Is Music the Language of the Universe? with Daniel Levitin

Chuck, the brain remains a frontier.

Yes, it does.

Greater than the universe itself.

You said that?

Wow, this must have been a really good show.

I love the recipe of all the ways music can not only work with our moods, but work with our emotional and physical health on StarTalk Special Edition.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, and I got with me Chuck Nice.

Chuck, how are you doing, man?

Hey, Neil, what’s happening?

Okay, this is StarTalk Special Edition.

It is.

If I’ve got you for StarTalk Special Edition, we also get Gary.

That’s right.

In this edition, Gary O’Reilly is going to take us in.

Gary, what do you have to tell us?

Generally speaking, music is a pleasure.

We appreciate the artistry and enjoy the performance.

Music can transport us to another time and place, alter our emotional state.

Now ask yourself, what throws an audience into a trance or a performer into a flow state?

Why do we get earworms?

They’re nasty little rascals and they’re annoying.

They are just some of music’s gifts.

The ancient Greeks knew way back when that music has the power to heal.

So we’re talking the cognitive neuroscience of music, and for that we need someone very special whose range is nothing short of extensive.

Daniel Levitin, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in music and psychology.

Multi-million, best-selling author with another just out.

A musician, a record producer and an engineer working with some of the best in the business, and I mean the best.

And I am just scratching the surface when I say that he has won loads of awards for loads of stuff.

So, Neil, enjoy the show.

Sorry I can’t be there.

COVID has stopped me, but I know you’re going to have a great, great time.

It’s going to be a fantastic show.

Thanks, Gary.

Again, sorry you can’t be with us.

So, Daniel Levitin.

Daniel, welcome to StarTalk.

Thank you for having me, Neil.

Listen, dude, you’ve done everything in your life.

I haven’t done an interview with you yet.

Okay.

And now you can die.

So, you’re here primarily because you just released a book.

Yep.

And we’re going to talk a bit about that, but mostly just about the human brain and music.

But we look at your background starting out as a music producer and you knew everybody, anybody who’s anybody.

This book connects music and neurological health.

Yep.

Maybe we kind of knew it.

Well, but this book, all 350 pages of it, is…

It’s 412.

You didn’t read the notes at the end.

Good.

That was good.

I read 4,000 peer-reviewed articles, so you wouldn’t have to.

They’re in the notes.

Very good.

That’s why we buy the books.

So you analyze and put into narrative something we always suspected was true, but didn’t really have evidence for it.

And so let’s just start from square one.

The movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

We communicate with those aliens initially with musical tones.

It makes the bold assumption that aliens can hear.

This is a sense that we have, which is assuming other life forms will have it.

They might have some other sense that we don’t have.

Okay, so that’s our bias.

It’s fun to see what biases we put on our aliens.

Plus they were bipedal.

They had a head, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, ears.

Okay, that’s our bias.

And they also had lousy taste in music because they actually liked that song that we played them.

It was awful.

Well, four notes.

Yeah.

Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.

There is this idea that a sufficiently advanced technology society will have things like the Fibonacci series or a geometric series, powers of two.

And so the idea that there might be some universal language, math would have been the obvious one.

Not so entertaining for a Spielberg movie to have the compression.

They have prime numbers popping up.

It would have totally fed the geeks in the world.

We would have flocked it to the film.

Can you comment on why we care at all about music?

What we do know, music being auditory doesn’t leave the same kind of trace as, say, cave paintings.

Right?

So a lot of this is speculation.

When you say trace, the same historical evidence.

Archaeological, physical evidence, right?

Although we do have bone flutes that are dated between 40 and 60,000 years ago.

Oh, wow.

And they’ve been found not just in…

Well, you just said that like that’s a thing.

You mean someone took a femur, carved it out, and blew air through it and made a flute.

Yes.

You just said, a bone flute.

Like, you can get it in the corner.

Yeah, you know.

I shut up because there are many, many jokes that go with bone flute.

You are exactly right to point this out, because yes, somebody had to find a femur and drill holes in it at precisely spaced intervals to get particular pitches.

They’re 40 to 60,000 years old.

They’re among the oldest artifacts we find in human burial sites.

I’m guessing they might have done this with wood, because it’s easier, but wood doesn’t last as long as calcified bone.

That’s right, well, that’s right.

Their wood would turn to dust.

And so the interesting thing is, okay, well, if they went to that much trouble to have this technological thing of drilling the holes however they did it, the bone flute wouldn’t have been the first musical instrument.

They would have been stretching skins across stumps.

They would have been beating their chest Bobby McFerrin style.

This is perfectly reasoned.

The bone flute required sufficient effort that surely there were other instruments made with less effort before you got to that.

And they didn’t last.

Okay, yes.

And it makes sense because there are other instruments that happen without you doing anything.

Well, singing.

Singing is one.

Or banging two sticks together.

Two rocks can keep a beat.

Early rock music.

I see what you did there.

Or if they had any Coke bottles at the time.

Okay, so we agree it existed.

We agree it’s old.

I’m asking you why.

So in my field, we have a journal called Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

And it’s an interesting model for a peer-reviewed journal.

Somebody writes a target article.

