The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

by Levitin, Daniel J.

  I mentioned psychic research, and it is an irresistible subject. Some of the most interesting experiences I’ve had in my entire life were serving on review panels for scientists who had applied for funding to undertake research on psychic phenomena. I was asked to review their pilot data, findings from preliminary experiments that they felt showed evidence of psychic phenomena. In every single case, a lack of careful scientific controls rendered the data uninterpretable. In one study I reviewed, the person who was “reading minds” could only answer questions correctly if the experimenter already knew the answer and was allowed to interact with the “mind reader.” If the experimenter was silenced, the effect went completely away. I don’t think that the pair were trying to hoodwink anyone, but a parsimonious explanation—and a review of the experimental transcripts—suggests strongly that the experimenter was providing subtle, if unconscious clues to the “mind reader.”

  What I found so interesting was the tenacity with which people, even trained scientists, held onto their beliefs about the supernatural when confronted with evidence that the experiments were flawed. First, here’s an example of how probability theory pertains to psychic claims. Suppose you have a standard deck of fifty-two playing cards. A friend of yours tries to guess the suit (hearts, clubs, diamonds, or spades) of each card—you can either look at the card (and try to psychically transmit the information) or you can keep it turned down until after your friend guesses. Now without working through a formal mathematical/probabilistic treatment of the problem, it should be clear that if your friend only guesses and has no psychic ability at all, she will guess a few of the cards right. In fact, in the long run, she will tend to get 25 percent of them right. It is the function of probability and statistics to help specify just how many she would have to get right for us to know, with reasonable certainty, that she wasn’t guessing.

  While reviewing one such experiment in Silicon Valley, California, a very complicated experiment with many different facets, I pointed out to the lead research scientist (who held a Ph.D. in physics) that the chances of guessing a right answer in his psychic experiment were one our of four and he agreed. I pointed out that his best subject, after testing twenty people, had only gotten one out of four correct. He agreed to that. I suggested that she might have been only guessing.

  “No!” he insisted. “She told me that she was really concentrating.”

  I asked what his explanation was that she got a meager 25 percent correct, the same number that would have been guessed by a machine generating random numbers.

  “She showed her psychic powers on 25 percent of the trials—what more do you want?” he demanded. He was getting agitated now. He started to speak very slowly. “Psychic powers can come and go like anything else. Even Artur Rubinstein doesn’t play Beethoven perfectly every time he sits down at the piano.” He knew my weakness.

  “She had her powers on those 25 percent of the trials. And on the other 75 percent of the trials, the ones she got wrong, those are the ones where she was guessing!” I held my ground. If she had been truly guessing on those 75 percent of the trials, she would have gotten 25 percent of them right. He would have none of that. He had now stood up from the table and was red in the face with fists clenched, and his knuckles were turning a kind of ghostly whitish yellow. He seemed to be trying to stare me down.

  “I have an idea,” I said at last. “Why don’t you have your subjects tell you which trials they’re guessing on, and which they really, really know. If your subject can get 25 percent of the suits right and can say ahead of time, before she gets any feedback, that those and only those trials are the ones where she is using psychic power, then I think we might have something.”

  “We’ve done hundreds of experiments already using our existing method. We have all the data. Why should we go back to the experiments again just to satisfy one $@%* like you? I know that she has psychic powers, she knows it. Why can’t you admit it, Dan? Why do you have to be so negative all the time!”

  The professional magician and skeptic James Randi has offered a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can prove the existence of psychic phenomena, anytime and anywhere, anyone who can read minds, predict the future, influence the toss of a coin, or divine what playing card is about to be turned up, without using magic. No one has even come forward to try to claim the prize, but the money is in a certified escrow account, there for the taking. A researcher must simply follow the protocols designed to distinguish flimflam from fact.

  Which brings me to the healing power of music. There are mountains of data on the effectiveness of music on illness, but not all reliable or reputable. Trying to separate the good from the bad would be enough work to earn some enterprising young investigator a Ph.D. thesis. If I sound skeptical or negative, I do not mean to denigrate the many fine music therapists who are helping people. Indeed, the American Music Therapy Association is just as interested as I am in weeding out those who are fakers, exploiters, and just plain incompetent. By the association’s own definition, music therapy is the “evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional . . .” [emphasis mine]. Certified music therapy is used for pain and stress reduction, motivation, anger management, as an adjunct to physical therapy in the case of motor difficulties, and for a variety of other purposes.

