Article by Daniel J. Levitin, Published by The Walrus. October 3, 2024.
Read the full article: https://thewalrus.ca/yes-listening-to-music-is-therapy/
Excerpt:
Music reduces pain, increases resilience, and reconnects Alzheimer’s patients with their memories. It’s time for science to take it seriously
… Until the glass crashed, I had been in what neuroscientist Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin calls experiential fusion—the state of being so absorbed that your consciousness itself becomes fused with what you are experiencing. During experiential fusion with music, you temporarily lose awareness of yourself as an individual entity separate from the music; you and the music have become one. If someone touched your hand and asked you, “Are you aware that you’re in a jazz club?” you’d almost certainly say, “Yes.” But that awareness is born only in the moment of the interruption, as you get yanked out of your absorption, back into the mundane. In both moments, you’re attentive to the music, but only in the second moment do you have meta awareness. If this sounds strange, compare it to sleep. If someone wakes you up and asks if you were sleeping, only retrospectively can you assess that sleeping was just taking place and it was you who was doing the sleeping.
The band launches into “In a Sentimental Mood.” Billy Pierce, who’d been my sax teacher just the previous year before Art picked him up mid-semester, is also up on the bandstand. He looks at me and smiles. He starts to play, and I’m transported again to another time and place. I couldn’t tell you where—but it is in turns thrilling, heartbreaking, bustling, radiant, and always, always moving forward.
Today, in my sixties, after a bad day at work, getting cut off in traffic, or just feeling blue and despondent for no discernible reason (that is a part of the human condition), there is refuge. Picking up my guitar or sitting at the piano, it’s as if I’m in a bubble—feeling safe, contented, and that all is right in the world. And when playing music with Victor Wooten, Rosanne Cash, or Carlos Reyes on a good night, we feel that bubble extend out into the back of the room and lift up everyone in it.
My father’s father, Joseph, was a scientist and a medical doctor with an extensive collection of 78 rpm records of big bands, opera, and symphonies, and 33 1/3 rpm sing-alongs. As a physician, he lived in a world of evidence and scientific truths. As a humanist, he immersed himself in art; his home was filled with paintings, sculpture, literature, and music. We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another, but they are bound by a common objective. Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world. Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise, and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy. It is no accident that the word “motion” is part of the word “emotion.” Both come from the Latin “emovere”: to move, move out, or move through. As music moves through us, it signals, exercises, and invokes emotions...