Striking a chord: Why neuroscientists believe music could hold the power to cure what ails us

Music makes us feel better — for most of us, this is an intuitive truth. But scientists are only now beginning to understand the remarkable ways that music affects our brains. With the help of innovation, researchers are working to assess and codify the whats, whys and hows that could help us harness this power as a therapeutic tool to treat people grappling with everything from mood disorders to Parkinson’s disease. Their data is helping prove that music could be one of our most vital, valuable and accessible forms of medicine.

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Narration: Music moves us. It’s a bit like magic, isn’t it? What other art forms spark such a range of reactions in so many different people?

Dan Levitin: Why does music affect us? Why can it heal us? Well, because it’s personal.

Narration: Scientists are realizing that if we can figure out how and why music affects us, we can harness that power and use it as a kind of medicine. The answers can be found deep inside the labyrinth of our brains.

Dan Levitin: Think of the difference between your auditory sense and your visual sense. When you look out, what you see — a lamp, a tree — those are out there in the world. When you listen to somebody talk or you listen to music, it feels like it’s coming from inside your head. It’s in your body, not outside your body. It’s very personal.

Narration: It’s this exact quality, the power to trigger our emotions in a deeply personal way, that may hold the key to using music as medicine. I’m Manjula Selvarajah, and this is Solve for X: Innovations to Change the World. Today, we’ll explore how and why music moves us, and look into the role technology could play in unlocking its healing power.

Jessica Grahn: Medicine, I don’t know what the strict definition is, but I think it’s much more broad than pharmacology, and it absolutely treats symptoms of a variety of different problems in a way that I would say makes it a type of medicine.

Dan Levitin: Music hits every area of the brain that has so far been mapped. It’s a whole brain activity.

Narration: That’s Dan Levitin. He’s a neuroscientist, psychologist and best-selling author who’s dedicated his life and career to understanding how music affects our brains.

Dan Levitin: You don’t realize this at the time, because it just sounds like music, but the rhythm is processed in one part of the brain, and the melody in another, and the chords and harmonies in another, the lyrics in another. And the reason this is relevant is that each of them can get to different circuits in the brain that do different things.

Narration: His best known book is This Is Your Brain on Music. Now, he’s exploring the potential of music to heal us.

Dan Levitin: When we talk about one possible application of music, which is to help restore speech in aphasics, people who lost the ability to speak like Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, she learned to speak again by singing what she needed: “I need a glass of water. Show me where the bathroom is.” And she could sing these things that she couldn’t speak because the lyrics are extracted and sent to a different part of the brain than speech is.

Narration: His latest work is I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. I reached Dan at his home in Los Angeles to learn more.

Manjula Selvarajah: We all know music is good for us. Many cultures tie music and healing, and yet it feels like we’re now in a moment of heightened interest and awareness about music’s potential to improve our health. Why is that? Why now?

Dan Levitin: The easy answer is that until about 2006, most of the papers that were being published were not very good. They lacked control conditions, or the experimenters were from outside the field of cognitive psychology or field of human behavioral sciences, so they didn’t know how to properly construct an experiment. Or they used, instead of music, computerized sounds like beeps and boops [Dan mimics beeping sounds] as a way of understanding auditory perception. Things changed around 2006 or so when more people got into the field and started conducting better experiments. And so now we’re 18 years after that, we’ve got thousands of papers of well-conducted studies.

Narration: All those studies? They were sparked by the development of a new technology.

Dan Levitin: When brain imaging was first introduced around 1998, it somehow made the study of something squishy, like musical emotion, more tangible, more biological. The evidence seemed more believable. “If the brain was doing this, not just a bunch of people telling you what was happening, then it must be true.” So the brain imaging stuff was giving it a validity that it didn’t have before.

Manjula Selvarajah: So you know, we’re looking at 2006 as being this kind of turning point. What are some of the more recent breakthroughs in this field of study? What is the science telling us about music as medicine?

Dan Levitin: I think the big headline is that this is not just some alternative treatment or some unproven technique — that we now have a rigorous body of evidence that music can be used to help with a variety of health outcomes, from treating disease and injury to boosting the immune system, speeding up healing times, putting us in a good mood, or allowing us to be more productive and live happier and healthier lives. So that’s the big finding, is that there really is a solid research literature behind it. And then in terms of specific findings, one of the obvious ones is Parkinson’s disease.