  In just the past three or four years, however, an emerging body of evidence is pointing scientists in new directions. There have only been a dozen or so careful, rigorous studies and so I don’t want to overstate the case, but they seem to point to what the ancient shamans already knew: music—and particularly joyful music—affects our health in fundamental ways. Listening to, and even more so singing or playing, music can alter brain chemistry associated with well-being, stress reduction, and immune system fortitude. In one study, people were simply given singing lessons and their blood chemistry was measured immediately afterward. Serum concentrations of oxytocin increased significantly. Oxytocin is the hormone released during orgasm that causes us to feel good. When people have orgasms together and oxytocin is released in both, it causes them to feel strong bonds toward one another. “I feel good/I knew that I would/I got you.” You can see how this would be an evolutionary adaptation. Because the act of lovemaking (at least in the pre-birth control world) often led to pregnancy, it would be adaptive for the man and woman to feel a sense of connection, because that would increase the chances that the man would help raise the child, in turn significantly increasing the child’s chances of survival. Significantly, also, oxytocin has just been found to increase trust between people. Why oxytocin is released when people sing together is probably related evolutionarily to the social bonding function of music we saw in the previous chapter.

  Looking beyond mental health to physical health, immunoglobulin A (IgA) is an important antibody that is needed for fighting colds, flus, and other infections of the mucous system. Several recent studies show that IgA levels increased following various forms of music therapy. In another study, levels of melatonin, norepinephrine, and epinephrine increased during a four-week course of music therapy, and then returned to pretherapy levels after the music therapy ended. Melatonin (a naturally occuring hormone in the brain) helps to regulate the body’s natural sleep/waking cycle and has been shown effective in treating seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression. It is also putatively linked to the body’s immune system because some researchers believe that it increases cytokine production, which in turn signals T-cells to travel to the site of an infection. Both norepinephrine and epinephrine affect alertness and arousal, and activate reward centers in the brain. All this from a song.

  Music listening also directly affects serotonin, the well-known neurotransmitter that is very closely associated with the regulation of mood. (Prozac and a number of other recent antidepressants act on the serotonin system and belong to the class of pharmaceuticals called SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.)
Seratonin levels were shown to increase in real time during listening to pleasant, but not unpleasant music. And different genres of music caused different neurochemical activity! Techno music increased levels of plasma norepinephrine (NE), growth hormone (GH), adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), and β-endorphin (β-EP) concentrations, all chemicals closely associated with improvements in human immune function. Techno was also shown to increase cortisol levels (not good for the immune system, but outweighed perhaps by the other increases), while meditative music decreased cortisol and noradrenaline. In the same study, rock music was shown to cause decreases in prolactin (at least in this group of techno-loving listeners), a hormone associated with feeling good.

  We all suffer from stresses today that are very different from the stressors experienced by our ancestors, those very ancestors whose lifestyles caused the changes in DNA that we call evolution. When changes in lifestyle or environmental conditions created a subset of people who were better adapted to those early conditions, natural selection teaches us that those people were the ones who survived to pass on their DNA. This whole process can take a lot of time, thousands or tens of thousands of years. In other words, many parts of our DNA were selected for by evolution to cope with the world the way it was five thousand or even fifty thousand years ago. As biologist Robert Sapolesky points out, we are living in bodies and thinking with brains that were designed to solve problems that almost none of us has today.

  In ancestral time periods, if a lion approached us, we became stressed. Cortisol levels shot up. Our amygdala and basal ganglia set us running—or at least those of us who managed to survive. (Many of those early humans who, for one reason or another, didn’t run or otherwise escape the lion didn’t live to tell about it or to have children.) Running uses up glucose and helps us to “burn off ” the cortisol our adrenal cortex produces. Today, though, when our boss yells at us, when we have a big exam that we haven’t prepared for, or when someone cuts us off while driving, our adrenal cortex still produces cortisol—the stress hormone—but we don’t have an opportunity to burn it off. Our legs and shoulders tense up to run in accordance with an ancient evolutionary formula, but . . . we sit there. Our shoulder muscles stay tense but we are not swinging our arms, and so there is no release.

  All that cortisol temporarily interrupts our digestive system—a body in flight needs to allocate its energy to movement and agility, not digestion—and so today, following stress that doesn’t require literal fight or flight, we end up with stomachaches, gastroenteritis, ulcers. Increased cortisol is associated with decreases in production of IgA, and so our immune system takes a hit. (This is why people who are stressed are more likely to get sick.) In contemporary society, increased cortisol levels (and decreased IgA) have been found in experiments conducted during some of the most psychologically stressful situations humans face: students before exams, professional coaches during athletic events, and air traffic controllers during their duty cycle. Getting tense in the face of a threat was adaptive for our ancestors; it is maladaptive for us when those stressors are long-term, chronic, and don’t require an acute physical response.

  So cortisol suppresses our immune system temporarily, marshaling all the resources it can for the task at hand (or at foot as the case may be). This may well be one of the reasons why we move our feet or snap our fingers when we hear music. To the extent that music activates our action system—motor sequences and our sympathetic nervous system—our hands and feet become the instruments of that activation. Through these movements we burn off excess energy that could otherwise be toxic. In a sort of neurochemical dance, music increases our alertness through modulation of norepinephrine and epinephrine and taps into our motor response system through cortisol production, all the while bolstering our immune system through musical modulation of IgA, serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), and β-endorphin (β-EP). Some of the energy we feel during music playing and listening is then expended in the increased mental activity (the visual images that many people report accompanying musical activity, or other mental activity such as planning, ruminating, or simply aesthetic appreciation). Finger snapping, hand clapping, and foot tapping help us burn off the rest, unless of course we actually get up and dance, perhaps the most natural reaction, but one that has been socialized out of many Western adults.

