Why do brains love music?

How can we understand music’s effect on human brains? Is music universal or does it rely on your experiences? How is music similar to a language? Can music be leveraged to help anxiety, dementia, or Parkinson’s disease? What does any of this have to do with Stevie Wonder on the high hat, or the relationship between music and color? Join Eagleman with guest Daniel Levitin — neuroscientist, musician, and author of This Is Your Brain on Music and I Heard There Was A Secret Chord.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:
Daniel J. Levitin (2007). This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Plume/Penguin, New York.

Daniel J. Levitin (2024). I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine. W.W. Norton & Co, New York.

Oliver Sacks (2008). Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Vintage, New York.

Ashoori A, Eagleman DM, Jankovic J (2015). Effects of auditory rhythm and music on gait disturbances in Parkinson’s disease. Frontiers in Neurology, 6(234).

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN ON:

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

Wednesday is Indigo Blue

Sum

The Runaway Species