How Music Can Be Medicine, with Dr. Dan Levitin

A lot of us reach for music when we’re struggling. Whether we’re going through a breakup or just a rough day, our favorite jams seem to have an almost magical ability to give us relief. But WHY?! What exactly is music doing in the brain that affects how we feel? And how powerful is it? Like, could music actually treat diseases? We dig into these questions with musician, neuroscientist, and professor Dr. Dan Levitin. He wrote a book called “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine” all about the incredible neuroscience science behind music and how it can help with things like depression, pain and even Alzheimer’s disease. This episode does mention depression. Here are some crisis hotlines: United States: US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Dial 988 (Online chat available); US Crisis Text Line Text “HOME” to 741741 Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14 (Online chat available) Canada: Call or text 988 United Kingdom: Samaritans 116 123 (UK and ROI) Full list of international hotlines here Find our transcript here: https://tinyurl.com/ScienceVsMusicAsMedicine In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Intro (03:04) How music activates the brain (09:17) The effects of music on mental health and pain (14:37) The relationship between music and memory (20:35) Music as medicine for movement disorders (23:23) Does music really make you smarter? (27:45) Oddball questions Credits: This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys with help from Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, and Rose Rimler. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Wendy Zukerman is the executive producer. Fact-checking by the Science Vs team. Video editing and sound by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Michelle Kitchen and Spotify Studios in Los Angeles, as well as Humdinger Studios in Melbourne. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  My lab was the first to show that when you listen to music, it releases opioids in your brain, what we call endogenous interior opioids, same as you would get in morphine, or an oxycontin, or a codeine tablet, but they're in your brain.

• 0:17Wendy Zukerman?

  Science chats with our favorite nerds. Yeah. Hi, I'm Wendy Zukerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, how music can help us live happier and healthier lives. A lot of us have had that moment where we felt really crappy, and then we turned on a song, and it just made us feel better. We started dancing, singing, maybe crying. It felt almost like magic. But of course, it's not magic, it's science. Music is doing all of this stuff in our brain. It's worming its way in there somehow.

• 1:01Wendy Zukerman?

  And to find out more about this, I talked to musician turned neuroscientist, emeritus professor Dan Levitin. Dan has worked with the likes of Santana, Sting, Roseanne Cash, Steely Dad, the list goes on. And then he became a neuroscientist. And he's been looking into how we can harness music to help us with all kinds of things, from depression, to pain, to even potentially helping those with movement disorders walk better. Dan wrote a book about it. It's called, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine. And so today on the show, it's my chat with Dan Levitin.

• 1:46Wendy Zukerman?

  It was really lovely and insightful, and I hope you enjoy it. So after the break, my chat with Dan Levitin.

• 1:59Speaker 02

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• 3:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. Today on the show, I'm chatting to musician turned neuroscientist, emeritus professor Daniel Levitin. Hey, Dan, welcome to the show.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Wendy.

• 3:17Wendy Zukerman?

  After writing this book, Music As Medicine, what bugs you about pop culture that perhaps didn't before?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know what you mean, because like in the brain sciences, what bugs me is like when an actor will mispronounce a word that he could, he or she just could have looked up.

• 3:39Wendy Zukerman?

  Yes.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So I remember watching a TV show that had J.K. Simmons. It was one of the Law and Order series. And he comes on, and he says, well, I'm looking at the brain here, and there's a problem with the amygdala. But we pronounce it amygdala. And I'm thinking, you know, come on, J.K., you're a great actor. It'd take five seconds to go to a dictionary.

• 4:00Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah, that, yeah. And rightfully so, I say.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:04Wendy Zukerman?

  Let's talk about your kind of origin story. You grew up in Northern California among orchards, I've heard you say. And it was at school where you were first given an instrument to play, and you chose the clarinet. And you said that that was the beginning of everything for me. Do you remember why? What was it about playing?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  I loved it. I enjoyed it. I felt, I'll tell you what I can say, I felt most myself while playing music. That is, everything else is sort of me doing stuff. But that feels like the me and the stuff have fused.

