Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.If you’ve ever been accused of snobbery for complaining about bad music being played in public spaces, feel vindicated. It turns out there’s a neurological reason for the affront. Your brain is simply rejecting what you’re hearing. And just as unwanted music has the power to irritate us, good music has the power not just to enthral and delight but to heal. So argues Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist and musician, in his new book Music as Medicine. To imagine what sickness and recovery would be like if we plumbed the depths of music’s curative potential is not a new concern. In fact, it’s about 20,000 years old. Since the Upper Paleolithic era, when ancient shamans and other healers turned to the use of drumming in the hopes of healing maladies — from mental disorders to wounds — humans have put store in the power of music to heal mind, body and spirit. The only difference between then and now, Levitin argues, is that modern western society has increasingly separated healing and music. “We tend to see healing as the province of doctors, and music as entertainment,” Levitin writes. “Perhaps it is time to reunite two of the most intimate parts of our lives.”Music as Medicine is a fun and thoughtful read. In accessible terms, it gives a kind of crash course in the aspects of neuroscience that relate to aspects of our daily lives: joy, pain, learning, memory. Levitin draws on a career’s worth of experiments and scientific discovery to demonstrate the many ways music can and is being used to treat a number of ailments, whether Tourette syndrome or Alzheimer’s. His point is not that music can cure, but rather that it can alleviate and palliate. What we need to figure out is “getting the ‘dose’ of music just right”. One central thread that runs throughout is the link between memory and patterns, the former instructed and set by the latter. Without our conscious awareness, Levitin tells us, our brains are constantly attempting to find patterns so as to make order from disorder, to predict what might happen next. For people who have lost part of their memory, patterns are crucial to relearning, which is why music is used in therapy for those who suffer from trauma. “Prediction and anticipation,” he writes, “alongside recognition of unfolding patterns, are at the heart of the musical experience.”Alongside the many examples Levitin gives of how music has helped recovery — from bongo drums aiding patients with Huntington’s disease to the singer Joni Mitchell (a friend of Levitin’s) convalescing after a brain aneurysm with the help of a carefully curated soundtrack — he also gives pleasing evidence for things we intuitively believe. In one instance, he recounts an experiment he conducted with a colleague which showed that even people listening to the same music at different times reveals neural synchrony on their brain waves. Listening to music, then, literally puts your brain on the same wavelength as other people’s. Instances in which Levitin demystifies aspects of playing music will be fascinating to any musician. One experiment conducted by neuroscientist Charles Limb revealed that the “flow state” of improvising jazz musicians comes up on brain scanners as increasing the activation in the part of the brain associated with accessing autobiographical memories. The interpretation of this, Levitin says, is that improvisation is a means of expressing one’s own musical voice. Music is deeply personal, making music therapies and interventions most successful when the patient or listener chooses the music. Which leads us to the first and last mystery of the book: what, exactly, makes music so powerful to humans? We can guess at what it might be — Levitin thinks it’s probably not from specific frequencies “but from trance-inducing rhythms, or a combination of musical elements as they stand in relation to one another . . . including harmonic structure, melody, tonality (major or minor), rhythm, and tempo” — but we can never know for sure. Herein lies its secret and its charm. No wonder we can’t stop listening.Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power by Daniel Levitin Cornerstone £22, 416 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
