Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Introduction

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Introduction [excerpts]

Riffling through my first homeowner’s insurance policy, I did the math: my most valuable possession was a cello I hadn’t played in years.

When I picked up the bow, a plume of white horsehair fell across my wrist. The wiry hairs had detached from the tip. My throat tightened. I had never seen my bow like this.

By my mid-30s, I hadn’t played my cello in a decade. Seeing my bow like this was a shock.

Some of us sing to Beyoncé when we’re going through a rough patch, or collect vintage synthesizers to play ’80s riffs from Duran Duran.

Collectors of vintage keyboards can get so into ‘80s synth sounds, they paint the walls to match!

Even if we lie perfectly still, music fires up the putamen, a nut-shaped structure at the base of the forebrain that helps regulate our motor movements. When music tickles our eardrums, our gray matter shimmies back.

The nut-shaped putamen — a key structure involved in motor movement — is easily stimulated by music.

Before entering journalism, I spent seventeen years sawing away in a practice room, determined to become a professional cellist.

In university ensembles, I performed at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and once at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, designed by the late Canadian architect Arthur Erickson. I remember being unnerved as spectators peered at the orchestra from the sides of the wraparound auditorium. Photo Creative Commons.

Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa: What a thrill it was to perform in the same auditorium where I’d watched cellists Mischa Maisky and Yo-Yo Ma play.

Photo SamuelDuval, Creative Commons.

Carnegie Hall in New York City looks as magnificent today as it must have on opening night in 1891, when composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducted on stage. Photo Tdorante10, Creative Commons.

My break with the cello coincided with dramatic advances in neuroscience that began in the 1990s, which U.S. President George Bush proclaimed the “Decade of the Brain.”

Official logo created after President George Bush declared the ‘90s the “Decade of the Brain.” (Graphic design has come a long way since then!)

Image U.S. public domain.

In many ways, the flurry of new findings validated a belief long held by Indigenous peoples: music is a strong elixir.

In the lowlands of Siberia, Tuvan healers beat hand-held drums to make disease “fly away.”

Tuvan shamans drumming in the Second All-Russian Congress of Shamans, 2019, Tyva. Photo Irgit, Creative Commons.

In 1945, the U.S. War Department launched an ambitious music program for convalescing soldiers.

An Army Air Forces private, Harold Rhodes, invented a bell-toned therapy instrument using aluminum tubing from wrecked B-17 bombers.

Bedridden veterans learned to play his “xylette,” a lap-sized xylophone rigged to a piano keyboard.

Rhodes went on to found an electric piano company, and in 1971, the Fender Rhodes Piano Bass gave its signature sound to the keyboard riffs in The Doors’ hit “Riders on the Storm.”

Above: Army Air Forces private Harold Rhodes with an early prototype of his “xylette,” photo via Rhodes Super Site. Rhodes with metal tone bars, photo via World Piano News. Rhodes’ bedside “Pre-Piano” for convalescents, photo via Down The Rhodes. The Doors’ Ray Manzarek with a Rhodes Piano Bass in 1968, photo Creative Commons.

Decades later, universities worldwide began to rigorously test music’s capacity to heal.

Songs relieved pain in cancer patients. In surgical wards, music lowered anxiety as effectively as Valium.

Familiar tunes revived memories, pulling the elderly out of the fog of dementia.

Above: Watch the preview from Alive Inside, the 2014 documentary that drew broad attention to the benefits of music for people with dementia.

In organizing material for my book, I took cues from Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” (likely inspired, it turns out, by his experiences on a Blackfoot Reserve in the summer of 1938).

Left: Diagram of Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” Creative Commons. Right: Blackfoot teepee from 1880, photo in U.S. and Canadian public domain.

From a time before memory, our early ancestors pulled music out of wood, seeds, animal skin, bone.

Above: Rattles from Costa Rica (date unknown), photo public domain. Stringed musical instrument from ancient Egypt, photo Creative Commons. Prehistoric flutes and rattle made of wood and bone, photo Creative Commons.

Embedded in primeval rituals, and tucked inside our gray matter, are surprising answers to a simple question: How can music help us heal, and thrive?

Iron Age figurine playing a drum. Photo Israeli National Maritime Museum, Creative Commons.

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To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all statements in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 2: The Music Instinct

A chapter-by-chapter series of photos, drawings and videos illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 2: The Music Instinct [excerpts]

My first boyfriend after I quit the cello was a brooding drummer who test-drove his songs on street corners.