I don’t know if they have this in astrophysics.

Somebody writes a target article.

And then other people around the world who are qualified in the field get to write commentaries on it.

And those commentaries are peer-reviewed.

So you have an idea put forward and then maybe 40 or 50 people weighing in on what they think about it.

Do you have this?

Not really.

It’s a wonderful thing.

Well, we do have in the journal Nature, we have, you can write an article.

And if the article is a little bit controversial, the editor will solicit a comment on it.

I’ve written some of those.

Okay, so beyond that, no, it’s not a free for all, as you described.

The nice thing is that it helps a field to cohere into some kind of a consensus.

Oh, it’s a town hall.

Yeah, then the target article, people get to write a response to the, yeah.

So I mentioned this because in 2019, there were a couple of target articles about the evolution of music.

And this is something I devoted a whole book to in 2008, The World in Six Songs.

The subtitle was, How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.

And the idea was, you know, like so many things with evolution, as you’ve explained to the public better than anyone can, things don’t evolve typically for a single reason or a single purpose.

There’s a bunch of different evolutionary pressures.

And in the case of music, there were at least six independent lines of why music became important and encoded in the genome and passed down, not just culturally, but genetically.

Give me the most significant one that has to do with survival.

I am not qualified to…

You said there were six.

So give me one of the six.

I will.

You asked me to rank order.

I’m not an evolutionary biologist.

Okay, give me any of the six.

Okay, my favorite of the six.

Okay, there you go, your favorite.

Think about the transmission of information within a culture and across generations.

Now we do that by talking, but we also write things down.

We’ve only had written language on this planet for about 5,000 years.

In fact, it almost defines history.

Well, that’s right, absolutely.

But humans have been on the planet for 40 to 100, 200,000 years longer than that, depending on how you define human.

And so for most of the time we’ve been on the planet, we did not have writing.

And what we believe from studying contemporary hunter-gatherer societies that are cut off from Western civilization and industrialization, we have every reason to believe they’re living the way they might have been 20,000 years ago.

So we believe that they use music to encode knowledge.

For example, they would have a song that would encode, this is the route to the well.

And this is the route you take to the other well if this one goes dry.

Or a song that says, don’t go over that mountain because great-grandfather ogg went there and the neighboring tribe killed him.

And this is how you make a watertight canoe.

This is how you boil a plant so it’s not poison.

Why music?

Because first of all, the available evidence from my lab and now many others around the world.

And which are lab by the way?

McGill University.

McGill, up in Canada?

Yeah.

Yes, okay.

The Laboratory for Music Cognition and Expertise.

The available evidence is that the neural structures that encode music are phylogenetically older than those that encode speech.

Wow, so evolutionarily, we were musicians before we were talking to one another?

That’s what this sounds like.

So it seems.

From a brain development standpoint, yes.

And Stephen Mython has written a wonderful book called The Singing Neanderthals, where he posits that some sort of proto-language was music.

Sounds like a great punk group, by the way.

The Singing Neanderthals, yeah.

Are you suggesting that we made sounds, if we don’t yet have words, that we could imagine writing, or language as we now think of it, sounds can be put together into musical shape?

Yeah, so there’s two parts to this.

Let’s talk about sound without language and sound with language.

And if you don’t mind, I’ll go backwards in time.

Do you?

Once we had language and we set the language to music, once we had words that we set to music, those words would become encoded and preserved in memory with far greater resistance to distortion.

Because you’ve got the mutually reinforcing cues of rhythm, accent structure, meter and rhyme scheme, so that there’s a limited number of ways that you can fit words into that space.

And so you look at the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were orally transmitted, very, very long poems.

The Old Testament.

The Bible, the Psalms are all songs.

That’s right.

And the Old Testament was sung before it was ever written down for a thousand years and preserved as far as we know fairly accurately.

And so songs are able to resist to a large degree distortions that simple speech is not.

Makes perfect sense simply because we teach all of our children in song first.

The ABCs.

Yes.

All of your nursery rhymes are sung.

Little kids learn the body parts through the song, right?

You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out.

You put your right foot in, you turn your head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes.

Everything we learn as a kid, I mean a lot of what we learn is through song.

That explains why it would have had evolutionary value because we can remember lessons for where the water hole is, where the food, how to not get eaten.

It’s like the equivalent of the bee dance.

We sang like bees dance.

That’s how they give direction.

Yeah, exactly right.

That’s how we give direction.

The bees are the waggle dance.

So might you then suggest that among vertebrates at least, birds engage in song in this whale song.

We call them song.

Maybe they’re just angry and they’re complaining.

Wow, this is really…

You forget humans.

Ooh, ooh, which is the whale equivalent to get off my lawn.

Get the hell off my planet.

Or I’ve got Lombago.

So just to sharpen my question, what other animals offer any evidence at all for musicality, if not birds when we think of bird song, whales when we think of whale song, or other creatures that make what we think of as melodic sounds to one another?

This is a very contentious question in the ethology community.

Remind me what ethology is.

The study of animal behavior.

That’s called ethology?

Is it not?

No, I don’t know.

Biology, let’s say.

No, but…

Ethology, yeah.

Ethology, animal behavior.

Yeah.

