Musical Pharmacology

The New York Times reports on interesting research in Austria on concentrated musical prescriptions for specific medical conditions. I'm not sure that I buy the title of "musical pharmocologist," especially when donned by a former music promoter with no scientific credentials. This is the sort of talk that makes people understandably leery of serious discussion of the mind-body-music connection. But the research is exciting, as is any occasion when the Times deigns to dedicate a full page spread to the topic.

I, of course, love to Heal with Bach.

Yes We Can -- Instant Mood Boost!

Michael Franti's ska-fired celebration is one of the best mood boosts of the Obama songs out there.

http://www.stayhuman.org/media/audio/Obama_Song.mp3

The video is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd9xU8cw1JE

Play as needed for the next four years.

The Tune Your Brain Website Is Back Up

Thanks for your patience.

Is Music a Gateway Drug?

Oh, please.

Here's a hysterical (in both senses of the word) USA Today article warning parents against the dangers of audio "drugs" -- to be precise, digital recordings of rhythmic beats channeled into the listener's left and right headphones in a staggered pattern -- available on the Internet. It sounds a lot like the worries of white oldsters, when R&B swept the nation in the 1950s, that the music's "jungle rhythms" would drive all who heard it to rampant promiscuity and ruin. We seem to have survived that aural assault on our brainwaves with civilization intact.

Much as I may trumpet the measurable effects of music on the body and brain, and wax on about how to use them, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no amount of sound-induced brainwave activity is going to match the effect of ingesting lysergic acid, or cause an otherwise teetotalling listener to suddenly hit the streets searching for the man.

I recommend that the article's author calm down and relax to, say, some mellow Norah Jones. Though it might just turn her into a pothead.

Mix Tapes -- Where It All Began

Tune Your Brain was basically born of mix tapes. Not only did I get hooked on the power of music-mood sequencing by the mix tapes I made and received in my formative years, but I actually created the Tune Your Brain CDs by the prehistoric process of exchanging mix tapes in the mail with my collaborator at Deutsche Grammophon. The results may be digital-slick CDs with liner books and flashy art stamped on the disc, but the beginnings were old school. Conceived and created in real time with painstaking fast forward rewinding care.

So I chimed with the San Francisco Chronicle's loving coverage of the mix tape on Sunday. From a lamentation for the mix tape's demise to personal mix tape tales, book references, and links to web sites catering to mixologists of the musical type, the Chron made me miss days gone and be glad for the mixes I've made, braintuning and otherwise. I could spend hours messing around on The Art of the Mix site. Couldn't you?

Musicophilia - Music in Your Mind

I've always had a case of music in the mind. Sometimes I invite my inner soundtrack, when I decide to ease tension or cure boredom by mentally practicing a clarinet piece, or accompany a walk with a song sung inside my head. But sometimes I don't. Music barges into my mind uninvited, playing itself out loud when I might prefer silence, sometimes taking me back in time to events I hadn't been thinking about and didn't particularly want to, sometimes just getting in the way. I always thought my mind music was a natural outcome of having spent much of my life and career attuned to music, and, outside my research for Tune Your Brain, paid little attention.

But lately it's gotten worse.

I sleep with a white noise machine, which does wonders for my insomnia and sensitivity to other, non-white noise. But several nights of late I've woken up thinking I'm going mad as classical music comes out of the white noise machine -- entire if inchoate orchestras, with moving melody lines and string sections bowing along. I have to sit up and put my ear to the machine to settle all the sounds and colors back into the single blended spectrum of white. Sometimes, as soon as I lie down again the music comes back, as if it had just ducked behind a tree when I went to examine the source and, like a playful Puck, plans to dance on my head all night long.

My eine kleine nachtmusik is still irritating but much less worrisome after reading Chapters 4-6 of Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. (These are "Music on the Brain: Imagery and Imagination," "Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes," and "Musical Hallucinations.") Sacks tells us about his own internal music, born of his habit of obsessively playing the same recordings over and over for a period of time, during which those pieces continue to play internally when the external source has gone silent. He describes "earworms," those annoying tunes and jingles that play over and over in your head and bear a remarkable resemblance to an epileptic seizure (check out the top ten earworms). And finally, the phenomenon that explains the orchestra inside my white noise machine at night, musical hallucinations. Musical hallucinations are episodes where music spontaneously plays itself in the brain -- not just a simple repeated phrase, like an earworm, but full-blown music. They appear to be particularly common in people who have lost their hearing, suggesting a compensatory measure (though horribly intrusive and crude for some) in which the brain simply won't settle for an absence of music.