I followed him and his Gretsch kit to the grimiest bars in town, thrilling to the sound of his pulsing tom-toms and bass.

My punk ex-boyfriend’s Gretsch drum kit looked similar, but far less sparkly!

Photo Drum Crew, Creative Commons.

Although some of us have stronger musical skills than others, the myth of musical talent has been largely debunked.

As the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music, explains, there’s no such thing as a “music gene” or a “center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else does.”

Left: Daniel Levitin’s book “This Is Your Brain on Music” (2006) became a perennial hit. Right: Levitin, a neuroscientist, author and musician, has performed with the likes of Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash and Sting.

Photo Creative Commons.

Like other animals, humans evolved in a world thrumming with sounds — whistling winds, cawing crows, chirping squirrels, burping frogs.

Above: Eastern gray squirrel, photo Rhododendrites, Creative Commons. Cawing carrion crow, photo Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart, Creative Commons. Marsh frog, photo Peter Trimming, Creative Commons.

Steven Pinker enraged musicologists worldwide in his 1997 book How the Mind Works, dismissing music as nothing more than “auditory cheesecake.”

Music may be a sweet treat for the ear, but dismissing it as nothing more than “auditory cheesecake” ignores its inherent role in human evolution.

Photo zingyyellow, Creative Commons.

Gary Tomlinson, a musicologist at Yale University, traced the origins of music to a time before language, before human culture — before our ancestors could conceive of a distinct self.

The building blocks of music, he wrote, helped shape the modern brain.

In the video above, Yale musicologist Gary Tomlinson explores music’s evolutionary emergence, “and the connections of musicking to language, cognitive complexity, and the metaphysical imaginary.”

As I waded through Tomlinson’s dense academic text, my thoughts drifted towards my own origins.

Then something dawned on me: without music, I might not be here at all.

From left: My yogi-mathematician father and artist mother met in the mid-1960s through a shared love of music, in the sitting room of a boarding house in Toronto.

While expecting me, my parents lived in a one-room cabin in Carlsbad Springs, a rural area not far from Ottawa.

My parents owned just a handful of records in this cabin, where I came into the world during my older sister’s nap.

I was born — and likely conceived, my mother said — to the chiseled strains of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

In an EEG study, researchers concluded that in humans, the ability to perceive a musical beat is “functional at birth.”

But when researchers adapted the EEG experiment on newborns in a study of rhesus macaques (a type of monkey native to Southeast Asia), they found no sign that macaque brains could detect a musical pulse.

Based on EEG experiments, the brains of rhesus macaques do not detect a musical beat the way human newborn brains do.

Photo Charles J. Sharp, Creative Commons.

Snowball, the boogying cockatoo, was the first documented case of an untrained animal that could match a musical beat. (Snowball later hit the big time bopping to “The Piña Colada Song” in a TV ad for Taco Bell.)

Above (video): Snowball bops to the beat in the Taco Bell commercial.

In exchange for bites of herring, Ronan, a California sea lion, would bob her head up and down to the beat of a metronome and switch tempos on a dime.

Above: In this CNN video report, Ronan the sea lion grooves to the Backstreet Boys and Earth, Wind and Fire.

Musical animals give hints that the neurological underpinnings of music might be older and more broadly shared than we ever imagined.

But somewhere down the line, human ancestors stumbled on ways to sharpen [our musicality] for reasons that chimps, our closest relatives, didn’t have.

Chimps and humans separated from our last common ancestor roughly six million years ago.

Illustration The Nature Box, Creative Commons.

Music, like our species, has origins in East Africa.

Along the highway between the Serengeti grasslands and Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater — a meadowy oasis teeming with lions, zebras, elephants, and wildebeest — two colossal skulls of concrete mark the turnoff to the “Cradle of Humankind.”

In Tanzania, the turnoff to the “Cradle of Humankind” — Olduvai Gorge — features six-foot-tall concrete skulls of the hominid species Paranthropus robustus and Homo habilis.

The museum at Odulvai Gorge displays a replica of the Laetoli footprints discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey.

Replica of the Laetoli footprints discovered in Tanzania in 1978 by Mary Leakey. Photo Momotarou2012, Creative Commons.

