doctor, a dentist playing music in the dentist's office. That's not a music therapist, it's a music intervention.

We've seen increased recognition that this is a real thing by healthcare providers. State of New Jersey, blue Shield, blue Cross in the state of New Jersey. Now reimbursed for musical therapies. Massachusetts is giving out 12 vouchers for free arts therapy as a preventative to help people stay healthy in the first place.

Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, is working to get legislation passed that will get Medicare to pay for music therapies and music interventions, maybe even for people who otherwise couldn't afford it. Elderly people to have their Spotify, their subscription paid for as a prescription by Medicare Medicaid.

[01:18:44] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. Yeah. That would be your Spotify price has gone up to $1,100 a month because insurance is paying for it. Oh, and you can only access these five playlists. Sorry. Uh, anyway, that's a whole different podcast, I suppose, on the future of the American Healthcare System. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss this.

I just find it so amazing what the brain can do. I love the fact that music interfaces with our minds in such a primal way, and I think people, by the way, who love music as much as you do, are gonna get a lot more outta the book. 'cause I will admit a lot of the stuff in the book was like terminology, music stuff.

Of course I understood what you were saying, but a lot of the finer points probably went over my head As somebody who doesn't play a musical instrument and is not as much of a music fan as you. I recommend reading the book for people who like music and for people who don't care about it per se. But I think people who especially love music, are really gonna love the book as well.

[01:19:36] Daniel J. Levitin: I tried to write at keeping in mind the dictum of the Simpsons. Which is the Simpsons is a cartoon that works at two levels. Kids love it, and then there's a lot of stuff that they're not gonna understand and they just ignore it. And then adults get this sort of satire and more advanced tumor. So I tried to write the book thinking.

I want to communicate at a level where the average high school student will get a lot out of it, but even scientists will get a lot out of it too.

[01:20:01] Jordan Harbinger: I think you did a great job with it.

[01:20:02] Daniel J. Levitin: Thank you, Jordan.

[01:20:03] Jordan Harbinger: But yeah, thank you once again for coming back on the show. Thank you, Jordan. Good to see you. The deepest parts of our oceans remain a mystery with 75% still unexplored.

You're about to hear a preview with Victor Vevo, the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans built and piloted a submarine that defied crushing pressures revealing a world few have ever seen.

[01:20:24] JHS Clip: 71% of the Earth is ocean, and of that 75% is completely unexplored. It's extraordinary. Deep ocean in the middle of Pacific is completely unknown.

We just don't go there and it's hard to go there. And many of the places in the ocean are really rough. And because it's so harsh, that's why it's really hard and really expensive to explore the ocean. I think I'm cursed with just an insatiable curiosity, which I'm probably most known for, is diving to the bottom of all five of the world's oceans.

If I'm gonna spend money, I'm not gonna spend it on a $10 million birthday party. I'm gonna spend it funding some people that are trying to move the needle forward on technology. It was kind of like Oceans 11, where I basically got to go around the world and say, who is the best person for expedition management?

Who would be the best ship captain? And because this was such an ambitious undertaking. They wanted to do it. That I think, is the way to spend wealth. I enjoy exploration. I enjoy pushing technological boundaries, but I like putting myself on the pointy end of the spear, and I don't leave it to other people.

I wanna be at the control. When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled sub, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together. Mine was designed and tested to a crush depth of 15,000 meters. That thing was a tank and things did go wrong.

Eventually, you can operate in a very dangerous world. You just need to be aware and you need to mitigate those risks. What

[01:21:52] Jordan Harbinger: did Victor find in the darkness where even light cannot reach? To find out, listen to episode 10 89 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. By the way, if you are really into music, folks, this book is probably even more enjoyable than it was for me.

I definitely also enjoyed it, but there's a lot of music terms and concepts that went over my head, and I think if you're really a music fan, you're gonna love this book along with the science that's in it, all things Daniel Leviton will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, wee bit wiser comes out, eh, every Wednesday ish. Has something practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. And don't forget about six Minute Networking as well over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn in this show. It's created an association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

So if you know somebody who's interested in music, interested in the science of music or alternative healing type stuff, maybe share this episode with 'em. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.