Jessica Grahn: My name is Jessica Grahn. I’m a professor in the psychology department at Western University, and I am a neuroscientist who researches music.

Narration: Through her research, Jessica Grahn is working to provide a scientific foundation of music as medicine. And she’s one of the people whose research is helping make this field of study less squishy, as Dan might describe it.

Jessica Grahn: One of my main focuses is on why we move to music and how our brain’s movement system responds automatically when we’re listening to music. And I’m also very interested in how this could be applied to help people with movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

Narration: Jessica’s exploring how and why the brain responds to rhythm. She hopes that getting to the bottom of this mystery will let us develop better and more effective treatments.

Jessica Grahn: So we were playing people different rhythms and just asking them to listen to the rhythms, and we specifically told them, “Don’t tap along, don’t count, don’t move, and don’t even imagine moving — just passively listen”. And they were doing this while having their brain scanned using MRI.

Narration: Using functional MRI, Jessica was able to see what people’s brains looked like when they were listening to rhythm.

Jessica Grahn: And what we found was that even when they were completely passively listening, we saw areas of the brain, several areas of the brain that are normally involved in the control of movement. So the areas that help us select which movements to produce, when to produce them that help us correct movements — all of these areas were lighting up, even though people were staying very still.

Narration: But inside their brains, there was a lot of activity — almost like they were moving.

Jessica Grahn: We actually didn’t see one movement-related area, which is the area that responds when you actually execute a movement. So this sort of confirms that indeed, they weren’t moving or tapping along secretly, but all of those other movement-related areas that are really important for motor control and how we move throughout the world, were responding just listening to a rhythm that sounded something like “duh, duh, duh, duh, duh duh duh, duh,” nothing there that requires you to move, but yet we still saw the movement system light up.

Narration: This was revelatory for several reasons. Jessica found that the areas of our brain responsible for movement are key to our understanding of rhythm. But there was something else, too.

Jessica Grahn: And then the other part that excited me about that is one of the motor brain areas that we saw is called the basal ganglia, and this is an area in Parkinson’s disease that has degeneration and is thought to lead to some of the movement problems that they have. And so I thought, “Oh, if rhythm is actually helping this area light up, maybe this could help explain why musical rhythm could be useful when you have a movement disorder.”

Narration: Music may be an art form, but there’s a science to how it works. When we really like a song, it’s also because of a chemical reaction — our brains get flooded with dopamine, a teeny, tiny molecule also known as the “feel-good hormone.” And as Jessica explains, that little molecule plays an important neurological role in Parkinson’s disease.

Jessica Grahn: In Parkinson’s, there’s a degeneration of neurons that emit dopamine, and that lack of dopamine input to the basal ganglia, this key movement related area, actually causes the brain to be over-inhibited. So it’s shut down in a way — not the entire brain — mostly initially the motor circuitry. But eventually this spreads, and so some people talk about the basal ganglia as a brake on movement, and that in Parkinson’s, the brake is on too strongly, such that when they want to release it to, for example, stand up and move across the room, they’re unable to do so.

Narration: As the disease progresses, there’s also an issue known as freezing. Somebody could be walking down the street and find that suddenly their feet stop moving.

Jessica Grahn: Or walking through a doorway can also be a trigger for freezing. So there is something about the movement system where that activity is decreased and they’re unable to generate movement. Interestingly, they are able to generate movement in response to external stimuli. So if, for example, you say, “Hold your arm out,” it might take a few seconds for that command to actually be responded to, but if you throw a ball to them, that arm might shoot out completely accurately, and they’re able to catch the ball. So this tells us that it’s this brake that’s the problem. The fundamental way that the movement system is working to make a movement happen can still be accessed, but it needs to be accessed in a particular way.

Narration: Jessica and her colleagues have been trying to tackle this issue with technology. One of their experiments involves using a very, very low-level electrical current, on par with a 9-volt battery. The idea is to stimulate part of the brain to enhance music’s power on our movement system.

