Use Music to Change Your Brain and Get Happier
DDr. Arthur Brooks
MusicMental HealthMusical Instruments
Transcript
00:00:00There is a very ancient idea, an idea that there are alternative languages that are different than
00:00:08the languages that we speak to each other that I'm speaking right now, not written or spoken,
00:00:12but languages nonetheless that uncover deep truths that are otherwise inaccessible, languages that
00:00:18allow us to access parts of our brain that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. Sounds fantastic,
00:00:23sounds sort of like science fiction, right? Well, why not? Why would that not be the case?
00:00:29There's a belief that goes back across the centuries and millennia that music is that
00:00:34language, that music has special properties to unlock mystery and meaning from the right-hand
00:00:41side of the brain. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness,
00:00:54the science of love and happiness, and how we can bring the science to as many people as possible.
00:00:58That's my passion. This is what I love doing, and I'm so grateful to all of you for joining me week
00:01:03after week. If this is your first week, I hope you'll stay with me. If this is your 40th week,
00:01:08all the better. And I hope that you will continue to share this podcast with other people. This is
00:01:12how we spread a movement of people who are enthusiastic about learning about the science of happiness,
00:01:17changing the habits in their lives, teaching other people, lifting each other up. So wonderful to have
00:01:23you with me in this community and looking at a different aspect of happiness every single week
00:01:28and how we can get more of it. This week's topic is music. Music and happiness. What's the relationship?
00:01:36How can we get more happiness through music? I'll talk a lot about that today and give you some very
00:01:42specific ideas. And it's a personal topic for me as well, as you'll hear about here in a minute.
00:01:47Before we get there, however, please do feedback on this show. Tell me what you'd like to see more of,
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00:03:01has access to an AI version of the ideas that I'm actually sharing here. Not a substitute for what
00:03:07we're doing in person, but it's a compliment to it, certainly. And we're even starting to run some
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00:03:27seeing you. There is a very ancient idea from philosophies that go back literally thousands of
00:03:33years in India and China, more recently in among the ancient Greeks and up into more current centuries
00:03:40in Europe, an idea that there are alternative languages that are different than the languages
00:03:47that we speak to each other that I'm speaking right now, not written or spoken, but languages
00:03:52nonetheless that uncover deep truths that are otherwise inaccessible. Languages that allow us to access
00:03:59parts of our brain that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. Sounds fantastic. Sounds sort of like
00:04:04science fiction, right? Well, why not? Why would that not be the case? We do know that the brain is
00:04:10hemispherically lateralized, meaning the right-hand side and left-hand side do different things. And
00:04:14furthermore, that the left-hand side, which for most people contains the language centers, and that's
00:04:20where you process precision and facts and information, is different than the right side of the brain,
00:04:26which processes intuition and deep ideas and mystery and meaning. Why wouldn't it be the case that there
00:04:31would be different kinds of vernacular, different sorts of languages that would access that mysterious
00:04:37right-hand side differently than the words I'm using right here? Specifically, there's a belief that goes
00:04:44back across the centuries and millennia that music is that language, that music has special properties
00:04:51to unlock mystery and meaning from the right-hand side of the brain. I'm going to talk about people
00:04:59who thought this, but most importantly, I'm going to talk about how you can do this because I believe
00:05:03that that is absolutely the case. And I think the science backs it up. You can be better at consuming
00:05:10music such that your brain can work better. You can have a deeper sense of mystery and meaning in your
00:05:15life and you can be happier, but you got to know the science and you got to change your habits in
00:05:21the way that you actually use music. These are music protocols. And I'm going to be talking how you
00:05:26can apply music to your own life. It's not just, oh, that's nice. It's actual medicine. It's actual food
00:05:33in the way that we're sustaining ourselves. Let me give you an example of a philosopher who really
00:05:37believed this. And this is the most unlikely philosopher to believe in this mystery and meaning
00:05:41unlocked by the musical vernacular. This is the 19th century nihilist philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer.
00:05:49This is the guy who was such a cynic, this German philosopher. And this guy had a messed up life,
00:05:54you know, his terrible relationship with everybody. Women forget about it. His mother, you know,
00:06:01boom, he blamed his whole life for the suicide of his father. I mean, completely dysfunctional stuff.
00:06:07And he was such a negative guy that he created the theory of rational pessimism, which basically said,
00:06:13you should be a pessimist. If you have any rationality at all, you should go through life
00:06:17with complete pessimism. And occasionally the equilibrium of your depression will be punctuated
00:06:23by a nice thing happening from time to time. I mean, this guy was a real walk in the park, trust me.
