This Scientist Says Listening to Music Can Fix Medical Issues, Like One Suffered by Joni Mitchell

Daniel J. Levitin is hardly your typical neuroscientist and writer. With his background as a musician, songwriter, and producer, he’s helped Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell with input on compilations, signed new-wave bands back in the Eighties, and had an uber-backstage pass to the Police reunion tour, where he was able to hang out with the three musicians after shows and hear them dissect each gig.

In his first book, the ground-breaking 2007 study This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Levitin wrote — through a scientific but accessible lens — about our connections to music and what it can trigger within us. His eye-opening new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine (W.W. Norton & Co.), takes the idea one step forward, exploring the ways that music can play a role in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other conditions. Levitin also chronicles what he learned from watching musicians like Mitchell, Glen Campbell, Bobby McFerrin, and Tony Bennett grapple with their debilitating medical issues — and how music played a role in their treatment.

The idea that music could help in treatment of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, as you write, is a very recent concept. When did those findings cross your desk?
The evidence came in at first, in trickles. The first big study that interested me was one from an operating room, where they played people relaxing music or gave them a Valium, which is the normal thing you do. The people who heard music fared better. They recovered more quickly. Their blood pressure was lower. They reported lower stress and tension.  

Then studies showed that if you play somebody with Parkinson’s some music with a tempo that’s about at the pace they would be walking, they can start walking again. That made sense, because Parkinson’s degrades a particular set of circuits in the brain that are involved with an internal clock or an internal timer that helps you maintain a smooth and steady gait. We need to have an internal timer that gives us a steady gait so that we don’t falter, and that’s what gets damaged in Parkinson’s.

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Have you noticed any particular genres helping with recovery?
This is probably the question people are most interested in. And I think part of it is that people want to know: Is classical better for you? Does it make you smarter? Is it better for your brain than heavy metal? And no, absolutely not.

So playing Mozart for babies is a myth?
Yes, it’s a myth. Classical music is great, but musical taste is very personal, and it’s very subjective. It’s not going to be the case that a music therapist will say something like, “Well, you’re depressed. Take two Joni Mitchell songs and call me in the morning, and we’ll see how you’re feeling.” Music therapists and clinicians will help you within the musical taste that you’ve already established to find music that will help you achieve your therapeutic goals.

What surprised you about these findings?
What surprised me more wasn’t the findings, but seeing real musicians struggle with brain injury or disease. That isn’t a substitute for the science, because they’re not scientific experiments; every brain injury, every Alzheimer’s case, every stroke, is different. But they certainly fill in a lot of color.

Let’s talk about the late Glen Campbell, for instance, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
I did not meet Glen, and I didn’t interact with him. Kim Campbell [Campbell’s wife] reached out to me and I saw Glen’s brain scans. I knew that half of his brain wasn’t functioning on his final tour, and yet he was still the best guitarist on the planet. In the field of neuro music science, learning to play an instrument at that high level creates something we call cognitive reserve, meaning you’ve got a whole bunch more capacity in the brain from having achieved mastery. What it meant for Glen was that he could basically do it — guitar playing and singing — in his sleep.  He could do it with half his brain offline.

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He needed a Teleprompter for the lyrics. On the final tour, he would sing a song two or three times in a row, because he’d forget he had just done it. He’d forget what city he was in. But when it came to the guitar playing, once the downbeat started, even if he forgot the lyrics, he knew what song it was, and he knew some of the words and what he was supposed to do. So the insight with Glen Campbell wasn’t anything that a neuroscientist couldn’t have predicted. It was just such a vivid and marvelous demonstration of the power of the brain to be able to withstand a great amount of disease or injury through the sheer power of expertise.

It was fascinating to read that so many musicians you know are on the spectrum, and that so many stutter.
I don’t want to name names here, but most of the professional rock stars I know are on the spectrum. They don’t relate to other people the way you would expect. I’m thinking of a couple in particular whose music makes you think that they really understand human emotion, and they’re so sensitive and have such deep empathy. But they don’t understand emotion in the real world.

If you think about it, to become a great musician requires a certain amount of obsessiveness and compulsiveness. You have to practice hours and hours and hours. If you’re writing songs, you have to keep track of where they are. You have to be pretty highly organized not to lose track of them. You have to label the tapes and know where to find them. That level of detail is very close to what scientists do. And scientists are, famously, many of us, on the spectrum. [Laughs] When we look at the definition of autistic people on the spectrum, it includes things like stereotypical repetitive movements or obsessions with a certain thing. If you’re going to practice a piece every day for three hours for a month, that kind of fits my criterion, doesn’t it?