Jessica Grahn: We are finding that it seems like that boost to the motor system, coupled with the music, seems to actually produce slightly faster walking speeds in older people and people with Parkinson’s. What we’re hoping is that the new connections that might be developing as they practise walking to the music that really enable them to improve their gait will stick better. So by enhancing the plasticity, those connections are more likely to be made and more likely to persist.

Narration: Helping people with Parkinson’s walk using audible or visual cues has been around for a while, but using music does something more than that. It could actually be helping rewire our brains.

Jessica Grahn: We’re just learning now, I would say, in the last 10 or 20 years, about how music affects the brain, and this is inspiring new ways of using music to try and aid people in lots of domains. So I focus on movement, but other researchers have looked at PTSD and how music can be used in conjunction with exposure therapies to reduce the effects of PTSD. So I think there is a lot of potential out there for music because of its connections to movement-related areas. It also has connections to language. So it can be a great adjunct for speech therapies. If you are having an emotional or mood disorder, music can be used directly to treat that as well. So I think music has a lot more to tell us, and it’s going to be used a lot more widely in the future.

Narration: But you don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see how powerful music can be as a therapeutic tool.

Charlotte Cumberbirch: My name is Charlotte Cumberbirch. I’m a classical singer, so I’m a mezzo-soprano. I am a music therapist. Right now, I’m working almost exclusively with older adults. For me, I’ve had the experience of feeling like the lights on the switchboard have been off, and then music will help me light them back up again. You know, have that feeling of reawakening and feeling more alive.

Narration: In her work, Charlotte helps light up other people’s switchboards. She invited us to join a session she puts on for the Cummings Centre, a Montreal-based community organization that helps older adults to experience the healing power of music over Zoom.

Charlotte Cumberbirch: Hey everyone. I don’t see cameras on.

Narration: One morning earlier this summer, my producer joined a group of eight seniors to sing together online.

[Charlotte playing piano]

Charlotte Cumberbirch: Great, we’re going to start here actually, just with some humming.

[Charlotte humming]

Narration: The participants come for a variety of reasons. Some have challenges communicating through speech because their vocal cords have been damaged, for instance, or because of a stroke or Parkinson’s disease.

Gabrielle: So I’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2020 and I find I’m losing my voice, and I get hoarser and hoarser and weaker. And I enjoy the class — I mean, Charlotte is just great.

Carrie: I have a little problem with my vocal cords. One side is lazier than the other, so this can really help me with breathing. So that’s why I’m here. And I have a love of singing — like I don’t play pickleball. I like to sing.

[Charlotte singing “Can’t Help Falling In Love”]

Josef: I have a medical reason because, as a consequence of a fall, I have swallowing trauma. So I’m here to improve whatever there is improvable.

Charlotte Cumberbirch: How did that feel for everyone? How is that going? We’re good? I get a thumbs up from Carrie. I get some nodding from Koba, everyone else, we’re good? OK.

Narration: Alongside her Zoom sessions, Charlotte is dedicated to bringing music and song into a variety of health and long-term care settings.

Charlotte Cumberbirch: I’ve had the experience through singing and sharing music with a resident who has been described to me as unreachable, as aggressive. And then, I can sort of swan in with my guitar and my voice, and then all of a sudden we’re having a conversation. And they are not unreachable, and they are not aggressive, and they are experiencing a part of themselves as well that maybe they haven’t experienced in a while. Because certainly in long-term care, every interaction can be a medical interaction. So the capacity for music to reacquaint ourselves with parts of ourselves that might have been lost. For me, honestly, I think that’s the biggest card in the hand.

Narration: I was struck by Charlotte’s description of music as a portal to help us find parts of ourselves that may have been lost. This idea is something Dan Levitin has been looking into as well.

Dan Levitin: One of the big findings of the last decade or so is that music activates the memory almost directly, and it allows us, through the default mode network, through the daydreaming mode, to access memories that we hadn’t thought of for decades, or even memories that we forgot we had. In that way, music helps put us in touch with parts of ourselves that were always there, but we may have lost track of. And this is why it’s so powerful in cases of dementia, where people who have lost an awareness of where they are, what year it is, they don’t recognize their loved ones, they may not even recognize themselves in a mirror. You put on a piece of music from their youth, and they suddenly reconnect with themselves, and it’s incredible to see.