00:06:29Schopenhauer, who also a genius, nonetheless believed that music had special, almost magical properties,
00:06:37neurophysiological properties of that. He believed, as many philosophers have, as many religious figures
00:06:43have throughout the ages, that the truth about life is largely invisible to humans. Reality is largely
00:06:50invisible. Plato talked about this a lot. He talked about, we can see shadows on the cave wall. So we
00:06:57can see shadows of what's actually really going on there. We have to kind of infer, but we don't have
00:07:02the ability to look directly at what's actually happening. Schopenhauer believed the same thing.
00:07:06Many people have believed this. Many philosophers have believed this. Probably you do too.
00:07:10I kind of do too. Reality is hard to discern. And there's a lot of neuroscience that shows that when
00:07:17we think we're seeing reality, what we're doing is that we're actually creating an image in our minds.
00:07:21A lot of what we think we see with our eyes is actually just an impression. And then the image
00:07:26is created in the occipital lobe of our brain. It's what we're seeing is what we've created, not what's
00:07:31actually there. And the result of it is that reality is a very hard thing to discern. However, Schopenhauer
00:07:38believed that there was a true reality. He's not a complete relativist, that there isn't any reality.
00:07:43He believed that there was an inner essence of the world called Villa in German, which would be
00:07:49translated as will, a pure will. It's what Hegel called Geist, the ghost. Hegel was bordering on
00:07:57religious. Actually, Geist was sort of the Holy Spirit of truth going through the world. It wasn't
00:08:03Christian, but you get the feeling for what I'm telling you. So Villa was truth for Schopenhauer,
00:08:10not Schopenhauer, but it was out of our grasp unless we use the special language where we could get an
00:08:17oracle to reveal the secret verities of Villa. And that was music. That was listening to music and
00:08:26producing music. I'll put in a reference that talks about an article, Schopenhauer on music as the
00:08:33embodiment of will. It's amazing the way he thought about this. His theory was that the will is so
00:08:41ineffable, so impossible to articulate in words, that it was only nonverbal language and specifically
00:08:48that of music that could grant access to this apprehension of reality. Now, once again, today,
00:08:54with the advantage of modern neuroscience, what he was saying effectively is that your images of the
00:09:01world are largely those that you manufacture with the complicated side of your left-hand side of your
00:09:07brain. But the right-hand side can get the intuition of the actual reality, but only if you access it,
00:09:13not using your language centers, using something that will actually burrow deep into the right-hand side,
00:09:18which he believed with music and which we know to be, point of fact, largely the case. Even though
00:09:24Schopenhauer was an atheist, he was an absolutely ardent atheist, his conception, his theory has a
00:09:30strong resemblance to the idea that's held by many philosophers, religious philosophers and theologians.
00:09:36Let me quote the American Catholic philosopher, Peter Kreeft. He's a philosophy professor at Boston
00:09:43College. He's actually been there for 50 years. And he had a 1989 book, The Three Philosophies of Life,
00:09:48in which he said, "God is love and music is the language of love. Therefore, music is the language
00:09:54of God." It's kind of a proof using the transitive theory or using the property of transitivity.
00:10:01I'll put that in the show notes as well. I find this notion very suggestive and,
00:10:05in point of fact, very persuasive as a social scientist. And it captures for me
00:10:10something that I've experienced my whole life. And this is where it gets personal.
00:10:14So I've mentioned before, if you've been following my work for a long time, you know this. So forgive
00:10:18me if you haven't, this will be new. I'm not a lifelong behavioral scientist. On the contrary,
00:10:22in my first life, my first career, I was a professional musician. It was what I did. Now,
00:10:27I wasn't some sort of, you know, long-haired rock and roller. On the contrary, I was a classical
00:10:31musician. Classical music was my life. I started violin when I was four. I started piano when I was five.
00:10:39I started the French horn when I was eight years old. And that's what stuck. I was really good at it.
00:10:43And I spent all of my childhood doing really nothing else but playing music. I played in every
00:10:50ensemble I could find. I was first chair of the orchestra. And my mother was my accompanist. She
00:10:54was a pretty talented amateur pianist. And so she would accompany me. And I did every competition
00:11:00I could possibly find. I was a good French horn player. I intended, my ambition was to be the world's
00:11:05greatest French horn player, which, you know, great ambition, right? I didn't make it. But I spent my 20s as a
00:11:11professional, as a matter of fact. I played in the Barcelona City Orchestra. And if you're wondering,
00:11:17you know, how does that sort of rank in world orchestras? That's for an American classical
00:11:21musician, most of the greatest classical musicians in the world actually are American. And playing in a
00:11:26European orchestra is kind of like, you don't play in the NBA, but you go and you play in an Italian
00:11:31league or the Spanish league. That's kind of what it's like. It was good. It was good. And I did that.