• 4:49Wendy Zukerman?

  Then you ultimately became a musician, you worked in bands, but then turned to neuroscience. So what is happening in the brain as we listen to music? What areas activated?

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Music activates more regions of the brain than anything else we've looked at. It interacts with every region of the brain that we've mapped so far. Music activates the rhythmic centers, and whether you know it or not, you've got clusters of neurons that fire in synchrony with the tempo of music. So you've got millions of neurons that are in training to it, you know, locking in, and then others that are causing you to move parts of your body, or wiggle your pudendum, or dance, or anything like that.

• 5:38Wendy Zukerman?

  How dare you call my dancing wiggling my pudendum?

• 5:46Wendy Zukerman?

  That is amazing, though. It is amazing.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  It is.

• 5:49Wendy Zukerman?

  That they're locking on, there's some neurons locking on to that. And the visual center, the visual center's lighting up.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have, in listening to, playing, composing music, the visual centers of the brain are active. Some music, when you surrender to it, takes you on kind of a guided visual journey. People often report, tens of thousands of people we've surveyed, say, well, I'll be, I'll be lying on the couch, and I'll close my eyes, and suddenly I'm transported. I'm in some other place, and it has trees and a river, or it's a cityscape, or whatever it is. And they're seeing images in their mind that's kind of like a visual accompaniment to the music.

• 6:30Wendy Zukerman?

  And you put Sting into a brain scanner. You talk about it in your book. Tell me, what was going on in his brain when he was hearing music?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Well, this was really so much fun for him and for me. When he was composing in the scanner, there was all this visual cortex activity. And I said, I've never seen so much visual activity during music composing. And he had an instant explanation. He says, oh, well, when I'm composing, I see music as architecture, and different levels of a house, or a building, and buttresses, and arches, and, you know, a number of stories and rooms, and I, you know, filigrees, and I, you know, that's how I'm thinking of it.

• 7:22Wendy Zukerman?

  And you, personally, you have affectasia. So if, is this right? So if I were to say, the classic one, imagine an apple, what do you, you say nothing?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Well, you've really done your research, because I haven't told very many people that I have affectasia. But affectasia was just discovered a few years ago, and it's the inability to form mental images. And I do have vivid mental images when I dream, but when you say, imagine an apple, I can't do it. But I mean, you know, people always used to say, like teachers would say, you know, close your eyes and imagine a flower, and then draw it. And I was never any good at that, because I, what do you mean, close your eyes? And imagine, what?

• 8:09Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah. And so when you listen to music, do you get that visual imagery?

• 8:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 8:15Wendy Zukerman?

  No? Interesting. Continuing with how music affects the brain, you've done research into the default mode network, and how music interacts with this network, which is, oh, I hope I don't mess it up, it's sort of the network your brain locks into when you're not really thinking about anything, daydreaming, it's default. How is music interacting with this network?

• 8:38Speaker 00

  When you listen to music, it puts you into this default mode, this daydreaming mode, which is an important restorative mode for the brain. And it's in opposition to what we call the central executive brain. The central executive is when you're paying attention to something, you're focused, and your brain is able to keep you on track, you're not distracted. Paying attention is an apt metaphor, because you have a limited amount of neural resources, biological resources, and you spend them by focusing. And after an hour or two of really hard work, your mind begins to wander, sometimes shorter. Your mind might be wandering right now.

• 9:21Wendy Zukerman?

  I'm unfocused, executive function engaged.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  When, when we drift into that mode, if we allow ourselves to go there, it can effectively hit a reset button in the brain, and restore neural function, and restore the oxygenated glucose that was spent by paying attention. Working and taking a restorative break, not, and a restorative break isn't where you check Facebook, it's where you go for a walk in nature, or you take a nap, or you daydream, or you listen to music. And music is one of the most reliable ways to get into that mode.