Narration: Now, if science is proving that music really can help us heal, how can we translate that power into a prescription? That’s where innovation could play an important role.

Dan Levitin: I’m imagining that in the not-distant future, either AI or a music therapist will look at your Spotify playlist or the last 100 songs you’ve streamed on Apple Music or YouTube or what have you, and use that as a launch point to understand your musical DNA, your musical tastes. If you were anxious, did it lower your blood pressure? You’ll know right away. And then, you know, in a feedback loop, we’ll be able to choose better music and focus in on the features of the music that helped. Was it slow tempo? Was it low-pitched instruments? Was it minor keys? All of that stuff would be part of an intelligent network.

Narration: One person who’s working to make that not-so-distant future and imminent reality is Frank Russo, a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist in Toronto.

Dan Levitin: Frank is one of the world leaders in the music and medicine field. I think he and I share the idea that in the near future, probably in the next three to five years, AI will be an assist, not in writing music, perhaps — I hope not — but in recommending music based on your own listening habits, your musical DNA, and that music will be targeted to particular health outcomes.

Frank Russo: My name is Frank Russo. I am the director of the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology lab, the SMART lab, at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Narration: Frank is also the chief science officer for LUCID, a Toronto-based company that is developing music-based therapeutics.

Frank Russo: We don’t have to be next to someone in a room with a device. We can send our intervention over the internet, and someone can receive it and have some benefit from it.

Narration: The idea behind this tech is simple, in theory: using AI to customize music playlists in real-time to help people with anxiety and other mental health challenges. But it’s not as straightforward as it seems.

Frank Russo: Music therapists have developed techniques over the years for regulating mood in clients. Some of that know-how, some of the research, is captured in the nuts and bolts of what LUCID does. On top of that, there is artificial intelligence that helps us to curate the experience.

Narration: Although this technology can be used by anyone, the company is focusing on applications for dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Frank Russo: So 50 percent of people living with dementia have episodes of agitation. Some of the theory around what’s triggering these episodes of agitation, concern, anxiety that, you know, “I don’t really know where I am. I know I’m not sure who you are or what’s going on, or something has changed in my environment.” So if we can play a piece of music that suddenly connects you with your personal identity that is deeply familiar, that triggers all these autobiographical memories, we’re going to tamp down that anxiety and maybe reduce — or even avoid — that episode of agitation. That’s the theoretical premise we’re working from. Now the evidence base there, we’re still building up. But if we step outside of LUCID and we look at what is the evidence for music as a means of sparking autobiographical memories, it’s robust. You know, aside from food and smells, it’s one of the best things we have.

Narration: Building on that thesis, Frank is testing how this kind of AI-enabled therapeutic could be best deployed to help calm down the brain. I took a trip to the SMART lab to try it out.

Kay Wright-Whyte: My name is Kay Wright-Whyte. I’m the research coordinator for the SMART lab. So we’re trying to see if we can influence the stress hormone, and therefore, we hope your anxiety levels, with this music intervention.

Manjula Selvarajah: So if you can picture it, I’m wearing an eye mask, an ECG monitor on my wrist to record my heart rate, and on my head, there’s what looks like a bright red swim cap covered with 64 different electrodes. Wires run from every one of those channels into a machine behind me.

Frank Russo: You see how each waveform is going up and down? When we have a low-frequency activity, we’ve got more space between the peaks and the wave, and that’s what we’re looking for as an outcome.

Narration: They were using EEG, or a snapshot of electrical activity in my brain, to get a sense of what was happening in my mind while I was listening to the soundtrack LUCID provided.

Kay Wright-Whyte: Those little peaks are eye blinks, you can see her blinking.

Frank Russo: What the AI is learning from is what progressions of music have guided people to a calm state.

Narration: I was sitting in a recliner in a tiny room, a sound booth, completely sealed off from the rest of the world. I was hooked up to an array of wires, but otherwise, it was almost like a sensory deprivation chamber, which was kind of the point.

Manjula Selvarajah: Looking forward to this. OK, here we go.