00:11:35And I made my living doing that. And I was really, really passionate about it. I did that until I was a
00:11:40professional musician until I was 31 years old, as a matter of fact. And that's when I quit and started
00:11:44my PhD. But the result of that is that my brain is wired toward this. I learned to read music before
00:11:51I learned to read words. I hear music in my head all the time. I'm synesthetic, which a lot of musicians
00:11:58are. Synesthesia is a commingling of the senses itself. In my particular case, when I hear music, I see
00:12:05color. It's not like seeing color. It's not like there's color in front of your eyes, but you perceive
00:12:10color. You know, I'll hear an A major chord and it's red. I don't know why, but so the truth of
00:12:15the matter is that when I hear the greatest music ever written, which for me will be a Bruckner
00:12:20symphony or a Bach cantata. My two favorite composers are Anton Bruckner and Johann Sebastian Bach
00:12:26from two very different areas, eras in music composition. It's like the greatest 4th of July
00:12:32thing I've ever seen, but it's inside my head. It's amazing. I glimpse for moments the majesty of
00:12:40creation. I understand in those moments why I exist in the universe. I feel like I have a
00:12:47glimpse of the beatific vision, the face of God, maybe. I don't know. So now maybe you think I need
00:12:52to go to a neurologist. Fair enough. But I think Schopenhauer was onto something. And I think we have
00:12:59plenty of evidence to suggest that properly understood and undertaken. Music truly is
00:13:06probably the greatest way to understand life more deeply. Let me make the case. And as always,
00:13:12let me make the case with science. And then I'm going to go on to applications that you can use.
00:13:17So there's a lot has been written about music and the brain. There's really interesting stuff from my
00:13:23own university. It's not my work. It's the work that's going on at my university at Harvard's Music
00:13:28Lab. That's with Dr. Samuel Mayer, who has ethnographic evidence that suggests, that shows,
00:13:34that proves that music is and has always been culturally universal. You simply can't find
00:13:40a civilization that doesn't have its own music. You also can't find a civilization,
00:13:47a serious civilization that's not religious of all things. Now, again, that doesn't mean you
00:13:50have to believe that religion is true. It doesn't mean that you can't believe that
00:13:54religion is all made up. You decide for yourself. But religion is a ubiquitous phenomenon. We want to
00:14:01be in communion with the divine. That's kind of part of being the human experience. And so is music.
00:14:07There's something about making sounds that are put together with melody, rhythm, and harmony,
00:14:13such as we understand it in different civilizations at different times. That's just part of the human
00:14:17experience. And it's enmeshed in every civilization in important parts of our experience, from sweet
00:14:23lullabies, to stupid love songs, to hymns of religious praise. All of these emotionally really
00:14:31salient experiences that human beings have are almost always in every civilization accompanied by
00:14:35different kinds of music. Now, music varies greatly all around the world. And appreciation for it
00:14:42is different in different places. But there are certain kinds of commonalities that I'll talk about.
00:14:47And for me, different kinds of music around the world is a real source of fascination. I mean,
00:14:51I remember when I was growing up in Seattle and I was in the world of classical music, I heard for
00:14:56the very first time, I heard Ravi Shankar, the great sitar player from the almost religious figure of
00:15:03hindustani classical music. And I was at, frequenting in the university district of Seattle, this world
00:15:10music record store. And I was buying all of these sitar records and all that and playing them really
00:15:15loud in the basement. And my parents really worried that probably I was smoking pot down there, which I
00:15:19wasn't. I was just really into this new vernacular that I thought was opening up my brain in new ways,
00:15:24which in fact, it probably was based on what we now know about the relationship between neurological
00:15:30activity and the enjoyment and consumption of music, because our brains are really built.
00:15:36So it seems to enjoy and even heal with music. There's a 2018 study from the Berkeley Music and
00:15:42Health Institute, which is part of the Berkeley School of Music in Boston, B-E-R-K-L-E-E. That's not Berkeley,
00:15:48California. And the conclusion of the study is that music occupies both place both in our universal human
00:15:53history, as well as in our personalized medical future, which is really interesting, right? Because
00:15:58what we're now learning from neuroscience is that we're hardwired to use music to cure problems and
00:16:06heal ourselves. Interesting research along this line that backs up this assertion. So for example,
00:16:13Parkinson's patients, they can be stimulated by hearing a rhythmic piece such as a march and the
00:16:18symptoms actually diminish and they're able to walk more naturally. So when neurons from the
00:16:24substantia nigra of the brain are destroyed, I mean, one of the things that it does is it makes people
00:16:28akinetic and rigid or have a tremor and it interferes obviously with people's ability to function,
00:16:34to be mobile in the way that they were before. But when they hear rhythmic music, it does something
00:16:40and it's almost like a workaround in the brain that makes it easier for them to walk, for example.