• 9:56Wendy Zukerman?

  Has that changed how you use music in your day to day life?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. What I do is, you know, I'll work, and when I feel my attention flagging, rather than grabbing another cup of coffee, I'll just close my eyes and meditate, or I'll put on some music. And then five or 10 minutes later, I'm refreshed.

• 10:16Wendy Zukerman?

  Lots of people use music to help them out when they're not doing well mentally. Sometimes, you know, a Gallup poll of Gen Z folks found that when kids are upset, listening to music was the most common thing they did to feel better, more common than looking at social media, or even hanging out with their friends. And we are getting, there's more and more research on the effects of depression, anxiety symptoms, that particularly in the short term, listening to music, it can help.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Listening to music can release dopamine. And that serves different functions in different parts of the brain. But one thing it does is it makes you feel that warm pleasure when it's in the limbic system of the brain. And when it's in the frontal lobes, it helps you feel motivated to do things that are healthy and healthful. So dopamine is what helps you get through an exercise workout when the music's going and your muscles hurt, but you keep going because you've got a steady supply of dopamine. Music listening modulates serotonin, which helps to stabilize mood.

• 11:18Wendy Zukerman?

  And then let's look at pain because you've done some very interesting research into how music might help us deal with pain.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Well, so the question is how, the first question is how do you study pain? Well, you have to have people who are in pain. So the typical way we induce pain in the laboratory is we ask somebody to put their hand in a bucket of ice water up to the elbow.

• 11:41Wendy Zukerman?

  Have you done this?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 11:43Wendy Zukerman?

  How painful is it?

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Well, it's not painful at first. You know, you put your hand in the ice water, 10 seconds go by, 15 seconds, it's not, it's fine. Don't care if it's a hot day, but at some point it becomes quite uncomfortable. And at some point beyond that, it becomes painful, really painful. And, you know, we can, we can manipulate things like, you know, if you stay in another 15 seconds, I'll give you an extra 10 bucks. And some people just say, no, no, it's not worth it. Get me out of here. And so in this ice bucket task, most people can last between a minute and two minutes. No matter how much the reward is, they just can't take it anymore. And so that's how we induce pain.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And what we find is that when we play music to people in this setting, it allows, music raises their pain threshold. That is, it acts as an analgesic, lowering their experience of pain because the threshold is higher. And they can last longer in the ice bucket.

• 12:51Wendy Zukerman?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  And the mechanism for this, my lab was the first to show that when you listen to music, it releases opioids in your brain, what we call endogenous, interior opioids, same as you would get in morphine or an oxycontin or a codeine tablet, but they're in your brain. So listening to music that you like, that's the caveat.

• 13:14Wendy Zukerman?

  That you like, that you like, right?

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it releases these natural painkillers.

• 13:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Uh huh. And if you're listening to music you don't like?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  That not only doesn't release the painkillers, it releases cortisol, which is the stress hormone that makes you more sensitive to distraction and it slows down critical thinking. It releases adrenaline, it upsets you.

• 13:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, listening to music, you don't, it is a painful experience, yes.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Well, it's what drove Manuel Noriega out of his compound in Panama. Music he didn't like.

• 13:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Was that really?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  The US Army blasted him with Van Halen music and he couldn't take it. They had already turned off all the water and the air conditioning and, you know, there was no food in the compound. He's not giving up, he's not giving up. They blast him with Van Halen and he caves.

• 14:02Wendy Zukerman?

  He's like, I'm done, I'm done. Is that, is the opioid mechanism the main mechanism? You think that music can help us sort of deal with pain? Because it's other, is it a distraction? You know, there's other ideas?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Main mechanism is the right question to ask. It is a mechanism. Music is also distracting and it's also engaging. We haven't been able to sort out which is the most important component. There's more work to be done there.

• 14:36Wendy Zukerman?