Imprinted by feet hardly different from our own, the Laetoli trail proved that our ancestors walked upright, with a human-like stride, at least two million years before the massive growth spurt in the hominin brain.

In these footprints, Anton Killin, an evolutionary theorist, sees traces of rhythm.

But ancient neural connections leave no fossil record. They’re impossible to prove. Paleolithic tools offer more tangible clues.

Tomlinson, the Yale musicologist, believes the building blocks of music emerged from the rhythmic chipping of rock on rock. Homo erectus began chiseling diamond-shaped hand-axes about 1.7 million years ago.

Left: Lower Paleolithic hand axe, roughly 1.2 million years old, taken from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania; currently in British Museum, photo public domain. Right: Bifacial symmetrical pointed hand axe circa 280,000 BCE; photo (cropped) via Portable Antiquities Scheme, Creative Commons.

Neurons that fire together, wire together. Thus, as our ancestors sharpened stones, tool-making sharpened the brain.

Next came fire. Homo erectus learned to harness flames at least 790,000 years ago, and possibly earlier.

Nourished by roasted tubers, hippopotamus, elephant, and boar, early brains doubled in size.

For Homo erectus, fire added leisure time.

Bored and restless around the primeval hearth, they might have bonded by synchronizing their voices and body movements, said [Anton] Killin, “rehearsing” precursors of song and dance.

Prehistoric cooking fires, over centuries, fanned the flames of human imagination. Photo Alasdair, Creative Commons.

Like a moth to a flame, my mother was drawn to music and adventure. Widowed at age twenty-six by my father’s death, Mom hitched a ride from Ottawa to Vancouver with two toddlers in tow.

Within weeks, she fell in with a band of ragtag musicians.

I was in diapers when she got cozy with the Pied Piper of the group, a tall and bushy-haired Californian named Michael Fles.

Though I have no memory of this time, as a toddler, I was surrounded by jamming musicians.

In Vancouver, Michael [Fles] worked the system, applying for a government grant to fund ‘spontaneous music workshops’ for children with special needs.

He got the idea from Christopher Tree, the musical wizard he’d followed to Woodstock the year before, in the summer of 1969.

Above: Trailer from the 2018 documentary “Christopher Tree” from Les Blank Films. Tree was a direct influence on the ‘spontaneous music’ scene my mother was part of in Vancouver. In the summer of ‘69, Tree opened each day of the Woodstock festival with a cacophony of Tibetan temple gongs.

Mom followed her musician friends to the mountains of Chiapas, where she tried her hand at Mayan-style pottery.

My mom, a widow in her late 20s, playing one of her clay flutes in Mexico. I was a toddler along for the ride.

My earliest memory is of a bonfire crackling in daylight as a long line of women carry earthen pots to the flames.

Mom said this memory fits a time when I was three, in the Mayan pottery village of Amatenango del Valle.

I found this photo recently while emptying my mother’s house. Imagine my excitement — I had never seen it before! The image fits my earliest memory: women firing clay pots in the village of Amatenango del Valle. Photo Susan Feindel, all rights reserved.

We slept in an abandoned stable in Chiapas, much to the amusement of the Mayan villagers.

Gringos locos, they must have thought.

The abandoned stable in Chiapas where my mom, her boyfriend and my sister and I slept. Photo Susan Feindel, all rights reserved.

A black-and-white photo shows me in pigtails and a handwoven dress, sitting in the dirt. My chubby hands clutch a pottery flute shaped like a child with a round face and curly hair.

The clay figure is me. I am blowing into the hidden mouthpiece, filling myself with sound.

Me in Mexico at nearly three years old, playing one of my mother’s flutes (it is shaped like me).

I have no memory of playing this ocarina, or of the two musicians who inspired my mom to make flutes out of clay.

Photo Susan Feindel, all rights reserved.

Meanwhile, back in Vancouver, two members of the “children’s spontaneous music workshops” regrouped in 1976 to launch Canada’s first training program in music therapy, at Capilano College (now Capilano University).

One of the founders, Nancy McMaster, said the program never strayed from the values of spontaneity and free expression rooted in “Woodstock, the ’60s, and some hitchhikers.”

Above: Music therapist Nancy McMaster in the documentary “Celebrating the Beginnings of the First Canadian Music Therapy Program” founded at Capilano University in 1976. This film features key members of the ‘spontaneous music group’ my mom was part of when I was a toddler.