00:16:46And I saw this with my own mother. She was really, really interested in music as an amateur musician,
00:16:51but also very accomplished as a listener. She knew a lot about music. She had majored in music in
00:16:56college, as a matter of fact. And later in her life, when she was suffering from Parkinsonian syndrome,
00:17:02probably not Parkinson's per se, but there are a lot of Parkinsonian syndromes that function in
00:17:06largely the same way neurologically. And she couldn't walk very well. I mean, she was very,
00:17:13very rigid, very rigid. And she would be standing still and then she'd be frozen. She couldn't get
00:17:20started. It was the impulse to start walking. This is characteristic of a lot of people with Parkinson's
00:17:24disease. And what she found that really helped a lot was to put on Sergei Prokofiev's opera,
00:17:30"The Love of Three Oranges," which has a very famous march in it that she loved. It's bum, bum, bum,
00:17:36bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Maybe you've heard it. I don't know. Maybe you can't even recognize it
00:17:45because I'm not a great singer, but it's really, really rhythmic. And sure enough, as soon as the
00:17:49march from "The Love of Three Oranges," as soon as it was on, she started walking. And so I saw the study,
00:17:55I'm like, "Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I got the data at least. N equals one from the experience of my own
00:18:00mother." It was like a miracle, as a matter of fact. Alzheimer's patients, obviously a different
00:18:05neurological melody, who can't remember family members nonetheless are able to remember familiar
00:18:11songs. Part of the reason for that is that almost certainly that the memory that's required for
00:18:18remembering faces and family members and relationships is different than the music that's
00:18:22encoded in the brain or remembering songs. And so you'll play people who are completely incommunicado,
00:18:27who are not functioning the way that they were, who don't recognize their loved ones, even their spouse,
00:18:33and you'll put on a song that they heard in their youth, and they'll start singing it,
00:18:36and they'll remember all the words. Now, here's the way that you can experience this as well.
00:18:41You may have noticed that some, you'll say, "Okay, I'll give you two letters from the alphabet
00:18:46that are kind of close to each other." And I'll say, "Which comes first? Quick." And you're like,
00:18:50"A, V, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K." You learn the alphabet, and you still remember the order of the
00:18:57letters because of the song. The song organizes your memory. That's the same principle as people
00:19:04actually having memories who are Alzheimer's patients who are completely degraded in the functioning of
00:19:10their short-term and even long-term memories. People suffering from epilepsy experience sometimes a
00:19:16dramatic decrease in seizures when they listen to certain kinds of classical music, and researchers
00:19:21really like Mozart for that. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is apparently really good for soothing the parts
00:19:27of the brain for people who have substantial seizures in epilepsy. And the examples go on and on and on.
00:19:34I could do 45 minutes of different examples of this. The bottom line is that it's very, very effective
00:19:39in different ways. It's also the case that music affects human emotions. And that's the brain too.
00:19:45You know that psychology is biology, and emotional activity implicates the functioning of the limbic
00:19:51system of the brain. And sure enough, when you expose people to really, really consonant versus
00:19:57dissonant music, you know, so that the dissonance in music, which is like sort of the clashing sound,
00:20:03where the physics actually don't actually give you that clarity and openness and chords, for example,
00:20:09that that has an inverse correlation with positive emotionality. The more dissonant the music that
00:20:13people listen to, the more negative emotion that they actually feel, and vice versa, which means it's
00:20:19affecting the limbic system of the brain. If you're like me, you got to be drinking when you're in the gym,
00:20:24and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories, that will actually give you your
00:20:28electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's Element. LMNT. You probably knew that already.