  How big is the effect? Do you think we could, you know, for people going into surgery, that hospitals could, you know, give you two doses of, you know, Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles and instead of giving you opioids? How far do you think we could push this?

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Oh, well, Here Comes the Sun would work if they were operating on your solar plexus, wouldn't it? No, I think that the level of analgesic effect of music is significant and measurable, but probably not so large. It's not pharmaceutical level doses. So dentists have figured out that people respond to music in a way that either minimizes or minimizes the need for Novocain or nitrous oxide slash laughing gas. Or, or, you know, many people, just if they've got music going, they don't need anything at all.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  So certainly in the dental field, that's true.

• 15:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Let's talk about memory, music and memory, because a lot of us will sort of intuitively know that music and memory have this deep connection. We really, you know, remember songs from our childhood, from a few beats of a song. You're just like, oh my God, I know this, I know this. And you have talked about how music, our memory of music holds this almost privileged position in our brain. So our music memories can be more accurate than other kinds of memories. Why is that the case? Why do music and memory have such a strong relationship?

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Well, I, I think the caveat is that not everybody remembers music well. Some people don't like music. We estimate about 10% of the population don't like music. They don't understand it. But what music has that other things don't have, I mean, what are you going to compare it to? I guess literature, comedy sets, plays, dialogue from movies, visual art, sculpture, dance. Why do we seem to remember music better than those things? One thing is that music has multiple elements that work in tandem that are mutually reinforcing. So you've got melody and there's this rhyme scheme at the end of the line.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  The pieces can only fit together in certain ways.

• 17:03Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  The other element of it is that in the last 70 years or so, we've had pop music culture where a song would get played a whole lot for a few weeks or a few months. And after a year, you're not, you're not hearing that old Britney Spears song as much as he used to. And, and so it becomes associated with a certain time of your life, a certain place of your life. It's a unique memory. And so it can unlock all the other experiences of that time of your life. A principle of memory is that when something goes into memory storage, it's bound together

• 17:46Speaker 00

  with all the other things, which is why a smell or a taste that's unusual can unlock a flood of memories associated with a particular time of your life.

• 17:57Wendy Zukerman?

  Mm hmm. And when, and with Alzheimer's, I feel like this is particularly potent where, you know, where sometimes people won't even remember their loved ones fully, but can remember songs from their childhood. I mean, tell us about Tony Bennett.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Well, so a principle of music is that the first memories that go in are the last ones that come out. And that's a general principle of memory. You tend to remember things that were put in earlier. And we, most of us start paying attention to music around the age of 10 or 12. And that's when we develop our musical tastes. And because they're the last things to go, in a case of Alzheimer's, people may not recognize their spouses or their loved ones, but they'll still remember photographs of their fourth grade classroom or their seventh grade bedroom or music from that period. And Tony Bennett famously had Alzheimer's disease and was able to keep singing his,

• 19:00Speaker 00

  pretty much his full repertoire of hundreds or thousands of songs because, you know, he knew them from the time he was a kid.

• 19:07Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  He didn't know what day it was and he might sing the same song three times in a row because he didn't realize he had just sung it.

• 19:14Wendy Zukerman?

  So how can music help, help people with Alzheimer's? Because you've said it can't, it can't cure or slow the progression of it, but what can it do?

• 19:24Speaker 00

  What we see in care facilities, so-called old age homes and assisted living, is that somebody who doesn't recognize their loved ones or even themself in a mirror can become quite agitated because nothing makes sense or quite withdrawn because nothing makes sense. If you put on recent music, that means nothing. But if you put on music from their teen years, it allows them to reconnect with the self they thought they had lost. And it can be profound. Playing music for just 20 minutes to somebody in that state can get them talking again and orient them and pull them outside themselves for a week or so.

• 20:08Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow. So should we all be making Alzheimer's playlists for our future?

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:16Wendy Zukerman?