Cool, thank you.

So let’s look at the characteristics of human music.

For one thing, we’ll sing when we’re all by ourselves.

Birds won’t.

Birds will only sing if they know there’s another conspecific nearby.

Bird and whale song is communicative.

When we speak to one another, we are speaking with a specific intention, usually, and we’re referring to things.

All the animal calls that we know of are referential to some event in the world.

They’re either a mating call or a call to distress.

Hey, everybody look out.

There’s a predator here.

Right.

Or, hey, there’s some food over here.

They are specific, stereotyped communications that are used in the presence of others.

They aren’t, for the most part, changeable.

We have an infinite variety of songs.

Birds do not.

They’re not riffing on a melody.

I have a bird song identifier on my smart phone.

And the only reason it works.

It’s because they can pull it out of its sound.

And they don’t change the song.

Right, right, because it could be a noisy environment, but if there’s a bird in there, it will find that bird.

And the bird in New York, and its offspring, and a bird in Illinois, and a bird in Brazil, if it’s the same species, they’re going to sing more or less the same song their whole lives.

And it’s encoded, and you know how we know this, my colleague Evan Balaban did a study.

He took embryonic, I don’t remember the species.

Oh, this is called eggs?

Well, he took, yeah.

He took eggs.

Embryonic birds.

He took fertile, he took.

That’s an egg, the egg is an embryo, right?

Well, yeah, he took fertile eggs.

Let’s say it’s a chicken, and he gets the auditory cortex of a zebra finch, and he implants it in the developing brain of the chicken.

Wait, is the zebra finch a zebra or a finch?

It’s a finch.

It’s kind of a bird.

A songbird.

I’m just being literal here, because you all name stuff, you know, zebra finch.

He takes a songbird auditory cortex and puts it in the developing brain.

Of a chicken.

And vice versa.

It’s not a zebra that looks like a finch, it’s a finch that has zebra stripes.

Exactly.

Exactly right.

And so the question is, are birds learning their song from their parents and from the environment, or is it hardwired?

And what he found was the chickens started singing the song of the finches and the finches started clucking like chickens.

Oh.

Because it’s hardwired.

That sounds like a great Pixar movie.

Somebody mixed up the eggs at the beginning.

You’re not a chicken.

I’ll be a chicken if I want to.

I could be whatever I want.

And the chicken goes, mooo.

Scramble the farm animals.

That’ll mess with the farmer.

So these are hardwired actions in these animals.

For everybody else.

But not for us.

Not for us.

Everything that we know about animal communication is that it’s not music the way we would define music.

It’s not infinitely generative.

You can’t model it with a Markov chain.

Is there any evidence that we have always enjoyed music as entertainment?

Because when you talk about, it becomes this directional medium.

It’s a medium of direction, where we’re telling each other stories, or we’re giving each other information.

At what point do we have proof or evidence historically that it went from that, which it still is, which we just determined, to, man, this is my jam.

I love this so much.

What a great song.

Well, so one of the other uses of music is to create a bond between mother and infant, because the infant would imprint on the mother’s singing voice.

And we now know that relaxing, comforting songs can release prolactin, which is a soothing and tranquilizing hormone.

So we’ve got a number of different reasons why music was there, and they’re subserved by different neurochemical systems.

This works even in utero?

Yeah, so by the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system is fully functional.

Wow.

And the fetus can hear sounds, it’s through the amniotic fluid.

That would change the frequency of it?

No, it would not change the frequency, it would change what frequencies you hear.

So if you put your ears under water…

Is that the same thing?

I don’t get the difference.

Oh, well, I mean, it’s not like a prism that can change…

Isn’t it exactly that?

I can change the frequency by speeding up tape.

But if I simply play music in a different medium, it doesn’t change the frequency, it changes which frequencies are emphasized over others.

If you stick your ears under water in a swimming pool or a bathtub and music is playing, you’ll only hear the, primarily hear the bass notes.

The frequency of those bass notes hasn’t shifted appreciably, although water is a different medium than air, but you could do the calculations and see, I think.

I have to think about this.

Okay.

Let me table that for a moment.

So the value of a lullaby, for example, is not just soothing auditorially, it’s soothing chemically, as you described.

And what is the chemical?

Prolactin.

Prolactin.

And what does that do?

It’s a soothing, tranquilizing hormone that calms you down.

A neurohormone.

Yeah.

So does different music then activate different parts of the brain?

Yes.

Holy moly.

Music activates every part of the brain that we have so far mapped.

Oh my goodness.

That’s astounding.

When you say activates, you mean all parts of your brain respond.

But not all at once.

Not all at once.

Not to every piece of music.

Okay.

So music regionalizes your brain.

Would this account for why?

Because they say the same of smells, where you can hear a piece of music and it takes you right back to a time and a place, and everything is explicit without you even trying to summon that memory.

Depends on the music.

So by that, I mean the current theory of memory, the neurobiology of memory is that everything you’ve experienced, your thought gets in your memory.

It’s there.

The problem is getting it out.

And so what you need to get a memory out is what we call a retrieval cue.

And that retrieval cue should be unique.

So if I sing you happy birthday, that’s not going to bring you back to a particular time.