00:20:34It's a great product that helps you stay hydrated without sugar and a bunch of dodgy ingredients
00:20:39that are found in a lot of popular electrolyte drinks and sports drinks. No sugar, no junk,
00:20:44just electrolytes that actually work. Give it a try. I like it. It's science-backed and made for athletes,
00:20:50fasting, keto, or happiness scientists like me. Anyone who sweats. So how do I use it? I use it
00:20:57in the morning, 4:45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that
00:21:02peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the
00:21:07ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample pack with any purchase
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00:21:20like it, they'll refund your order. No questions asked, but you're going to like it. As you know from listening to this show, I've never been
00:21:27a supernaturally happy person. That's exactly why I've spent much of my life and my career trying to
00:21:33understand human happiness. Not just academically, but in a way that I could use very practically. And
00:21:40you can too. I don't do research. I do me-search. Well, and you-search. My time in academia has
00:21:47reinforced the lesson I continue to rely on today. Happiness, well, and energy are best managed through
00:21:53deliberate habits and discipline. I take my personal habit seriously. I need to. I have a morning routine. I've
00:22:01talked about it on this show. It involves prayer and exercise and healthy eating and a lot of coffee. Well,
00:22:07taking it at the right time. But in my creative work, I've long looked for a gold star supplement to that
00:22:14routine that helps me take charge of my day. I came across Magic Mind. Now, I was skeptical at first, honestly, because there's a lot of noise in the
00:22:23supplement space. And most of it really doesn't hold up to the science or human experience. But Magic Mind has
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00:22:50it's supposed to. Calm, sustained, and focused. If the same cup of coffee every morning has started to
00:22:56feel more like a crutch than a ritual, or if you're just tired of it, it might be worth trying something
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00:23:22near you using the store locator at magicmind.com. Let's talk about how this relates to the research on
00:23:30happiness now. And some researchers have asked, what kind of music brings about the most happiness? And
00:23:38I am going to tell you what researchers found is the happiest song in a second, which kind of bums me
00:23:42out. But anyway. But what they find is that music at 140 to 150 beats per minute is associated with the
00:23:50greatest amount of happiness that it provokes, suggesting that, once again, it has this particular
00:23:55effect on the limbic system of the brain, perhaps tapping the ventral tegmental area, the ventral
00:24:00triad with the brain, so you get this feeling of joy when you get 140 to 150 beats per minute. They
00:24:06don't know exactly why that's the case. Now, if you want to know how many that is, intuitively,
00:24:10here's 120 beats per minute. Here's how you remember 120 beats per minute. You hum to yourself
00:24:15the stars and stripes forever. That's 120. 140, therefore, is a little bit faster. That's 140 beats.
00:24:29Around there, music at that tempo strongly correlated with stimulating feelings of joy.
00:24:37Dominant seventh chords. It can be a little harder for me to explain that. If I had a piano,
00:24:42I could play a dominant seventh chord for you. But that's strongly associated with feelings of happiness
00:24:47as well. The result of it is that a lot of the happiest songs have those two characteristics. They go to
00:24:52140, 100 beats per minute. They're up-tempo. They've got a lot of seven chords going on in there. The happiest song that more or
00:24:59less fulfills these characteristics is the Beach Boys' good vibration that is judged to be the happiest
00:25:04song. Now, it turns out it's not because it fulfills all the scientific characteristics that you need.
00:25:09That was actually based on a survey where they asked what was the happiest song of all time, and it won,
00:25:15so for whatever reason. I would not have voted for it. Folks, I would have given you something for the
00:25:20high baroque period, and I would have done something else entirely. I got nothing against good vibrations,
00:25:25but I'm not going to listen to it more than once every few years. What was the saddest kind of music, or what's
00:25:30the most negative kind of music? This is where it gets interesting. It's a 1998 study from the journal Alternative
00:25:36Therapies in Health and Medicine that looks at grunge rock and finds that it's the worst kind of music for happiness. I could have told you that. I'm from Seattle, and I grew up a little bit before the
00:25:38grunge rock era. I left in the mid-80s when I graduated from high school, and that was more or less a 90s thing, but every time I would go back, I'd be like, "What is that sound?" And I felt like an old man, "Get the hell off my lawn," or "This is too loud," whatever. But grunge rock is judged to be especially
00:26:08bad for happiness. How do they know that? Because it raised hostility, sadness, tension, and fatigue among people who are exposed to it in experimental conditions. You're angry, sad, stressed out, and tired when you listen to it. And it has a lot to do with the effect of the distorted electric guitar and nihilistic lyrics on the brain. It also, by the way, lowered caring, relaxation, mental clarity, and vigor made people less caring toward each other.
00:26:37Yeah, I mean, I'm listening to grunge rock. Huh. All right. So why the heck could anybody listen to it? And that leads to a very interesting new area of research, which is the benefits of music that brings you down. Any kind of music that would be sad, or God forbid, do all the things that is talked about with, you know, Pearl Jam, or whatever grunge rock band is your favorite. Why would you expose yourself to that? Why
00:27:07Why would you listen to miserable music? And there's an answer to that. There's actually a benefit that actually comes from listening to music that doesn't lift you up. And I want you to think about this for a second. Imagine your last really bad breakup.
00:27:20I can't even remember for me because I've been married so long. But you know, some of you listening, you had a bad breakup last week, right? When you're having a bad breakup, and you're really, really, really sad, what kind of music you want to listen to? You want to listen to a Sousa March? You want to listen to good vibrations? No, like get that away from me. You don't want that. You want something that actually is consistent with your mood for a particular reason. Now, your mom might say, don't listen to that sad music. It's just going to make you feel worse. That's actually wrong.
00:27:50And here's the reason for that. Here's a hypothesized reason for that. Here's a hypothesized reason why you want to listen to sad music when you're sad. And it somehow kind of makes you feel better.
00:28:00The right hand side of your brain, the right hemisphere of your brain, the side that processes mystery and meaning, and if you want all the science on that in this book right here, processes both beauty and suffering.