  What would be on yours, number one?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  The music I heard from 12 to 18.

• 20:20Wendy Zukerman?

  Right.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Which was, you know, it was, it was Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and then Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago and Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and...

• 20:33Wendy Zukerman?

  I can already see, I can see your face lighting up just picturing these, these songs.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Johnny Cash.

• 20:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  And these funny little one-hit wonders. The Cascades. Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, telling me just what a fool I've been. Beautiful song written by a guy named John Gumo.

• 20:55Wendy Zukerman?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  One hit.

• 20:56Wendy Zukerman?

  It'll be funny when the millennials, when, once we start going to old folks homes because it'll all be like Who Let the Dogs Out, you know, airing, blasting.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it will, yeah, yeah.

• 21:08Wendy Zukerman?

  After the break, how music can help those with movement disorders to walk better. Plus, can listening to certain kinds of music make you smarter? Coming up.

• 21:36Wendy Zukerman?

  Welcome back. I'm here with emeritus professor Dan Leaverton. So another really interesting use of music in medicine is helping folks with various movement disorders like MS or Parkinson's, and that music actually can help them to walk. Research has shown that certain music can help people walk faster, with better strides. How is it doing that?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Well, so when you listen to music, your brain synchronizes with the beat. Entire populations of neurons synchronize. If you've got Parkinson's, at some point, it can cause circuits in the part of the brain called the basal ganglia to degrade. And they're responsible for helping to maintain smooth, continuous movements, as well as to put one foot in front of the other and to do things in a sequence at a particular time and in a particular order. And when the basal ganglia go, Parkinson's patients often freeze and have difficulty walking because that internal clock has been degraded

• 22:41Speaker 00

  or damaged. But when the music comes on, if it comes on with the tempo of your natural walking speed, your gait, after about four seconds of synchrony, the Parkinson's patient can walk in synchrony to the music. This has been a game changer. And the idea is you listen to music, say, 15 minutes a day, you walk with the music. And after some days or weeks of this training, you can dispense with the music and go for several weeks without it because you've retrained some new supplementary circuits in your brain.

• 23:13Wendy Zukerman?

  Wow. And so it's that circuit that is firing with the beat that is somehow going into the basal ganglia and saying, "Come on, come on, we can do this?"

• 23:24Speaker 00

  No. It's not so much that it's fixing broken circuits in the basal ganglia. It's acting as another clock that the motor system can use to time itself.

• 23:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Ah, it's creating new connections that then is helping you to walk. That's amazing.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  It is.

• 23:46Wendy Zukerman?

  And does a metronome work if it's all about that beat? Can you just sort of play the boom, boom, boom?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  You're really thinking like a scientist. That was the big question. That was the big experiment. Well, if it's just the beat, then a metronome should do it. But no, it doesn't.

• 24:02Wendy Zukerman?

  It doesn't?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  And it probably doesn't because metronomes are not engaging. They don't grab your attention the way music does.

• 24:12Wendy Zukerman?

  So you need both. You need to have the beat, because your whole brain needs to be co-opted into this exercise, or a big chunk of your brain needs to be co-opted.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:23Wendy Zukerman?

  There are some myths around music as well. The one idea you talk about is, can it make us smarter, perhaps by listening to Mozart, or something like that?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is balderdash. This is just, this was bad science. There was one very poorly conducted study done that purported to show that if you just listen to Mozart 20 minutes a day, you don't need to read books, or do math, or do anything else because that makes you smarter. No, that's not, it's another word that starts with B, and I'll just call it balderdash. A two-syllable word that rhymes with full hit.

• 25:02Wendy Zukerman?

  It feels right, though, particularly if you didn't grow up with fancy music, and I didn't. It feels like if you listen to sophisticated classical music, it'll make you smarter. But no, no, this is not the case.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  No. In fact, when we talk about any of music's effects, you can't say that classical music is better. I mean, it's not better for Parkinson's, or for depression, or for motivating an exercise workout, unless you like classical music better. It all comes down to individual taste. As my grandpa used to say, if we all liked the same thing, everybody would want to get with your grandma.