Kay Wright-Whyte: We got you, we got you.

Narration: It’s hard to fully capture the experience I had in that sound booth in part because, well, I don’t know that I was consciously aware of all of it, but I’ll try. You know, I came in with a certain degree of anxiety. Nothing exceptional, just the everyday stuff. “Did I park in the right spot? Will I get a parking ticket? Am I going to be on time?” And mentally, you’re aware that you’re a test subject and you don’t want to mess anything up. And then the process starts. And for that first little bit, I kept thinking, “Are we done yet? Is it over? Is my time up?” And then I guess I sort of drifted off. My mind went on its own journey. I had these strange thoughts and dreams, you know, just things here and there, some useful stuff. I started thinking about people I hadn’t thought of in a really long time, which was odd. At one point, I was like, “Did I just fall asleep? Has it already been 20 minutes?” But what really struck me though was how I felt at the end. I came away surprisingly energized, not hyper or dysregulated in any way, just really alert. Participating in the study offered a glimpse of what it might be like to engage with LUCID’s therapeutic platform. The hope is that in the near future, patients can access this kind of treatment to manage symptoms that undermine their quality of life.

Frank Russo: So you may not, as a dementia patient, you may not be able to say how you’re feeling right now. But if we’re observing you from day-to-day, we can get a sense of what’s your day like right now, and we could cue up the right piece of music. We would hope we approximate what a music therapist might do or what a loved one might do, who knows their loved one’s response to different kinds of music.

Manjula Selvarajah: So how would AI figure that out? Figure out the mood state of someone, someone living with dementia?

Frank Russo: Yeah, so a few ways. It’s a great question. So to start with, we brought in individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and we played them music that evokes different kinds of emotions. And we recorded the facial movement of these people: the eye movements, the pupil response, the head bobbing, all that kind of stuff. All of that gets fed into an artificial intelligence. But if you’re using the system day-to-day, we’re going to tune in to what your normal is. If you’re feeling particularly anxious that day, the system should be able to detect that.

Narration: Frank and other scientists are continuing to develop this technology. But could healthcare providers treat people more effectively with music right now?

Jessica Grahn: I think music has really been underused so far, clinically. There are music therapists out there, and they are very successful. Music can be used as an adjunct to make therapies more attractive, more engaging, more appealing. And increasing adherence to therapies is always a big challenge.

Narration: That’s neuroscientist Jessica Grahn.

Jessica Grahn: Our medical system moves slowly. So policies and treatments, if there’s not a lot of money to be made, there’s not that much impetus to change how things are done. So nobody is trained in this as a part of routine care. This isn’t part of our medical curriculum. It’s an alternative therapy, and that’s probably appropriate in some ways, because of the fact that there isn’t a lot of hard data behind it. But without a huge amount of money to be made, it can be hard to actually get the research to show what it can do. So, I think in some ways, its accessibility is a blessing, but also potentially a curse.

Narration: And when you’re talking about something as subjective as music, there’s also the issue of how we perceive it.

Jessica Grahn: We did a study where we asked patients with Parkinson’s whether they noticed music helping them in their daily lives, and mostly they didn’t. So, I think the research helps call attention to something that might be able to be used more effectively than it is currently. And again, access to music therapy is not very broad, so if you don’t need a specialized therapist to access the power of music, that is also helpful. And that’s where the research can also help, because instead of needing to train individuals for years, we can put some aspects of that music intervention out into the public domain to be used more broadly.

Narration: Even though music is something many of us use intuitively in our daily lives, we don’t always appreciate how it could be used to improve our health.

Jessica Grahn: Somebody got in touch with me after I gave a talk and said, “I have an uncle who has Parkinson’s, and I went home with them, and we found some music for them, and they really love it, and they’re going for walks more often than they used to before, and they think it really helps.” And it was just really nice to have something where the knowledge dissemination that we do, where we tell people, “Well, this is a thing that you can try,” somebody came back and said, “Hey, I tried it and it worked!” And that was really gratifying.

Narration: I learned about so many promising developments in the field of music as medicine, but I wanted to get Dan’s take on the risks of it getting misused.

