I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
One of Smithsonian's 10 Best Science Books of 2024
Neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals the deep connections between music and healing.
Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.
In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.
Levitin is not your typical scientist—he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playing and listening to music soothes the agitated mind, stimulates memory, and improves physical coordination, according to this exuberant treatise from neuroscientist Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music). Drawing on experiments conducted in his lab—the brain produces endogenous opioids when listening to music, his students found—and his experience as a professional guitarist and producer, Levitin delves into the burgeoning field of music therapy. Music, he writes, promotes the mind's default mode network of high neural connectivity and stimulates facets of brain function from motor control and memory to focus and emotional control. As a result, research suggests, music may diminish anxiety and depression, reduce blood pressure, improve walking and speech in Huntington's disease patients, lessen Alzheimer's symptoms, and even help to bridge seemingly uncrossable social divides (at a 2009 Esalen Institute workshop Levitin attended, Israeli and Palestinian participants wrote a song together that called for the removal of walls between the West Bank and Israel, swaying some Israeli hardliners that the wall was antithetical to peace). Enriching lucidly explained neuroscience with ebullient musical appreciation (a Billy Pierce saxophone solo is "in turns thrilling, heartbreaking, bustling, radiant, and always, always moving forward"), Levitin makes a persuasive case for music's therapeutic potential that gives due to its medical promise without undercutting its mysteries. The result is a fascinating take on the tuneful raptures of the mind.