As you write, Billie Eilish has admitted to dealing with Tourette’s, and Elvis Presley stuttered.
It’s not that different than [old-school country singer] Mel Tillis and Elvis Presley, who famously stuttered when they spoke but not when they sang. With stuttering and tics there’s some internal regulator not doing its job. And music gives you a roadmap for timing and for putting things in a certain order, like typing, which is very similar to playing an instrument. Once you’ve learned those, the brain takes over and establishes that order almost flawlessly. The music has this internal momentum that propels you forward, and so it acts as a stabilizing force.  

As you observed, Joni herself is an example of that.
I’ve been friends with her since 1996. I was writing for Grammy magazine and interviewed Joni and we hit it off. Around 2001 she’d given me her number and asked to stay in touch. I started going to her house whenever I was in town, and we’d have dinner together, and she’d play me whatever she was working on. I remember the very first time she sat down at a piano and played me “Bad Dreams,” which ended up on Shine. I thought, “Oh, my God, she could be playing this at the Hollywood Bowl.”

In 2015, she had an aneurysm burst and went to the hospital. It was a brain bleed. She came home and couldn’t speak or move, and she had round-the-clock care. My phone number was on the bulletin board in her kitchen, and the nurses saw my name and called me and said, “We’re Joni’s nurse and your name’s on the bulletin board. Why is that?” I told them what I did and they said, “Sometimes when we’re listening to music on our cell phones from the other room, it seems like she perks up.” And I said, “Well, that’s a good sign. Maybe you should play her some music. And the most important thing is that even if she can’t really speak, make sure that you got a clear signal from her that she wants to hear music.”

They started playing songs she’d selected for her Artist’s Choice compilation. I said, “Play her that record.” So they did and noticed that within a short time, she was kind of bobbing her head to it and gesturing that she wanted more. What the music did for her was what it did for Bobby McFerrin [who is battling Parkinson’s]. It served as a reminder of something they deeply loved, and it served as a motivator. We now understand that when you listen to music you like, it releases dopamine, which helps you to maintain a steady gait and to walk smoothly and to control what might otherwise be jerky rhythms in Tourette’s. When it’s in the prefrontal cortex, it helps you to pay attention and focus. When it’s in the limbic system, it promotes feelings of pleasure, but a very particular kind of pleasure.

What do you make of Joni’s recovery?
It’s been extraordinary, and it’s totally a testament to her willpower. Because nobody predicted this. Given where she was, the level of willpower and dedication and spirit that brought her to Newport and will bring her to the Hollywood Bowl in the fall — I don’t think anybody else could have done that. As much as I like to think of music as power, it’s equal parts music and equal parts Joni and her indomitable will.

What about the role of AI in music therapy?
This is a golden age for music. There are 100,000 new songs being uploaded every day to streaming services. The real trick is to help you discover music you didn’t know, that is fresh and new but still similar enough to music you like so that you’ll gravitate towards it and it’ll be able to affect you right away.

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The role of AI in a couple of years is going to be simply that it will be able to automate this process of selection and feedback. Whatever streaming service or however you get your music, it’ll play you a song, and you’ll have your smart watch or smart ring communicating in real time and telling you whether your blood pressure went up or down, whether your oxygenation levels went up or down, whether your heart rate increased or your respiration rate increased. Eventually, we’ll be able to track brain waves like the physiological activity, and we’ll be able to tell: Did that song physiologically calm you down or not? Did it help you focus or not? And if not, we’ll play you another one, and we’ll refine the algorithm that’s choosing until we can get better and better in real time.    

Speaking of music, you were an A&R man for 415 Records in San Francisco in the early Eighties, home of Romeo Void, Translator, and other Bay Area new wave bands. How was that experience?
The most interesting thing that happened while I was there is that I had the opportunity to sign MC Hammer but didn’t. We would get these mail bins full of cassette demo tapes, and one of my jobs was to listen to the tapes. We weren’t doing hip-hop or rap, and so that might have been a stretch, but we got a tape and he was local. And I listened and heard [hums the Rick James “Super Freak” riff]. I’m thinking, “Oh, well, that’s ‘Super Freak’ by Rick James and it’s also in ‘Da Commissar’ by Falco and the same song by After the Fire and ‘Deep in the Dark’ by Laura Branigan.” And I thought, “The public is not gullible enough for this a fifth time!”