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This post is a review of I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine. By Daniel J. Levitin. W.W. Norton & Co. 405 pp. $32.50.
In 1993, Nature magazine reported on a study suggesting that listening to Mozart was associated with an improvement in spatial reasoning tasks. A media frenzy ensued, followed by sales of Baby Einstein CDs and a proposal by the governor of Georgia to use public funds to supply parents of newborns with Mozart tapes. Listening to Mozart, it turned out, does not make people smarter.
Nonetheless, Daniel Levitin (an emeritus professor of neuroscience, psychology and music at McGill University and author, among other books, of This Is Your Brain On Music) agrees with Pink Floyd: “Music seems to help the pain… to cultivate the brain.”
I Heard There Was A Secret Chord examines the many and varied neurological benefits of listening to and performing music. Along the way, Levitin, who also plays the saxophone, guitar, and bass, is a vocalist, composer, producer and recording consultant, 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.
That said, Levitin focuses primarily on music’s impact on the treatment of depression, pain, cognitive impairments and injuries. Because they combine motor, auditory, and semantic functions (structures that hold everything together), Levitin indicates, musical memories can connect “different modes of awareness with our internal narrative, our sense of self, where we’ve been, and, most important, where we want to go.” Uniquely robust, with any of their many attributes – pitch, melody, harmony, note duration, meter, rhythm, tempo, loudness and timbre able to trigger pattern-making circuits of the brain – musical memories can boost immune function and survive even in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
Stutterers, Levitin reports, achieve more fluency while singing songs with a steady beat than they do during normal conversations. Rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) helps Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s patients increase their walking stability and balance and reduce falls and episodes in which they freeze. Music stimulates neuroplasticity, enhances brain recovery, and normalizes stress responses for many people with traumatic injuries. Based in Anchorage, Alaska, the Creative Forces Music Therapy program provides and encourages individuals with concussions and PTSD to express emotions and forge social connections. Listening to music reduces post-operative pain and the amount of anesthesia required during recovery, even for spinal surgery. And the pain doesn’t always return when the music stops. Older adults who take piano lessons improve their fine motor control more than a group of music listeners; both groups improve their mental processing speed.
More generally, as world-class musician Carlos Reyes declared, “You can talk about endorphins, serotonin, immune system signaling, and all that stuff, but that’s the bottom line – good music can make you feel better.”
Music therapy is relatively new, however, and Levitin acknowledges that positive results are often based on anecdotes, case studies, and animal models. A review of 18 studies of the impact of music on mood, motivation and the duration and intensity of hallucinations on schizophrenics, for example, concluded the evidence was of “moderate to low quality” and recommended further research using more rigorous experimental methodologies. All but 2 of 1,200 studies of music therapy and eating disorders are case studies, lack a control group or other essential design features. And two-thirds of the 114 peer-reviewed articles published between January 2000 and June 2018 on connections between music training and non-musical ability, brain structure or brain function, “incorrectly inferred causation from correlational designs.”
That is not to say, Levitin hastens to add, that music therapy is not effective. Indeed, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord provides ample evidence to justify Levitan’s claim that “music offers a dynamic interplay of sound, structure, and meaning,” continually prompts our brains to adjust and reinterpret and stimulates “neuroplasticity, growth of whole new brain pathways and healing or rerouting of damaged ones.”
And so, Levitin provides a 21st-century perspective on the hyperbolic claim made more than 200 years ago by the poet Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Novalis): “Every illness is a musical problem – its cure a musical solution.”