No, not at all.

You associated with hundreds of different…

I heard that on my ninth birthday!

Oh my gosh!

It’s not going to happen.

But if I play you na na hey hey kiss him goodbye, and you haven’t heard that in a long time, or tears of a clown, or something that you associate with a particular time in your life, you are brought back there because it’s uniquely associated with that time in your life.

Like Proust’s Madeleines, right?

Or a smell.

That’s pretty cool.

I mean, is that why?

And then this just popped in my head because of what you just said.

Tony Bennett had Alzheimer’s.

And the thing that they said often about him was, even when he was in the midst of an episode where he could not remember, even that he was Tony Bennett, he could sing his songs.

You could start playing, I left my heart, and he would jump in, and then he would start singing.

My heart and St.

Louis.

Almost worked.

That’s messed up, man.

I know, that’s messed up.

We should probably cut that.

No, don’t cut that.

That’s hilarious.

That’s St.

Louis’ comedy goal.

Are you kidding me?

But so, I mean, do we, I mean, that’s pretty wild.

Is that the reason?

We saw it with Glen Campbell, too.

Which is why he was able to perform well into the affliction that he suffered.

Yeah, and I’ve had the opportunity, the privilege to see his brain scans from when he was on the tour.

Half of his brain was offline.

The Alzheimer’s had really made it so half of his brain, literally half his brain was not functioning, but he was still the best guitarist on the planet, arguably, and could still remember the songs.

He might do them two or three times in a row, because he couldn’t remember he had just done it.

But the act of doing it was intact.

Is he drawing from the part of his brain that works?

He must be.

Well, so the interesting thing about brains is that they are massively.

Any sentence that begins.

The interesting thing about brains, is that everything?

Here’s an uninteresting thing about brains.

All right, go on.

Tell me something interesting about brains.

They’re massively redundant.

That’s what I came to learn in recent years.

So whatever circuits there are, they’re massively redundant and it makes evolutionary sense.

If you get a hit in the head, you don’t want to lose the ability to do important things.

The other thing we talk about a lot in my field is cognitive reserve.

And by analogy, if you’re a marathon runner and you can run 26 miles, on a bad day with COVID and a sprained ankle, you can probably still run five miles faster than I can.

You’ve got all this athletic reserve built up.

Musculature, air capacity, not to mention willpower, right?

To work through it.

Musicians have cognitive reserve in the musical domain, and they have so much of it that you can lose lots and lots of circuits, and the other redundant circuits are still intact.

Interesting.

And so what I said in my book Successful Aging reiterated it in this.

Chuck, when you lose half your brain, you might still be able to tell jokes.

I am right now.

What are you talking about?

I might be able to.

This is how I’ve made my entire limit.

So the expression, if you had half a brain, you’d be dangerous?

I do have half a brain.

Okay, I interrupted.

Sorry, go on.

If you learn an instrument at an older age, I write about this in Successful Aging, which was the previous book, but also reiterated here, it’s never too late to learn an instrument.

If you’re 70, 80, not too late, and I’ll tell you a story about that in a second, but it’s neuroprotective, neuroplasticity is the fancy word for making new neural pathways.

We do that our whole lives.

If you ever heard that, oh, you don’t grow new neurons after a, no, not true.

So even if you learn music at a later age, that will help this neuroplasticity.

It’s neuroprotective, and it means that by building up all this cognitive reserve, all these new pathways, for one thing, it’s invigorating, and you get a sense of agency, and, really, self-efficacy by learning something new.

And you can then engage with some of the greatest works made by some of the greatest minds in history.

The story of my grandmother, I think, is a very personal illustration of this.

My grandmother was born in Berlin in 1897, and had to leave under the Nazis.

My grandmother escaped with her three daughters and her husband.

The rest of the family were all killed.

On her 80th birthday, my grandmother told my mother and I that she was so grateful to be here in the United States, to have been able to raise three children here, to have a country that would take her in.

And she said that ever since she came over in 1939, every single morning, in gratitude, she sang God Bless America, a song written by another Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin.

So she would sing the song?

Sing it.

So my mother and I went out to Radio Shack and got her an $80 keyboard, electronic keyboard, and we put little pieces of tape on it with numbers.

One, two, three, four, five, six, so she could play the melody.

And she played it every morning.

And when we saw her on her 81st birthday, she had taken the tape off because she had memorized the right hand part.

On her 82nd birthday, she had worked out a rudimentary harmony with the left hand.

And she played that song every morning until she died at 97.

And I think that having learned the instrument, having a way to express gratitude, had a lot to do.

It’s an N of one, but it’s a very powerful experience.

So Daniel, you have a recent book published with…

Naughton.

Naughton?

WW Naughton?

That’s who your publisher is?

Yes.

Anyone over 70 will get that reference.

No, if you’re Eddie Murphy fan, you’ll get it too.

Oh yeah, you’ll get that from that one skit he did.

Yeah, I’m with WW Naughton, I’m very happy.

Yeah, yeah, I have a few books with WW Naughton.

I know you do.

That was one part of the attraction for me.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Do I get 10%?

No.

Oh, no.

Don’t aid it, I bet the publisher.