00:28:12Music gives suffering. In other words, the same part of the brain. Music gives suffering a form of understanding and expression. Once again, this is Schopenhauer. It's the same idea that it's this special language that will illuminate what's actually going on in the right hemisphere of your brain.
00:28:30It makes you understand what's going on in the right hemisphere of your brain. You're looking for answers. Why do I feel this way? What is the nature of what I'm feeling? How can I feel better?
00:28:40But it's mysterious. Suffering is a very mysterious thing. It's really, really hard to articulate. And when you can't articulate it, when you can't explain it, when you don't have the words for it, you go and you look for another language that explains it. And that's sad music.
00:28:53That's the theory about why that works. And it's almost certainly the case. A very nice article in The Arts in Psychotherapy, The Appeal of Sad Music, a brief overview of current directions and research on motivations for listening to sad music, actually shows that when people listen to it, they feel less alone.
00:29:10And the sad music makes sense of the crisis that they're actually going through. So the bottom line is that this stuff is good for you if you know how to use it right.
00:29:22Now, interestingly, there's two ways to amplify the positive effects. I'm going to give you these two ways, and then I'm going to show you how to be better at listening to music, how to create music protocols in your life that can lead to better mental health and more happiness for you.
00:29:39So the two ways to amplify positive effects, according to the research. Number one is consider more live music. So in 2024, British researchers in an experiment asked participants to listen to classical music in three ways: live, pre-recorded, and in a music video. Those are the three ways they asked them to do it.
00:29:58And then they hooked sensors up to the scalp of the participants, and they were trying to detect where the brain activity was greatest.
00:30:07And what they found was that people had the most intense neurophysiological experience when they were in person for performance.
00:30:14Now, maybe you knew that. Maybe you knew that that's the case. But not everybody does know that. So in person is more intense than any other way of experiencing music.
00:30:22Second, and this is more counterintuitive, that music is more intense when you're by yourself. That might not be the way you like it the most, but it's most intense when you're by yourself.
00:30:32It's a 2018 experiment from the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences where researchers showed that happy music seems happier and sad music seems sadder when you listen to it alone, as opposed to when you're listening to it with others.
00:30:47So, how do you use this? How do you use this information?
00:30:52I'm going to give you four ways to turn all this information into protocols.
00:30:58Number one: decide what you actually want from your music, and then consume it and create a playlist according to what your goals are.
00:31:08Now, the goal might just be listening to music while I work out. But if there's something that's a little bit deeper because you want special access to the right-hand side of your brain, consider the trade-offs that take place between using music to bond socially and using it to intensify emotions.
00:31:25So, for example, if you want to bond socially, listen with friends. If you want to intensify your emotions, listen by yourself. If you want a mixture of both, try going to a live concert with friends.
00:31:37If you want the richest emotional experience possible, go to a concert by yourself. You get the idea of how all this could actually be used, how you can use the science to improve your life according to what your needs are at the moment.
00:31:52Okay, even more practically, use your music in a way where you want the effect on you as opposed to categorizing all the music that you're listening to with respect to the type of music or the artist.
00:32:04So, for example, create a catalog. I use Spotify a lot. There's a lot of ways to actually do this. It's very convenient these days. Create a catalog of songs you like. Now, pay attention or pieces that you like in the case of classical music.
00:32:19Pay attention to how each one makes you feel and write down its characteristics in your own words.
00:32:25So, take the top 100 songs that you're listening to that's on your Spotify playlist and say, "How does this one make me feel?" and actually categorize it with, you know, up, down, how sad, happy, in your own words.
00:32:37And then look for patterns across the songs. You're going to find some pretty easy patterns, probably some counterintuitive ones as well. And then build your personal music library in a way based on emotional effect rather than style or artist.
00:32:49And this is really important, right? So, okay, when I'm sad, I'm going to the sad list. When I'm happy, I'm going to go to the happy list. When I need energy, I want to go to the energy list.
00:32:56When I'm going to have a party with my friends, I'm going to the party list. Because you've actually categorized it with respect to the activity in the limbic system of your brain.
00:33:04This is self-management in a way to use music in the service of self-management. That's the second thing that I recommend.
00:33:12The third thing I recommend is learning and growing. Because when you actually get more sophisticated about the music that you're consuming, you'll get more of these particular effects and you can get more of the neurobiological benefits and emotional benefits from it.
00:33:27You know, I recommend this to a lot of people along a lot of lines. You know, when I see, you know, a young person, a young adult who's reading a lot of young adult fiction, I say, "Fine, young adult fiction is fine."
00:33:37But start going toward old adult fiction too. You know, if you're reading a lot of, you know, novels by young adult authors, which are kind of, you know, they're kind of cotton candy.
