Music to get you in the mood

A workshop in Dublin this weekend will explore the link between music, the brain and health

HAVE YOU EVER been so moved by a melody that it made you cry? Maybe a particular song brings you straight back to a nightclub on holiday 10 years ago? Or how about that rising irritation as a partying neighbour cranks up heavy metal on the stereo at 1am?

Music can have a profound impact on us, and this Saturday Daniel Levitin, professor of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, will be in Dublin to participate in a workshop on music, the brain and health.

Levitin comes to the job with a remarkable pedigree: he started as a musician in California and then moved into production, working with household names like Santana, the Grateful Dead and Stevie Wonder.

More recently, Levitin’s popular books on music and the brain have been peppered with inputs from musicians such as Sting, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell (who phones him during our interview).

It wasn’t quite the path he had originally mapped out, he admits.

“I managed to carve out a career for myself not as what I intended as a rock performer, but as a studio guy, engineering, producing, arranging, co-writing, all the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

But as he worked at both playing and producing, the effects of music fascinated him and he devoured all he could about the emerging science of the brain, dovetailing it with his experiences in the studio.

One particularly memorable session stands out. “One of the players had pneumonia on the day of our recording session and he showed up in a wheelchair with a hospital IV stuck in his arm; he had escaped from the hospital to make the session. It looked like he was dead – I kept checking his pulse – but as soon as the music started he came completely alive. Then when the music stopped he would slump over and someone would have to catch the guitar so it wouldn’t fall to the ground.”

Witnessing that kind of transformation prompted Levitin to find out more and he started to sit in on lectures at Stanford University and eventually chose to do a degree in psychology. Since then his research has teased out various aspects of music and the brain, from the mechanics of how we sense a piece of music to its roles in shaping our identities.

“Some of the big questions we ask are how does music cause emotional reactions, and for that we have to look at neurochemistry and neuroanatomy, and really a social psychology of what music means to you as a member of society,” he says.

Brain imaging technology is now giving us new insights into what goes on between our ears when music hits them, explains Levitin. His lab has looked at what parts of the brain “light up” in response to music and worked out how we split sounds into separate components to process them.

“Pitch gets processed separately to timbre – where the layperson understands one instrument from another – and that’s different from harmony or the loudness or the melody,” he says.

“It all comes together about 51-thousandths of a second later and then you have the sense of a clarinet playing a melody. It’s like assembling a car. There are all these different little parts that have to come together.”

And we have been putting music together for quite some time, notes Levitin. “Music tends to activate some of the most primitive regions of the brain, which suggests an ancient evolutionary substrate for music,” he says, describing how a flute-like instrument has been found from as far back as Neanderthal times.

“One has to make inferences, but one assumes that before our ancestors went to the trouble of carving a flute they must have been singing and banging sticks for thousands of years.”

So how can music change how we feel? One link is that when we hear music that we don’t like, the amygdala or “fear centre” is activated, according to Levitin.

“If you ask people what are among the most aversive things in their lives, what frequently comes up is unwanted, undesired music that’s too loud,” he says. “This is what led the US military to use Van Halen records to get Manuel Noriega to leave .”

Levitin has recently been working with people who have Williams syndrome, a genetically well-defined condition where a region of the brain called the cerebellum is enlarged. People with the syndrome are often musical, and he believes it could be due in part to a lack of inhibition.

His lab has also shown that when you listen to music you enjoy, levels of the brain chemical dopamine increase in your brain, lighting up the “reward centres”.

But while science is peeling back the layers of your brain on music, we still don’t know why a person likes or dislikes a particular tune. Levitin suggests that it could involve factors like conditioned responses, where you link the music with an event or person, knowing what to expect from music within your culture and ‘tonal system’ and the kind of songs you listened to as a teen to fit in with your peers.

Meanwhile, research is also starting to show a tantalising link between listening to music and improving the immune system. “It’s not conclusive yet, but some studies show Immunogloblin-A levels increase and the production of T-cells and killer cells can be modulated by listening to music,” says Levitin.

And as a try-at-home tip, he suggests people should organise their music by mood, creating playlists on an MP3 player to suit particular emotions.

“My instinct would be that people already do that – if you have a clock radio that wakes you, you know what station it needs to be set on,” he says.

“But you could also explore your collection and think about different mood states: you could organise playlists of ‘awake’ and ‘relax’ music, exercise music that will get you through a workout and the ‘I just broke up with my partner’ music. It’s good to have it preselected.”

Your Brain and Music, Music as Healing Therapy

will feature Prof Dan Levitin, Paul Robertson (founder of the Medici String Quartet) and music therapist Dr Gary Ansdell at the National Concert Hall on Saturday. See seminars.ie. Book at nch.ie or on 01-4170000.