The one-sentence summary

If we understand music better, we can harness its therapeutic power.

Can’t be bothered to read it? Listen to the 5-minute summary in two parts.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • The author is a neuroscientist, celebrated musician and bestselling author. He reveals the surprising ways in which music can transform our bodies and heal our minds.
  • We are only just beginning to appreciate the healing powers of music. In recent years, a wave of scientific research has upended everything we once knew about its effects on our brains. It can reduce stress, enhance cognitive function, slow the spread of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and even strengthen our immune systems.
  • He explores how each of us can use music to calm our thoughts, repair our memories and heal our deepest psychological wounds. Rhythmic auditory stimulation can fight multiple sclerosis and certain songs, such as those by Tracy Chapman, might even help cure PTSD.
  • Episodic memory is for specific events, and semantic memory is for facts and general knowledge. Autobiographical memory combines personal, episodic and general self-knowledge. Memory in total is the heart of who we are, and the very private sense of what it is like to be us.
  • Traces of all this are found in synaptic activity where neurochemicals are fired around the brain. Each experience creates a unique synaptic network made up of a portion of the 80 million neurons in our brains, which remains the same from the first time we hear a particular piece of music. With each memory, these re-form to once again become members of that original experience group. The neurons are re-membered onto their original formation, so remembering is literally re-membering.
  • When chemical tags go wrong, we can experience Deja-vu or even Jamais-vu, which occurs when you’ve done something many times, but it feels like the first. This is a state that musicians seek to attain when they are performing.
  • Mental chronometry uses radiotracers to track blood flow in the brain in real time, so we can see which regions of the brain are involved in various cognitive operations. There is also blood flow deactivation – when parts of the brain shut down to allow the part doing the work to function at full capacity.
  • The main attentional-conscious states of the brain are:
  1. The central executive (goal- or task-directed)
  2. The default mode (mind-wandering self-directed)
  3. Sleep
  4. Two attentional filters, one voluntary (looking for something) and one involuntary (wake up if someone calls your name)
  • Components of music include melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. These intertwine with musical abilities, including playing an instrument, composing, improvisation, lyric writing, sight reading, programming, choreography, and sensitivity to emotional involvement with music. It’s quite a mess.
  • Music listening, performing and writing involve both systems 1 and 2. System 1 is default and instinctive, such as playing live, and system 2 is slower and more analytical, such as practicing or composing.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • There are 4 theories as to why music helps to relieve pain:
    1. It distracts us from pain
    2. It elevates our mood, making pain more tolerable
    3. Through some unknown mechanism, it activates circuits involved in pain perception
    4. It acts through the placebo effect.
  • None are conclusively proven.
  • Tone deafness is a misnomer. It should be called tune deafness because people can actually hear the tones but they can’t string them together into the representation of a melody.
  • It has taken many years of study to work out the true definition of attention. The current most commonly understood version is that attention is the mechanism of selection, enhancement, and integration of information. We say ‘pay attention’, so colloquially it is a synonym for concentration and focus, because the brain can only handle a limited amount of attention at a time.
  • ‘Paying” attention is an apt metaphor because we literally are paying for the process of both attending and switching. That’s why multitasking doesn’t work – the currency of the switching cost is oxygenated glucose in our bloodstream, and we don’t have an endless supply of it.
  • Attention has a zoom-in zoom-out quality to it. With art and music, you can concentrate on one specific feature or sound or take in the whole song or picture.
  • Apple Music and Spotify have 100 million songs and are projecting 200 million soon. But the number of songs that people play frequently is a tiny fraction of that – at most 0.002%.
  • Controlled crash refers to the kind of genius that is nothing more than controlled madness – something that breaks convention and sees or plays something that no one else has seen or heard before.
  • For music to be appropriate as an accompaniment to any form of work, it needs to be Goldilocks Music – not too hard, not too soft. Too hard can be distracting to the task in hand, and too soft can cause people to fall asleep. Think lullabies and truck drivers for instance.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • If you are not a musician, there are parts which show sheet music and keyboard notations that won’t make a great deal of sense.