The budding music therapists encouraged children with special needs, many of them nonverbal, to tune in to their own musical impulses moment to moment, and communicate in ways that transcended words.

While their approach was radical at the time, it was hardly counterintuitive. The earliest humans — also nonverbal — might have made music much like this.

Half a million years ago, in a balmy period in southern England, Homo heidelbergensis hunted rhinoceros and megaloceros (giant deer), leaving a cache of bones and stone tools at Boxgrove in West Sussex.

In southern England, human ancestors hunted megalocerus (giant deer) that stood roughly 6’7” at the shoulder and weighed more than half a ton. Reconstruction of extinct megalocerus at the Prehistoric Park in Tarascon, France. Photo Tylwyth Eldar, Creative Commons.

To divvy up the spoils and reinforce the chains of command without a brawl, the leaders would have hollered, pounded the ground, beaten their chests.

Anatomical changes helped them make themselves clear.

These hunters had lost the air sacs around the larynx that allow other primates to ‘hoot-pant’ without hyperventilating. Without these air sacs, the Boxgrove band could vocalize with close to human finesse.

Our human ancestors lost the laryngeal air sacs (inflatable extensions of the vocal tract) that allow chimpanzees to “hoot pant” and breathe at 10 to 15 times the normal rate. The loss of laryngeal air sacs allowed humans to vocalize with greater finesse. Photo courtesy Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest.

During the last ice age, small bands of sapiens huddled in the caves of Germany’s Swabian Alps, playing flutes fashioned from mammoth ivory and vulture bone.

In this cave, Hohle Fels, in Germany’s Swabian Alps, archeologists discovered flutes dating back more than 40,000 years. Photo Dr. Eugen Lehle, Creative Commons.

These flutes look like penny whistles, with finger holes carefully spaced to play tunes in five notes, similar to the pentatonic scales found in Scottish jigs or Javanese gamelan music.

Ice-age flute made of vulture bone, discovered in Hohle Fels cave in Germany’s Swabian Alps and dated at more than 40,000 years old.

Photo Hannes Wiedmann, Creative Commons.

On a replica of the vulture-bone flute, one experimental archaeologist managed to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Above: Amateur archaeologist Wulf Hein plays melodies on a replica of the vulture-bone flute created during the last ice age and discovered in Germany’s Swabian Alps.

Remarkably, our auditory cortex can rewire itself to process touch as well as sound. The renowned percussionist Evelyn Glennie, profoundly deaf since age twelve, often performs shoeless to allow her feet to feel the vibrations from the floor.

The human body, she told The Globe and Mail, is “like a huge ear.”

Percussionist Evelyn Glennie, deaf since childhood, performing at the Moers Festival in 2004. Photo Creative Commons.

Most children can learn to hum in tune and dance to the beat, grinning all the while.

Anyone who doubts this can check out videos of preschoolers wiggling to music in Mexico, Cuba, or Senegal.

Above: Video of a Cuban preschooler dancing salsa in Havana.

As a fledgling journalist, I struggled to pay the bills. Besides my freelance gig writing for a Reader’s Digest coffee-table book series, I cleaned houses and worked as an extra on film sets, wearing everything from zombie makeup to a torpedo bra for the role of a ’50s waitress.

Snapshots from my days as an extra on movie sets in mid-1990s Vancouver.

I was a “background performer” on shows ranging from The X-Files to Happy Gilmor (starring Adam Sandler).

If only I’d known sooner about the deep roots of music in my early life, and in the human brain. I might have had something to hold on to in my late twenties when I tried to reinvent myself as a cellist…

Follow here to view future chapters of Wired for Music: The Visual Companion. Sign up to receive an email alert for each post.

To order the book Wired for Music, see links on this page.

Sources for all information in this post can be found in the endnotes of the hardcover and paperback editions.

Copyright note: The author is the copyright holder of all text but not all images included in this post. Every effort has been made to identify and indicate the copyright status of each image pictured. In some cases, copyrighted material has been included for the purposes of teaching and scholarship in accordance with “fair use” regulations in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

Please contact me with any questions, permissions requests, or concerns about copyright.

Disclaimer: Discussions about health topics provided in this post, or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. The author accepts no responsibility or liability for any health consequences relating to information published on this website.

Wired for Music: The Visual Companion | Chapter 4: Mood Music

A chapter-by-chapter series of images illustrating key ideas in my book Wired for Music. Click here to view the series from the start.

