Review: In new book, author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin makes the case for the healing power of music | Canada Voices

• Title: I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
• Author: Daniel J. Levitin
• Genre: Non-Fiction/Science
• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Pages: 416

I recently spoke to York University ethnomusicology professor Rob Bowman. He had just celebrated the 10th anniversary of a double lung transplant. In his hospital bed as he waited for his new pair of breathers, he listened to the complete recordings of Aretha Franklin. Doctors told him that without the transplant he was days from death. He believes the Queen of Soul helped keep him alive.

“I was on life support, with 21 tubes in my body,” he said. “I’m hooked up to a respirator – I can’t speak. I had Aretha going 24 hours a day for two and a half days until I got the transplant. I can’t say what the music did physically, but it helped me psychologically at least. And logic tells you that if you’re in a good space psychologically, it can only help you physically.”

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What Bowman intuited, Daniel Levitin explores scientifically in his vital new book I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, about how the connections between music and the brain can be harnessed for treating a host of ailments, from PTSD to pain, Parkinson’s disease, depression and cognitive injury.

The book, titled after the first line to the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah, follows up 2006′s This Is Your Brain on Music, a bestseller on the neuroscience of music. The American, who also authored The World in Six Songs and two other books, is a professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Montreal’s McGill University. He’s also a musician who’s recorded his own albums and worked as a consultant on records by such artists as Joe Satriani, Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder.

So, not lacking in bona fides – the man reads brain MRIs and music charts as easily as the rest of us scan the back of cereal boxes. He is as liable to quote Confucius as he is Ludacris; neuropsychologists and Joni Mitchell are in his circles.

“Music affects the biology of the brain,” Levitin explains, “through its activation of specialized neural pathways, its synchronization of the firing patterns of neural assemblies, and its modulation of key neurotransmitters and hormones.”

Levitin tells us that Hippocrates believed strongly that music could be used to treat a variety of physical and mental-health conditions. Most lay people are already familiar with Bob Seger’s ideas on rock ‘n’ roll’s ability to “soothe the soul.” The questions this book addresses are how and why. The answers are technical and complicated, but the author has a soulful touch and a way with anecdotes often involving well-known musicians (including Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Bobby McFerrin and Keith Jarrett) who are afflicted with serious health issues affecting their abilities to perform.

McFerrin, the Don’t Worry Be Happy star, has Parkinson’s disease, a brain disorder that causes unintended or uncontrollable movements. “Of all the uses of music as medicine,” Levitin writes, “none is more closely connected to biology than the treatment of movement disorders.” Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, Tourette syndrome and Huntington’s disease have been shown to be responsive to music therapy such as drumming exercises.

When it comes to depression and anxiety, the neural and biological mechanisms underlying music’s ability to reduce symptoms are “complex and not fully understood.” Possible explanations offered by Levitin and others include enjoyable music’s triggering of mood-lifting neurotransmitters such as dopamine, and music’s stress-reducing effects on the parasympathetic nervous system.

The chapter on memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and stroke is important. As the author points out, old people, not children, are our future. He writes that 55 million people have dementia worldwide today and with the world’s aging population – in Japan, more diapers are purchased for people over 65 than for people under 5 – cases will inevitably rise.

Dementia causes agitation and anxiety. Chronic agitation, Levitin says, is one of the most pressing challenges for patient care in long-term care homes: “We’ve known for decades that music is just as potent as drug treatments for relieving anxiety, but getting it into clinics and care facilities has been a bumpy road.”

But Levitin believes that bumpy road is getting smoother. He points out that there is work being done at Toronto Metropolitan University on developing a music-based treatment to help manage the neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia, “pointing an arrow toward musical medicine for relaxation.”

One of the book’s more fascinating anecdotes involves the late singer-guitarist Glen Campbell, who toured after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Though he didn’t know what city he was in, he had built up so much neural and cognitive reserve he was able to continue performing: “Even with half of his brain offline, he was still among the best guitarists on the planet.”

A key point to the book is that music chosen by the listener is more effective at achieving a state of relaxation than music picked by others. In other words, there are no clinicians in lab coats deciding on dosages of Mozart and Motörhead. Aretha Franklin might save one person’s life; Frank Sinatra may help yours.

There is more research to be done on music as medicine, but Levitin’s I Heard There Was a Secret Chord is a significant study of the subject. If it is not a eureka breakthrough, it is at least worth a hallelujah.