  But why does music—a collection of sounds—tap into all these chemical and activity centers of the brain? What might have been the evolutionary benefit? First, it is important to reframe the question as concerning music-dance—not as simply a collection of sounds we make or perceive, but as an integrated cross-modal experience of movement, synchrony, sound, and perceptual organization, and again, this is because music and dance were virtually inseparable across evolutionary time scales. Second, the musical brain didn’t evolve in isolation from other mental and physical attributes. In other words, early or protohumans didn’t suddenly end up with music-dance and no other cognitive strengths. The musical brain brought with it all the facets of human consciousness itself. In addition to social bonding, fundamental to the experience of early humans was communicating their emotional states to others—the expression of joy through music-dance.

  Unrestrained joy usually accompanies a positive outlook. In situations where success isn’t assured, those with a positive outlook are more likely to achieve it than those with a defeatist attitude. Of course there is a delicate balance. As Barack Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign (quoting the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, whose words have also been used by the Catholic Church in offical writings), “Hope is not blind optimism.” An overoptimistic person is going to experience a large number of failures and find he has expended considerable energy for no rewards. On the other hand, the defeatist (or pessimist) is going to forgo activities that in many cases would have yielded a substantial positive payoff. The best adaptive strategy for hunting, foraging, or even mating has been shown to be the adoption of an attitude that is slightly over the halfway mark, on the optimistic (joyful) side of realistic. Music has a twofold role to play here, physical and mental. First, joyful music makes us feel better, it pumps us up, picks us up out of the doldrums. Second, joyful music can serve as a model—we look to the creator of that music as a mental inspiration and try to be like him or her.

  The clearest case of the evolutionary advantage of optimism might be the caveman who is uncertain whether that glance he just received from a cavewoman was a “come hither” or a “get lost” look. The caveman who walked away may well have lost an opportunity gained by his rival who treated that ambiguous look as at least worth investigating. As a species, we have evolved a healthy distrust for people who are too optimistic—they may be deluded nutjobs—and we’ve evolved a reasonable attraction to people who are self-confident and optimistic—after all, they may know something we don’t, and things might just work out well for them. “I’d do well to hitch my wagon to his,” we think. The optimist thinks a brewing conflict might be solved by diplomacy. The pessimist thinks fighting is inevitable, and those thoughts may bring about his own destruction. Our brains evolved the responses to joyful music making that they did because joy can be a reliable indicator of a person’s mental and physical health.

  In his groundbreaking book Sweet Anticipation, David Huron spells out how the musical brain might have helped to prepare humans for survival. To what he has already written, I would add that it also served to relieve stress through the release of the very same neurochemicals that helped to ensure survival in hazardous, ancient environments. The ideas are important enough that I think they’re worth repeating here in some detail. Huron’s thesis is built around a five-step process that he calls ITPRA. I present here a four-stage version of his model, which I think is more parsimonious.

  The core idea is that music gives the brain opportunities to explore, exercise, play with, and train those mental, physical, and social muscles necessary for the maintanance and formation of societ
y as we know it. It offers a safe forum in which we can practice and hone skills that are vital through the life span. In my stripped down version (with apologies to David Huron), TRIP stands for Tension, Reaction, Imagination, and Prediction.

  Imagine, David invites us, that we witness a lion attack. The next time we see a lion, we will understandably experience Tension. (If we didn’t, we might act complacently and end up as his lunch.) The tension begins a cascade of electrochemical processes in our brain and spinal cord, causing us to React. If that reaction allows us to survive, we may then spend some of our time Imagining—recalling the event in our mind’s eye (and ear) and planning appropriate reactions in the event of a future attack. Part of this process might entail imagining what future confrontations might look like, how we might Predict a possible attack under different situations.

  Now learning about the world by narrowly escaping from lions, rattlesnakes, or angry neighboring tribespeople is not the most efficient way to acquire survival information. Indeed, the topic of Chapter 5 is how particular kinds of songs—knowledge songs—can encode and embed such essential information in a way that is easily remembered and transmitted across time. But before there can be knowledge songs, there must be music, or at least the cognitive foundations for it, an adaptive motivation for the musical brain to come into existence in the first place. This is where music meets TRIP. What if we humans had a way that we could invoke tension in a safe, nonthreatening context, react to it, imagine new forms of tension and our reactions to those, and prepare a repertoire of responses, all from the safety of the camp-site, from the safety of our minds? Music doesn’t have to be the only adaptation that provides this; it only needs to be a plausible adaptation, even one among many possible, for this theory of its origins to hold.