So, in it, which has the beautiful title, I heard there was a secret chord.

That’s great.

That’s a beautiful song by, who wrote that?

Leonard Cohen.

Leonard Cohen.

He’s got that, I heard there was a secret chord that pleased the Lord.

And you just hear it, it’s like, ooh, I got it.

It gives me the, not the Willys, but the Jimmy’s.

Even without knowing the song, it makes you feel very Gwyneth Paltrow-esque.

Okay.

It’s like, I gotta get this book for some reason.

Yeah, it draws you to it.

So…

Yeah, we should bundle this with sales of goop.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So, you refer to a default mode network.

What is that?

This was one of the biggest findings in cognitive neuroscience in a generation, which was the brain wants to mind wander.

Now, you might say this is something we always knew, but a lot of things we thought we knew turned out not to be true.

And so, the job of behavioral scientists, we have a little bit easier than astrophysicists in that we have 20,000 years of history of people thinking that certain things are so, and then we can just test them and see if they really are or not.

Folk tales and all the rest.

So, the idea that the mind wants to wander as opposed to paying attention now has some neurobiological basis.

It takes energy to pay attention to something and to keep your mind from wandering.

And by energy, I mean neurons need to work harder.

They are metabolized with blood oxygenated glucose.

Glucose is the fuel.

And your brain is already a big consumer of your body’s energy.

It is.

So, now even within that now, you’re now dividing up the tasks for who’s energy intensive and who isn’t.

Paying attention to something, being engaged with something and making decisions, uses up glucose.

And the phrase paying attention is actually quite accurate.

You’re paying with glucose.

And it’s a limited capacity resource.

When you’ve been paying attention to something for a while, your attention flags.

Your brain, your mind starts to wander.

This is called the default mode network.

It was discovered by my colleague and collaborator, Vinod Menon, at Stanford.

And it’s a very important thing to understand because it’s in the default mode.

When our minds are wandering that most problem solving gets done.

Now, if you think about it, it should be obvious because if I’m trying to solve a problem and it eludes me, it must mean, in most cases, that the solution is nonlinear.

It’s not just connecting A to B, two things that I knew.

It’s having to come up with a nonlinear solution.

And those typically happen while we’re asleep and dreaming, another manifestation of the default mode as it were.

Because dreams can get really random.

They can, yeah.

But that’s where you get all this nonlinear out-of-the-box thinking, or you’re walking down the supermarket aisle looking for the Cheerios, and suddenly it comes to you, the solution.

So getting into the default mode happens automatically when we’ve worked too hard, unless we try to fight it.

But you can get into it by doing three things, meditating, walking in nature, or listening to music.

So I think everything we’ve described thus far has been known to us all.

The mood setting, the memory, jogging, what role it can play in our states of mind.

Where does medicine come in?

Where there’s something wrong with you, measured by doctors, and then music fixes it, or alleviates it.

So this is the book I wanted to write 20 years ago when I wrote This is Your Brain on Music, but there was not enough evidence for medical applications of music.

Notice there’s a good scientist speaking here.

Not enough evidence?

I’m not going to go out there and do it.

No, not at all.

Okay, you know how many people don’t think that way and they start a YouTube channel?

All of them.

All of them.

All of them.

That’s every YouTuber that you get.

Just turn on YouTube and you’re looking at that.

Yes.

No, no, the evidence was weak and I didn’t want to go there.

What you and I share, I think, is a feeling of an ethical commitment.

If we’re doing science and we’re taking grant money, ultimately, that either comes from governmental agencies or from tax breaks to private foundations, meaning the taxpayer funds scientific research.

You and I believe that every scientist has an ethical obligation to explain how we’re spending taxpayer money.

And so I don’t want to spend taxpayer money saying stuff that ain’t so.

So now we’ve got this book.

There’s a lot of foundation for your statements.

Give me a short list of some of the ailments that have been alleviated by music.

I’ll start with wellness.

So music boosts the immune system, particularly immunoglobulin A.

IGA is responsible for fighting off infections of the mucosal system, which is COVID or colds.

Music also boosts the production of natural killer cells, NK cells and T cells, which travel to the site to fight an infection.

The most sickly people in the world are people who never listen to music.

Is that?

The inverse true as well.

Well, we’re talking about significant but small effects.

I mean, and certainly there are always exceptions in the tails of the distribution.

So quantify your statement that it improves your resistance, your wellness.

Quantify that.

You mean like P less than 0.05?

No, I mean, how much of an effect does it have on your immune system?

For example, it can boost the immune system better than say echinacea or vitamin C or all these things that people…

So if I might have gotten five colds this year and I listen to music, would I get four colds?

We don’t know.

We don’t know.

Well, you’ll get five colds, but they just won’t be as bad.

Well, that’s right.

I mean…

That can happen, too.

We don’t really know, and I don’t want to claim that we do.

Okay.

But we know in clinical studies and in laboratory studies that IGA, for example, NK and T cells are increased.

Now, at that point, whether they’re successful at fending off a disease or not, there’s a lot of other variables.

Okay, so it’s one thing to say that these things are improved.

Yes.

And it’s separate to actually do the clinical trials.

But there is a logical progression, though.