Chapter 4: Mood Music [excerpts]

One evening at an art gallery, I bumped into a journalist from Canada’s newspaper of record, The Globe and Mail.

The Toronto-based paper was looking for an editor to assign arts stories in Vancouver, she said. “You would be perfect for the job.”

I was hired within days. I could hardly believe my luck.

In my first two years at The Globe and Mail, I assigned and edited more than six hundred articles on visual arts, theatre, music and pop culture for a weekly arts and entertainment section in Vancouver, B.C. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

As I scrolled through press releases, a jaw-dropping report about music caught my eye:

“Music releases mood-enhancing chemical in the brain.”

Huh. My classical training had left me anxious and depressed. The opposite effect. I wracked my brain thinking about how the new findings might have been true for me back then.

A devastating memory from my teen years came to mind. Flashing back to the anguish and its long aftermath, I realized for the first time that it was music that had helped me get through it.

The summer I turned fifteen, I loaded my cello onto a bus for a day’s journey from my hometown of Ottawa to a music academy in Charlevoix, Quebec.

I saw many familiar faces as I unpacked my things, but the bunk beds were filling up fast, with no sign of our principal violinist, Aruna, or her whiz-kid sister Rupa from the second violins.

“Didn’t you hear?” someone said. “They died in the Air India crash.”

Oh God.

On June 23, 1985, the bomb exploded while the passenger jet was in midair, sending the bodies of all 329 people — Aruna, Rupa, and their mother, Bhawani, too — hurtling into the Irish Sea.

The following spring, at the Ottawa Music Festival, the judges declared me the winner of the trophy for strings. But where was the prize?

Unbeknownst to me, Aruna had won it the previous year. Wordlessly, her father presented me with the trophy. Then he gave me something else: a photo of Aruna holding the golden cup, radiant and beautiful, two months before she fell from the sky.

The Air India bombing was the biggest mass murder in Canada’s history. Yet despite knowing two of the victims, I don’t remember talking about it with anyone.

Instead, I spent my free time barricaded in my room, lonely and depressed. Whenever I had the house to myself, though, I’d lie on the couch listening to my idol, Jacqueline du Pré, playing Elgar’s haunting Cello Concerto in E Minor.

Over and over, I’d listen and weep.

Jacqueline du Pré wowed the world in 1962 with her gut-wrenching interpretation of Sr. Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor. When multiple sclerosis forced her to stop performing at age 28, this haunting concerto became the anthem of her tormented life.

People struggling with depression often gravitate to melancholy music. And it turns out we have healthy reasons for choosing sad songs when we’re down.

Jonathan Rottenberg, director of the mood and emotion laboratory at the University of South Florida, and a graduate student, Sunkyung Yoon, conducted a study using music rated by Western listeners as neutral, happy, or sad.

Overall, people with clinical depression showed a strong preference for somber music, saying it made them feel calmed, soothed, and “even uplifted.”

Certain songs always make me misty-eyed, such as Tracy Chapman’s “The Promise.” When she sings the words, “I’ll find my way back to you,” she gets me every time. Photo Hans Hillewaert, Creative Commons.

Like an empathic friend, melancholy music meets us where we’re at.

And when songs make us weep or put a lump in our throat, music can trigger a cathartic release.

The late neurologist Oliver Sacks had deep appreciation for music, a passion he explored in his bestselling book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

Photo Maria Popova, Creative Commons.

Music reaches at a level beyond conscious thought. More than any other artform, it is both “completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” wrote the late neurologist Oliver Sacks:

“Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”

Early psychiatrists had an intuitive grasp of music’s mood-enhancing effects.

Image from a 1865 lithograph depicting the Illenau asylum in Baden, Germany, where music and nature were considered vital agents of healing in recovery from mental illness. Image U.S. public domain.

In the mid-nineteenth century, specialists in Baden, Germany, believed individuals with mental illness healed best in a pastoral setting with plenty of music— especially Mendelssohn.

The local asylum, Illenau, urged patients to sing in the choir, join the in-house band, and try writing their own musical compositions.

The structures that housed the 19th century Illenau asylum — an early adopter of music as medicine for mental illness — still stand today. Photo Gerd Eichmann, Creative Commons.

Near the turn of the 21st century, a critical mass of scientists began to shed light on the mind-boggling chemicals and electrical patterns activated by music.