Manjula Selvarajah: Because that’s the thing I wonder about. I mean, you painted this picture of this future where you could have music as medicine enabled by tech. And for some reason, I imagined a bunch of people reading your book, and in a year a whole bunch of products, a bunch of products and apps available. “Use this for focus. Use this to,” I don’t know, whatever the case may be, people that just run ahead with a real looser tie to the science. Is that something that worries you?

Dan Levitin: It worries me very much. In fact, I just did a study a few months ago where I took the top 20 relaxation songs on Spotify and compared them to the songs that we know in the laboratory will relax people. And we measured things like heart rate and muscle tension. And the Spotify songs did nothing. But they are the 20 most popular relaxation Spotify songs. It’s just somebody saying, “I find these songs relaxing.” There’s no science behind it. Spotify does not have a scientist making these lists. None of the streaming companies do. So, yeah, I worry about it a lot. All I can do is do interviews like this and tell people, “Look, there’s real science, and this is where it’s at.” With music, we are saying, “Yes, it works, as far as we know now, in a limited number of cases.” And this is, and more, we’re a little farther than that, because we have the mechanism. We know something about the brain activity in the neurochemical basis for it. And science is a self-correcting process, and it’s an infinite process. We never stop collecting data.

Narration: Remember the EEG cap and the other data the team at the SMART lab was collecting? After the experiment was done, I called Frank to find out if he could walk me through what was going on inside my head.

[phone ringing]

Manjula Selvarajah: Hi Frank. How are you?

Frank Russo: I’m well, thanks.

Manjula Selvarajah: Now I hear you have my results. Is that right?

Frank Russo: I have your EEG results in front of me, that is right.

Manjula Selvarajah: OK, talk to me. What can you tell me?

Frank Russo: The caveat about all this, Manjula, is that really, this is a one off and these changes, this could be a fluke. We never make the conclusions based on an N-of-one, but this is extremely promising. So what we can see is that there have been some changes. There’s a look at the neural activity in your brain prior to the intervention. Let’s call that the pre or the baseline, and then a look at the neural activity after the intervention. The short story is that it has changed in expected ways.

Manjula Selvarajah: Interesting.

Frank Russo: So it’s changed in a way that suggests there may have been some relaxation involved over the course of the session.

Manjula Selvarajah: The other strange thing I wanted to mention is what it was like when I got out of the room. I was very awake and very focused after the session. What do you think that’s about?

Frank Russo: Yeah, that’s a really interesting observation. The way that I would like to interpret that is that you are more ready to tackle a cognitive or social task, if you like, that you’ve rested for a moment. That whatever stresses were in front of you, those sort of melted away, which provides some rejuvenating power to tackle what’s in front of you next. I think it’s as simple as that.

Narration: I’m still processing my guinea pig experience, but it’s clear the music did have an effect on me. In some ways beyond what I’m able to articulate. And when Frank explained the results to me, it was like … wow. You know? I knew something had happened inside my brain, but to actually understand the nuts and bolts of what it was, it cemented something. There are already things I do to settle my constitution and manage my stress. I take hour-long walks, for instance. But this has made me think about the ways I could integrate music in a more intentional way. We may not quite be at the point where a doctor is going to prescribe it the same way they’d give you a pill, but there’s real evidence that music boosts our well-being, and for me, that’s an absolute takeaway.

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS. This episode was produced by Ellen Payne Smith and written by Sarah Liss. Lara Torvi and Sana Maqbool are the associate producers. Mack Swain composed the theme song and musical stings. This episode also features music from Ian Jack and Kevin Komoda, performed by The Loft Party, Johnny Caspar, as well as a captured recording from my LUCID demo. Those were actually the songs I heard. Gab Harpelle is our mix engineer. Kathyn Hayward is our executive producer. I’m your host Manjula Selvarajah. Watch your feed for the next episode coming soon.

Solve for X is brought to you by MaRS, North America’s largest urban innovation hub and a registered charity. MaRS supports startups and accelerates the adoption of high-impact solutions to some of the world’s biggest challenges. For more information, visit marsdd.com. And we want to hear from you — drop us a line to share your ideas, questions and feedback. What innovations are you curious about? Have you had a life-changing moment with music? Email us at [email protected]

Illustration by Workhouse