You’d expect it.

You’d expect the logical progression.

All right, so that’s one thing.

So your wellness.

Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease is characterized by a degradation of cells in the basal ganglia.

I’ve seen brain maps, brain models.

It’s in the back here.

Yeah, at the base underneath in there.

Yeah, exactly right.

Basal ganglia.

Ganglia, yeah.

A group of subcortical nuclei that are connected to the brain’s own internal clock.

So what happens is dopamine is normally used for signaling and transmission of information in this cluster of neurons.

But isn’t dopamine in the…

A feel-good.

It’s a feel-good chemical.

Neurochemical.

Neurochemical.

Well, so that’s an interesting thing.

Dopamine is throughout the brain and it does different things in different parts of the brain.

When you’re experiencing pleasure and dopamine is released in the limbic system, including the ventral tagmental area, you feel pleasure.

So dopamine does different things in different places and it helps to maintain a steady gate and synchronize circuits that are required for walking, for movement.

And that’s degraded in Parkinson’s.

And so we give them L-Dopo, which is supposed to promote dopamine.

Just to be clear, when Parkinson’s is advanced enough, you’re basically wheelchair bound.

Right.

And it starts, the first signs might be shuffling when you’re walking, dragging your feet, an inability to maintain a steady gait.

Sometimes you try to walk and you end up running.

Sometimes you walk and you end up freezing.

Or you can’t get started.

This is called fenestation.

And what we find is that if you play music for people that’s at the tempo of their natural gait, that activates a subsidiary redundant circuit.

So we’ve got populations of neurons that fire in synchrony to music, that entrain to the music and predict where the next beat is going to be.

And that allows Parkinson’s patients to walk smoothly.

There’s a technique called rhythmic auditory stimulation developed by a colleague of mine named Michael Tout at University of Toronto.

He was at Colorado State when he developed it.

And let me guess, that’s where you play the Bee Gees.

You can tell by the way I use my walk.

That’s exactly right.

Or any music by InSync.

You play the music at the right tempo and the neurons start firing and they can maintain a steady gait.

And after a course of this therapy, some Parkinson’s patients are able to get rid of their crutches and walkers and walk for months.

Whoa.

So this music is a way to get in the brain without having to do so pharmacologically.

Because I can imagine a future where, wait a minute, that other part of the brain remembers how you used to walk and it’s being overridden by this.

Let me go in there, nip tuck, suppress this, boost that, and now you’re done.

Maybe that day will come.

But until then, your music is filling that gap.

Yeah, that’s right.

Another interesting case is chronic pain.

Or acute pain, any kind of pain.

Tell me about that.

So pain is a $680 million drain on the annual economy in the US.

Well, music doesn’t stand a chance.

It’s the number one reason people visit.

I’m surprised it’s only $680 million.

I mean, when you think of painkillers, pain relievers, pain, people with chronic pain, and the whole Oxycontin, it’s all about pain management.

Conservative number.

It’s the number one reason people go to the doctor.

Doctors report that 80% of their patients come in and say, it hurts here.

That 80% of doctor visits, it hurts.

How do we treat pain?

We use two things that we’ve been using for thousands of years.

The bark of a tree or its synthetic equivalents, which is aspirin, or something from a poppy or its synthetic equivalent, heroin, opiates, opium.

My lab was the first to show that when people listen to music they like, doesn’t matter whether it’s heavy metal or hip hop or classical or jazz, R&B, if it’s music they like, the brain produces its own endogenous opiates.

Remind me what endogenous means.

Internal to the brain, its own.

You could just have said internal.

We use the word endogenous, because we’re fancy.

You know, in my field, we see spots on the sun, we call them sunspots, okay?

We’re like, tell it like we see it.

But the sun calls them endogenous sunspots.

So it’s endogenous, keep going.

The brain’s producing its own opioids, and they help to ease pain.

Now, it’s not producing them in pharmaceutical levels, but in sufficient levels that, instead of having an Oxycontin addiction, you might have been able to get away with, say, an Advil and music, or maybe a very small, much smaller dose of opiates for a much shorter amount of time.

The whole opioid crisis could potentially have been averted.

Whether it anesthetizes you, it can definitely help with pain management.

That’s the point.

If you do it in…

You can do it either way.

It can either be the painkiller, or it can just assist the painkiller.

It doesn’t make a difference.

It doesn’t make a difference.

Wow.

How about any other sort of neuro-kinetic afflictions that might be touched by music?

Multiple sclerosis arises, you know, the neurons have an insulating sheath, like the wiring in your house is insulated.

And it’s because they’re sending electrical signals and you need the insulation so they don’t interfere with each other and all of this.

The myelin sheath is a white fatty tissue, which is why we call it white matter.

And multiple sclerosis is a loss of myelination.

Ouch, ooh.

That sounds terrible.

So you have cross circuits, short circuiting of your brain signals.

But music can help with the movement disorders of multiple sclerosis and another kind of movement disorder is stuttering.

And it’s mostly in boys.

It is mostly in boys.

We don’t really know why, but it’s an inability to speak smoothly and we think, again, it has to do with timing circuits and an internal clock on a rye.

And music kind of hijacks the system with a steady tempo.