At the Montreal Neurological Institute, Dr. Robert Zatorre and Valerie Salimpoor, a McGill graduate student, became the first to prove that music triggers the release of dopamine in the brain — stimulating some of the same pathways activated by chocolate, addictive behaviors and sex.


Ball-and-stick model of a dopamine molecule: gray=carbon, white=hydrogen, blue=nitrogen, red=oxygen.

Image Ben Mills, worldwide public domain.

When music builds to a peak moment during, say, a drawn-out drumroll, we get a surge of dopamine.

Then, if the climax exceeds our expectations — with, perhaps, a spectacular crash of cymbals — dopamine spikes again.

Activating the brain’s dopamine pathways, music stimulates the putamen (involved in motor movement), the nucleus accumbens (involved in pleasure), and the body’s descending analgesic response via the spinal chord. Illustration adapted from image by Patrick J. Lynch, Creative Commons.

Dopamine isn’t the only chemical involved in musical pleasure.

The brain makes its own versions of heroin, morphine, and cocaine. Known as “endogenous opioids” (“endogenous” meaning “of internal origin”), these neurochemicals give us everything from a “natural high” to a mild tranquilizing effect.

Dr. Zatorre, along with colleagues in Spain and France, theorizes that music gives us two kinds of delight: intellectual enjoyment and physical pleasure — goosebumps, chills, prickles down the spine.

Goosebumps, one of the physical pleasure responses elicited by music. Photo Ildar Sagdejev, Creative Commons.

While the roles of dopamine and endogenous opioids remain “very much under debate,” said Zatorre, he believes dopamine may be responsible for our aesthetic enjoyment of music, while our endogenous opioids enhance our physical pleasure in music.

Pleasure is life-affirming. On the flip side, a lack of pleasure in normally enjoyable things is a hallmark of mood disorders including clinical depression.

Early in our evolution, physical pleasures including sweet foods and sex helped keep us alive. But the human brain developed, we learned to find pleasure in activities that required higher-level thinking, such as basking in Brahms. Neuroscientists refer to hits of bliss from art or music as “aesthetic” or “cognitive rewards.” Photo Stefano Mortellaro, Creative Commons.

Pleasurable music can take the edge off anxiety.

The evidence comes from surgical wards, where patients with acute anxiety end up with more pain, a higher risk of infection, and longer recovery times. Although sedatives calm most patients, they also carry the risk of breathing problems, blurred vision, dizziness, and agitation.

Anesthesiologists searched for alternatives.

Artwork entitled “Anxiety” by the artist Bhargov Buragohain, Creative Commons.

In a Barcelona hospital, for example, one group of surgical patients received a standard dose of Valium. A second group listened to half an hour of classical or new-age music, both the day of the procedure and the night before.

Just before the surgeries, researchers measured patients’ blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol, and anxiety levels.

They found no difference between the two groups.

As a treatment for preoperative anxiety, the researchers concluded, music was “as effective as sedatives.”

Music dials down chronic stress, as well.

A Dutch review of 104 clinical trials concluded that listening to slow-paced music for just twenty to thirty minutes has “a direct stress-reducing effect.”

Throughout history, however, superstitious beliefs about the “power of music” have taken bizarre forms.

Page from an extensive chapter published in 1641 on “tarantella” music as an antidote to tarantula venom, from the text Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. Image scanned by Feldkurat Katz, U.S. public domain.

In the Middle Ages, fast-paced “tarantella” music was the go-to remedy for a nebulous illness that plagued the Mediterranean for several hundred years.

While tending rows of tomatoes and spicy peppers, peasants developed sudden breathing problems, melancholy, and a “sensation of dying.”

They blamed their symptoms on the venom of the European tarantula spider (although many “victims” showed no sign of spider bite). Frenetic dancing to tarantella music was the only “cure.”

I’ll bet the peasant remedy actually worked — but not as a direct antidote to spider venom.

Belief in the mysterious spider sickness gave depressed peasants a socially acceptable culprit for their miseries under feudalism. More importantly, it gave them an excuse to get out of the field ruts and join in a mood cure that put a spring in their step.

There’s even some science to back up this approach.

In a large 2017 review, German researchers noted “highly convincing” evidence that music improves symptoms of depression and quality of life.

The poet Emily Dickinson aptly described depression as “a funeral” in the brain.