00:33:47Think about Dostoevsky. You know, that's where, if you're, if you like fiction, get better at reading fiction. And the way that you get better at reading fiction is by doing something that's harder, not doing the same easy thing over and over and over again.
00:33:59Now, this is the principle of progress through challenge. If you want bigger muscles, you have to lift more weight. You need progressive overload. And the same thing is true with your reading. You need progressive overload.
00:34:12And you need that with music as well. Think about your music in terms of the effects on you and on your appetite and learning about new genres, how that will stretch you and it will have more intense effects on you if it's actually more sophisticated.
00:34:28and deeper, but that requires learning. That requires the progressive overload. If you start getting really interested in the emotional and cognitive effects of love songs, for example, maybe we should start cultivating an interest in Italian opera.
00:34:43If you, you know, listen to Giacomo Puccini's "Tosca" or "La Boheme," it's actually not that hard to get into. I mean, if you sat down with me, we could, I could tell you all about the libretto and the context and the history, and we'd watch the video a few times and pretty soon, I bet you'd be a fan.
00:34:57If you think corny love songs make you feel one way, well, corny Italian opera is going to make you feel that times ten because of the depth and sophistication that comes around from that.
00:35:07If you like an electric guitar shredding sick riffs, try taking that experience to the next level by listening to the flamenco virtuoso Paco de Lucia, the greatest Spanish guitar player who ever lived.
00:35:19He's got sick riffs, man. But in a different vernacular that you've been used to. Go deep. You know, I have a son who's deeply, deeply, deeply into classical music.
00:35:29And he played a little bit of cello, but mostly he just knows a lot. And one of the reasons is when he was a kid, when he was laying in bed, because he was interested in music, we would look at scores and we would, you know, we would go to concerts in New York.
00:35:41And for a couple of months before we went to the concerts, we would read the music together every single night while we listen to recordings of this music.
00:35:47And he would get deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper into it. Now is now his interest is really sophisticated and he listens to a lot of music and it's a very healing, a very wholesome thing.
00:35:57It's a very, very good thing for him because of that level of sophistication. Learning grow. That's number three.
00:36:03Number four, play yourself. Why don't you play it yourself? Among amateur and professional musicians, people differ about whether emotional experiences in life, understanding or deeper when playing music as opposed to listening to it.
00:36:16But one of the things that I have found, in fact, is that amateur musicians get the most intense experience from it. And some of the people that I know who love the music the most, they're not professionals, they're amateurs.
00:36:27So my brother and I were both very, very serious musicians growing up. We played the same orchestras, the youth orchestras and the community orchestras together.
00:36:35I took one path, he took the other. I went pro, he didn't. He went into an entirely different line of work, but he kept playing. He's a double bass player, very gifted double bass player.
00:36:45And still to this day, in his mid 60s, he plays in community orchestras. He plays with his friends. You know, he plays bass in, you know, like bluegrass bands from time to time. And he loves it. It's a huge source of joy for him that he actually is able to do that as a source of joy in his life.
00:37:02Now, I stopped because I went pro and it was all that I did. And, you know, when you do something professionally, maybe that takes some of the joy out of it. I'm not quite sure.
00:37:10But the bottom line is that amateur musicians get deep and intense joy from what they actually do. There's a 2020 study that looks at the well-being of playing music and finds them to be very significant and very positive, even more so than listening to music.
00:37:26Take a few lessons on your favorite instrument and see for yourself. I should note, by the way, in that 2020 study, that they had a comparison group of people so that they could get a baseline of people who are neither listening to music nor playing music. They were knitting instead.
00:37:41And it turns out that the knitters were even happier than the musicians. So maybe you should listen to more music while you knit. I don't know. You decide. How did Schopenhauer do it? It turns out that Schopenhauer went to a lot of concerts, but fundamentally, the way that he loved music, Arthur Schopenhauer, the nihilist who was getting at Villa for music, he played the flute every day in his apartment in the afternoon after he wrote.
00:38:10He lived in Frankfurt. He played his flute in his apartment every day. It turned out he had his belief that there was one composer in particular who was better than all the others, which was actually a guy who was alive the same time that he was. It was somebody who was born just within four years of when he was born. I don't think they knew each other at all. That was Giacchino Rossini, the Italian opera composer.
00:38:33And back in the day, you couldn't get recordings of anything. You could get sheet music and play them on the piano, etc., etc. He didn't play the piano. He played the flute. And so he would get the sheet music of the melodies of Rossini's operas, and he would play them on his flute.
00:38:48And when he did, he would roll his eyes up toward heaven because he was having a mystical experience. He believed that Rossini's music was the secret to the underlying code of the mysteries of life. This is from the world's greatest cynic. Take it from him.
00:39:07The bottom line is, I don't know if he's right, but I know that you can go find your Rossini. If you do, you can be happier. Let's take some questions.