Research done by Robert Zatorre and others shows that imagining music activates the brain in much the same way as listening to it does. In other words, you don't need a band or an iPod to experience the act of listening to music in your mind. You can do it yourself without making a sound.

But why does music sometimes generate itself in the brain when you don't even try? NYU neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas postulates that the brain cells in the basal ganglia that drive our movements are constantly playing riffs for routine motions like brushing our teeth, and that when one of these motor riffs unexpectedly fires into the thalamocortical system, it can set off mind music. On the flip side, imagining music stimulates the motor cortex. Psychiatrist Anthony Storr has written that playing music in your mind from memory is "biologically adaptive" because it coordinates movements, boosts energy, and may unleash repressed thoughts.

Braintuning Tip

With imagined music having similar neurological effects as what you hear through your ears, you may be able to achieve braintuning effects without speakers or CDs by imagining the music that supports the mind-body-mood state you want. In other words, make your brain your iPod.

Sacks describes rowing himself down the mountain on his arms after he lost use of his leg in a bad climbing accident, by imagining marching and rowing songs synchronized with his arm
movements. After he was rescued, he went on to teach himself to walk again by playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor in his head to coordinate the rhythms of his akimbo legs. Less dramatically, he now synchs up his strokes and kicks when he swims to imagined waltzes by Strauss.

Since the mind music-motor connection is strong, physical activity is a good place to try your first mental braintuning. Use Energizing principles to choose some tunes that match your movements and experiment away -- your playlist is limited only by your memory, and you can easily adjust the tempo to match your pace. Try a stress break with some Relaxing music from your mental repertoire. Have some Healing music cued up in your memory for your next visit to the doctor. Decide which Cleansing tune you'll call on when someone cuts you off in traffic. And so on. Keep a list of your mental braintuning favorites by category, so you can grow your inner playlists and keep them top of mind.

The way the brain works makes imagining music a tangible experience of music itself. In a very real sense, even if you're more a "passive" consumer - someone who listens to music made by other people -- than an "active" performer, music resides within us all.

Musicophilia - Sacks Is Back on the Brain-Music Trail

I've been delighted to see Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia get widespread media attention and popular support. Dr. Sacks' earlier work was pivotal in turning me to mine. Before PET scans, MRIs, and other brain imaging technologies came along to start to shed light on the structural sources of music's profound and diverse powers, Dr. Sacks was telling the tale in human terms -- for instance, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, first out in 1985. Now, with the technological revolution in brain research well underway, Dr. Sacks is back with a book that brings new discoveries to bear (mostly in footnotes) but still focuses, insistently, on the human experience of music's workings on the brain, and the brain's workings on music.

I may be six months late in chiming into the commentary on the book, while I read and absorbed it and did a lot of other things, but this is a work with legs to last through time. So without worries that Musicophilia's fifteen minutes have flown, comment I will -- a bit at a time, as relates to braintuning principles, or not.

In Chapter 1, "A Bolt from the Blue: Sudden Musicophilia," Dr. Sacks examines people whose musical response or even talent intensify dramatically after a brain event. His centerpiece is a surgeon, medically adept but a music know-nothing, who gets struck by lightning, develops an unprecendented longing for piano music, and becomes an acclaimed concert pianist and composer -- as an adult and in fairly short order. If you've ever struggled away at the keyboard and cursed your parents for failing to give you piano lessons in your formative early years, perhaps you should keep an eye out for electrical storms.

This example and others in the chapter show how deeply interwoven our musical response is with our individual brain wiring, and how widely the results can vary between people. Brain differences may well account for at least some aspects of musical talent, and it seems less than far-fetched to think that our neural wiring may also affect our musical preferences, helping to explain how two siblings growing up in the same household at the same time can come out with a taste for Beethoven on the one hand and Limp Bizkit on the other. Trust me, it happens.

Ethnomusicologists and scientists wonder a lot about musical preferences, which can serve to unite and divide alike. As I've previously blogged about, research suggests a correlation between musical preferences and personality (at least within a single musical culture, which I won't try to define here). A common something underlies our individual responses both to music and to life at large. Taken a step further, music not only manifests individually in brain, but in some way lies at the core of our being as a self in the world.

Find out more about what your musical preferences say about you by taking the Short Test of Musical Preferences (STOMP - be careful not to scroll below the line to the scoring portion before you've completed the scale), then comparing your score to various sectors of the population.