Clinical depression brings persistent feelings of sadness and low self-worth, along with sleep problems, lack of energy, and in many sufferers, thoughts of suicide.

Photo Amherst College, public domain.

People with clinical depression often improve with antidepressants and talk therapy. But in a Cochrane review, music therapy offered an extra boost compared to standard treatments alone.

Of course, music therapy isn’t the same thing as moping around listening to sad cello concertos.

Depending on the condition, from brain injury to debilitating grief, people working with a certified music therapist might show improvements beyond what other treatments can offer.

When it comes to clinical depression, however, it’s unclear whether music therapy relieves symptoms any better than music listening alone.

Music-therapy session for cancer patients in Bristol, U.K.

Registered music therapists have extensive university-level training in using music to treat physical, cognitive, and emotional issues.

Photo Creative Commons.

In a study of cancer patients with low mood, music therapy and solitary listening offered similar benefits.

Some patients preferred working with a music therapist, saying they liked the feeling of camaraderie and support. But others felt anxious or even hostile when a therapist handed them an instrument or asked them to sing.

Left alone with headphones, one patient said, “You can concentrate more on your music, and it’s like it relaxes you more.”

Just about any music may offer temporary relief from depression, as long as we enjoy the music. Studies have shown benefits using everything from European classical to Indian ragas, Irish folk to reggae.

Researchers in North America and Europe have described music as an “emerging treatment option” for mood disorders that “has not yet been explored to its full potential.”

Yet in many parts of the world, this aspect of music is blatantly obvious.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s insightful book emphasizes treatments that address the insidious effects of trauma beneath conscious awareness. Photo Adriana Barton, all rights reserved.

Renowned psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk emphasized this point in his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score:

“The capacity of art, music, and dance to circumvent the speechlessness that comes with terror may be one reason they are used as trauma treatments in cultures around the world.”

In recent years, Western aid organizations have made efforts to provide culturally sensitive programs.

In 2012, for example, a group called Musicians Without Borders launched Rwanda Youth Music, offering drop-in drum circles, therapeutic music sessions, and music camps for youth coping with trauma, poverty, and HIV.

Approaches like these, depending on the person, can be more helpful than talk therapy.

To quote the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, “Where words fail, music speaks.”

Musicians Without Borders (video from January 2020): Emir Hasani from the Republic of Kosovo visited Rwanda to share innovative band coaching approaches with youth in the capital city Kigali. Five bands were formed from scratch; within a week, each band wrote, recorded and performed two songs.

Delving into the neurochemistry of music helped sharpen my understanding of its powerful influence on human emotions and mood. At the same time, I had to ask myself, once again, how I became so unraveled.

If music lifts anxiety and depression by stimulating pleasure chemicals, then playing the cello day after day should have made me the picture of mental health. Instead, it drove me to burnout and despair.

Did I have a glitch in the pleasure pathway in my brain?

A conversation with Barry Bittman, an American neurologist, offered more insight.

Bittman conducted some of the first studies demonstrating that music can strengthen our immune response. But under the wrong conditions, he added, music can have the opposite effect.

Beginners playing djembes in a drum circle. Image worldwide public domain.

Bittman divided non-musicians into three groups. The first joined a drumming circle for half an hour. The second sat in a circle and listened to drumming music, while the third read newspapers and magazines.

Initially, he found no differences in their blood samples. “Not a damn thing.”

Bittman was nonplussed. Then he figured out that most of these non-musicians had either had a negative experience with music earlier in life or were convinced they weren’t musical.

Being asked to drum on the spot was stressing them out.

Bittman scrapped his approach. Next, the beginner drummers pounded out the syllables of their names, played with shakers, and jammed however they liked.

This time, participants showed a surge in natural killer cells, the specialized white blood cells that seek and destroy pathogens and cancer cells.

Natural killer cell from a human donor (colorized electron micrograph). Natural killer cells perform vital immune functions, targeting and killing aberrant cells including virally infected and tumorous cells.

Photo National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Creative Commons.

Given the freedom to make their own music, Bittman said, participants loosened up and embraced a spirit of fun and camaraderie.

“That’s when the magic happens.”

With these words, everything clicked. My music training was almost guaranteed to induce a stress response — enough to dampen my immune system, along with my pleasure pathway.

I loved music, loved the sound of the cello. But I almost never played with a sense of creative freedom or fun.

This realization hurt. I had done it all wrong.

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