Isn’t that helpful for people such as yourself, professional neuroscientists, to one day find a way to get inside the brain and fix that problem?

Well, we are inside the brain now.

My colleague Eddie Chang and my other colleague Bob Knight, both in California and the San Francisco Bay Area, have implanted arrays of electrodes inside.

I’m ready for that to fix everything.

Yeah, well, I mean, it’s astonishing what it’s doing.

So the way this happens is that there are people with epilepsy, which is uncontrolled electrical activity that causes seizures.

Some of them volunteer to be in our experiments.

And from that, we can do in humans what we’ve been doing for 100 years in animals, which is to measure from single cells at a time.

And so, you know, it’s not far off where we will figure out where the stuttering cells are and maybe be able to treat it.

Treat that.

And how about Tourette’s syndrome?

Yes.

Yeah.

Tell me about that.

Tourette’s disease is debilitating.

Almost every case is accompanied by tics, unwanted motor movements, facial tics and body jerking.

It’s often thought of as the disorder in which people swear uncontrollably.

But that’s not present in all the cases.

Yeah.

I read somewhere that was the rarest of them.

Yeah, it is.

Oh, is that right?

That’s the rarest of Tourette’s where people actually swear uncontrollably.

The tics, and often what they do is make sounds.

Instead of swearing, they’re like, whoop!

That’s right.

That’s right.

Something like that.

Music can help that too?

It seems so.

So I write about the musician…

What do you mean, seems so?

You’re a scientist sitting in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.

Don’t you know you’re supposed to lie?

I don’t ask you a question and say, well, it seems to be the case.

Anybody could say that.

Tell me something out of your lab that has some statistical integrity.

Well, so here we’re talking about a collection of anecdotes and the plural of an anecdote is not data.

Okay.

That’s a good line.

That was a very good line.

I like that.

That’s a good line.

But there are a number of cases that…

From anecdotes come studies.

So the case of Billie Eilish is a perfect example.

Popular contemporary singer, she has Tourette’s and she finds that when she’s singing, the Tourette seems to go away.

Seems to, because she’s not keeping a log, she’s not being observed and monitored.

But from these observations of people like Billie Eilish and others, grant applications will go into the NIH.

I’m part of a panel that’s been working with the NIH and the White House Science Office.

National Institutes of Health.

Yeah.

Francis Collins has been a big promoter of this work.

Though no longer head of NIH, is that correct?

He’s been in the White House Science Office now.

Okay, got it.

And he’s working on eradicating Hep C, but he convened a meeting of 50 scientists in DC last December on music and medicine.

And he entrusted me to help him choose scientists who would be there.

We also invited professional musicians.

You get to tap some of that budget that’s allocated to non-traditional medicine?

Yeah, so there’s an Institute for Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and Emeline Edwards runs the place.

And she is terrific.

Because the NIH has a budget line for that.

Oh, they do.

Yeah, but it’s also the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIA, the Addiction Agency, National Cancer Institute.

I think most of the 26 institutes now are interested in music as medicine.

For one thing, because it’s potentially a huge cost saver.

And the best example of economy is this.

If you go to get surgery, it’s likely that in the pre-operating theater, they’re going to give you valium, a benzodiazepine, to relax you before they anesthetize you.

Because knocking you out and relaxing you are two different things.

They’re not the same thing.

That valium that might cost $5 at the CVS on the corner, or the Duane Reader or whatever, in a hospital, the average cost is, you know what?

$750.

Oh.

Same pill.

Same pill.

You’ve got compliance, you’ve got regulations, you’ve got all kinds of reporting that needs to be done, and you’ve got, you know.

Overhead.

It’s ridiculous.

But a number of studies have now shown that if you play people relaxing music, that they themselves chose, this is an important point, you can’t foist music therapy on somebody using music they don’t like.

Interesting.

That has the opposite effect.

So I’m intrigued that this is all in progress, and it’s active, it’s an active field of research, all of this.

Very much so.

Very much so.

Last thing, just to close out where we’re going here, tell me about memory.

How does memory work?

If I took a snapshot, as a physicist, and I come to your brain, and I just look at the state of every neuron, am I going to know what memories lurk hidden within your neurochemistry?

I used to know, but I forgot.

That was too easy.

That was really low-hanging.

That was windfall on the ground, right?

Yes, that’s called bending down and picking up an apple.

It’s not even low-hanging.

So, it matters when people claim, or at least hope, that one day we can upload your brain into a computer.

You have to upload the configuration of every cell that is storing information that we would call memory.

Right.

So, this is the idea of the connectome, which Sebastian Sung at Princeton and others have been working on.

That’s a recent term, right?

Connectome, yes.

And the idea is it’s parallel to the genome.

It’s not enough to know where all the neurons are or what they do.

You have to know how they connect to one another and what state they’re in at any given time.

So, what is it about the state of your neurons that preserves a memory?

So, here’s what we think.

This is speculation.

When you experience something, for example, you’re looking at a sunset, you’re listening to music, you’re drinking a nice glass of red wine, that’s an experience and the experience is delivered to you beginning with some stimulation impinging on your sensory receptors, setting off a cascade of neurochemical, neuroelectrical activity, and so there’s some group of neurons that are delivering that experience.