00:39:17Dane Jackson, as a matter of fact, we're going to take some questions about music because it makes sense. Dane Jackson writes in, "Do you have any suggestion on where someone with little to no experience with classical music can start in understanding and thus further appreciating classical music?"
00:39:31Great. This is super fun. This is our great hobby. There's old stuff and there's new stuff. And here's the great thing. I mean, YouTube is a vast wasteland of time wasting for a lot of people, but it can be used for great good.
00:39:44And this is a classic case of this. Howard Goodall's Story of Music is a BBC series from 2013. It's all on YouTube. Go look at it. It's fantastic.
00:39:53The second and one that I like even more is Leonard Bernstein. He was one of the greatest conductors and he was a fine composer as well. He was also a great educator and a genius.
00:40:02And he did in 1973, he did a series of lectures at Harvard to hold the Harvard Norton lectures. And those are all on YouTube, too. And they're super fun and they're super interesting.
00:40:12And you're actually going to learn a lot. The whole bottom line is that somebody who makes it come alive through joy and teaches you a lot about it is do that on YouTube.
00:40:20And you'll spend night after night after night doing it. So Sam Malick is the next question. Do you listen to music during your morning workout?
00:40:27And so what type? How methodical are you about it?
00:40:31I don't. I generally don't. And the reason is because as a former professional musician, I find it hugely distracting.
00:40:37So some people, they find people talking too distracting. I find people playing music too distracting.
00:40:43Now, I could find something that would be kind of numbing, but but almost any music I'm thinking about the melody.
00:40:48I'm I'm dissecting the harmony. I'm doing some sort of, you know, analysis of the music in my in my head.
00:40:54But that's just me. Sometimes I listen to music when I'm driving, which is really interesting and fun for me.
00:41:00I don't drive that much. But oftentimes when I'm coming home from work, when I'm in the office and I come back and I'll listen to Sirius XM has a really good radio station.
00:41:10It's actually a pretty good taste in music and I like it or I'll put on something that's actually on my phone.
00:41:16I have Spotify premium. Spotify is so fantastic, by the way.
00:41:20I mean, I love the service. I think it's one of the great ways that technology has made our life so much better.
00:41:25And maybe I will publish my my most liked songs from Spotify.
00:41:30Maybe I'll publish my Spotify playlist like that. Maybe I'll do that.
00:41:35And you could actually see the weird stuff that I'm listening to from jazz to world music to, you know, Indonesian Gamelan classical to, of course, the Bach and the and the and the Bruckner that were my stock and trade for so long.
00:41:47And that's the stuff that I listen to when I'm driving.
00:41:49And sometimes when I'm doing work that doesn't require concentration, like putting together PowerPoint slides or something for my lectures in class, I'll do that.
00:41:55But I don't usually do it when I'm working out. It's too distracting. Your results may differ.
00:42:00You got to experiment with that yourself.
00:42:02Last one. This is an anonymous question.
00:42:04My friends include my husband and music buddies.
00:42:07Good.
00:42:08So but that's about it.
00:42:09Could you please share some advice on how someone with Asperger's who's on the autism spectrum can grow deep friendships?
00:42:15You know, having a spouse and music buddies not that bad, I have to say, that's pretty good.
00:42:21It's not bad at all, actually.
00:42:23But the whole point is this.
00:42:24People were on the autism spectrum.
00:42:26They tend to bond with others over mutual interest as opposed to personal sharing, especially emotional sharing.
00:42:33There's a lot of reasons for that.
00:42:34You can imagine.
00:42:35But the bottom line is that how can you grow deeper friendships?
00:42:40And the answer to that is growing new interests.
00:42:43That's generally speaking the way it is for people on the on the autism spectrum.
00:42:46And a lot of people not on the autism spectrum as well is to do that.
00:42:49So think about a new area of interest, something you want to learn about and a community of people who are learning about it as well.
00:42:55And that's where your natural new friendships are going to come from.
00:42:57That's what I would recommend.
00:42:58We're done.
00:42:59I hope you've enjoyed this episode.
00:43:01I hope that you find use for it in the way that you listen to music, which is the most wonderful thing.
00:43:08Let me know your thoughts at officehours@arthurbrooks.com.
00:43:11Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple.
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00:43:16That makes me happy when you do so because we can spread more quickly to more people and we can get to you in a timely way.
00:43:21Leave me a comment.
00:43:23Good, bad, negative, positive.
00:43:26We like to hear it all.
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00:43:30And order the meaning of your life while you're at it.
00:43:32You'll learn more about music and art in there.
00:43:34There's a whole chapter dedicated to beauty in this book.
00:43:37And I'll write more about it in the weeks and months to come.
00:43:40I'll see you next week.