If it’s wine, it’s the taste buds and your olfactory system and the olfactory bulb and it presents it to somewhere in your brain that has self-consciousness and awareness in the prefrontal cortex of what’s happening.

If you were to later remember that experience, as I say, my lab and other labs have shown that it’s the same neural family, the same group of neurons, the same pattern that are activated in the memory.

So what allows you to distinguish a memory from an actual event?

It appears, we think, there are neurochemical tags that get attached to an event when it gets stored in memory, so that when you pull it out, you know that it’s a memory and not an actual event.

This is evolutionarily very important, because the same thing happens when you dream.

There are neurochemical tags that say this is a dream, because otherwise I might dream that you punched me in the nose, and then I come to see you, and I don’t know that that’s not reality.

And that could lead to another punch in the nose.

I would say, where’s the evidence of you getting punched in the nose?

So what then of the, what’s that movie with Arnold was in it?

Total Recall.

Total Recall.

Instead of paying for an expensive vacation, you would sit out in some doctor’s chair, and they would implant the memory of you having had the vacation.

Yeah, yeah.

And that would be just as good.

Or, remember, we were on the beach and we found the shelves, and we’d say, yeah, that was great.

And of course, you’d have 20 bucks instead of $2,000.

My colleague, Danny, and collaborator, Danny Kahneman, recently passed away, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who won the Nobel in economics for his studies of how human beings are irrational, how the brain is irrational.

And he documented it.

Did he need to have a study to show that we’re irrational?

Come on now.

Well, he cataloged the different kinds of irrationality.

That’s pretty cool.

Okay.

It’s not good enough just to know we’re all irrational.

What category of irrationality are you?

That’s good work there.

And one of them was that when studying vacations, people were told you could have the most fantastic vacation of your life but you won’t remember it, but it’ll be free.

Or it’ll be not as good a vacation, it’ll cost you a lot of money but you will remember it, which would you prefer?

People prefer to have the one they can remember.

A big part of going on vacation is not just to have the anticipation of it, but the memory for years or decades later.

So you get to an interesting point.

If you could just have the memory but not the experience, I suppose that would be something.

But I am still, as a musician, as an artist, I can’t defend this scientifically, but I feel like a virtual vacation, an implanted vacation, would be like AI-generated music.

It would be like fake flowers at a hotel lobby.

Looks fine from a distance, but when you get close enough to realize it doesn’t have a nice scent or a nice texture, you’ve got this uncanny valley between what is real and what is not, and you don’t want the false one.

Well, I’ve had enough experiences in my life where people told me I had a good time.

But I, for sure, cannot remember it.

Was Sigmund Maltz-Skoc involved in it?

Very much so.

One last thing about memory.

I heard about this when I was in college, but then I didn’t hear about it again, that you are more likely to remember something you learned by reproducing the state of mind you were in at the time you learned it.

So if you’re studying your chemistry book while you’re high, you’re better off taking the exam while you’re high.

Is that true?

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, I failed out of college.

You didn’t smoke enough, Mike.

I didn’t smoke enough weed.

This is called state-dependent memory retrieval.

It was discovered by one of my teachers, Gordon Bauer, at Stanford.

And when did that happen?

Oh, we discovered it in the 70s.

I’m old enough to have been in college in the 70s, and that’s what I remembered this coming out.

This is a big finding.

I mean, the idea is if you study in one classroom, you’re gonna remember the material better if you’re tested in the same classroom.

And it has to do, again, with retrieval cues.

And he called it, what?

He had a term?

State-dependent memory retrieval.

One of the experiments they did was parachuters.

You learn a bunch of unrelated words while you’re falling out of an airplane, and then you try to recall it either on the ground or falling out of an airplane again.

And it turned out the finding wasn’t as strong as they thought because it was not the actual physical state of being in an airplane.

It was the state of arousal, of being that energized and…

Okay.

So not a complete duplicate of your scenario.

Just as a duplication of your emotional state, emotional state.

But this is the reason why depression is so hard to treat.

People who are depressed only remember the sad times of their lives.

It’s very hard for them to get access to the happy memories.

And they think, oh, I was never happy.

Which means they can’t draw upon those good times in the face of bad times to counter it.

It’s just like, oh, everything’s bad all the time.

But music can help here.

One of the promising things that I’m working on with a group at UCLA is treating drug-resistant depression with drugs and talk therapy and music.

And if you play somebody who’s depressed a happy song, that makes them feel worse.

If you’re depressed, usually it’s because in some sense you feel misunderstood by the world or by others or by people in your life.

And you put on a happy song and that’s just one more person who does not understand you and you’re furious.

Why are you rubbing it in my face?

Right.

You put on a sad song and suddenly there’s somebody there staring into the abyss with you at your side and not only do they understand how you feel, but they’ve been through it and they came out the other side and created a beautiful work of art.

So Daniel, this has been a delight.

Thank you for having me here at the Hayden Planetarium.

Good luck with the tour.

Thank you very much.

Chuck, always good to have you here.

Always a pleasure.

And Gary, get well soon.

Thanks for taking us into this topic.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.