• 25:48Wendy Zukerman?

  Because what did that study get wrong?

• 25:52Speaker 00

  In this particular case, not to get too far down in the weeds, but it wasn't a well-controlled experiment. For one thing, the smarter came from a paper folding task, sort of like a simple origami task, which isn't really a measure of how smart you are. But in some studies, it was shown to correlate with general intelligence. If you're better at folding paper, you're smarter. Even that assumption is not valid. And then moreover, they had people either listen to Mozart or do nothing at all before the paper folding task. So it's not that Mozart made you smarter. Sitting in a dimly lit room doing nothing made you stupider temporarily.

• 26:37Wendy Zukerman?

  Right, or tired, or completely unmotivated to fold some paper. On this idea that music can make you smarter, the idea that if you play music to fetuses, it can make you smarter, there is a bit of a market for this, of speakers, for pregnant folks to play various kinds of music for their fetuses. And I did want to tell you about this study that we found because it makes me smile at the efforts that scientists go to work out these sorts of things. But they got more than 100 pregnant folks and picked out this song with a flute, and either put headphones on their belly, or intravaginally played the music. Yes, exactly.

• 27:19Wendy Zukerman?

  While they were in an ultrasound, and they were looking to see these very particular movements in the fetus, did the fetus move its mouth in this very particular way, or its tongue in this very particular way? And they found that when the music was being played in the vagina, the fetus did move more. When it was being played just on the belly, did not move more.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Well, so what we do know is that by the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system of the developing fetus is fully functional. And through the amniotic fluid, the developing ears of the infant can hear music. The amniotic fluid filters it out, and it would be like if you were listening to music in the bathtub. You hear mostly the low notes and the beat and the rhythm. Alexandra Lamont, a colleague of mine, did a study that I just love, where she played music to women who were pregnant around the 20 to 24 weeks, and then came back a year later and played to the one-year-old child now, well, a year and three months later, whatever, played to the one-year-old child either those same songs the child had

• 28:29Speaker 00

  heard in the womb, or songs by the same artist on the same album that the child hadn't heard. And the infant showed a preference for the ones it had heard in the womb. It recognized them, as it were.

• 28:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Interesting. All right, time for our lightning round of oddball questions.

• 28:53Wendy Zukerman?

  Okay, so what is the most dangerous thing that you have done for either research or a book that you've written?

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know that I've done anything dangerous for research or a book, but I do recall a dangerous experience. I was performing in 1984 in San Francisco on a very big stage with a band. And apparently, the electricians had not grounded things properly. And so I went and got up on the microphone. And as soon as my lip touched the microphone, I got an electric shock that knocked me back a foot. And I almost fell on the back of my head and got a concussion. And that was pretty dangerous because I could have been electrocuted.

• 29:38Wendy Zukerman?

  Oh, wow. And then have you put your mouth to a microphone ever again?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Now I'm at a place in my career where I can actually ask the sound guy, would you put your finger on the microphone for me?

• 29:51Wendy Zukerman?

  It's nice to hit that place in your life where you don't need...

• 29:54Speaker 00

  It's sort of like the taster for the king eating the food.

• 29:58Wendy Zukerman?

  Exactly, exactly. What was your favorite title to a paper you've read?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  My favorite title is to a book, and it was by my colleague Carl Zimmer, and it's called "She Has Her Mother's Laugh."

• 30:11Wendy Zukerman?

  I love that book, yes.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  It's a book about genetics. And just what a wonderful title.

• 30:18Wendy Zukerman?

  Funnest object sitting in your house?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  I have a bird wheel. A friend of mine, who's a wonderful producer, he's produced The Pet Shop Boys and Pentatonix, and he produced my first record. He's a wonderful arranger and singer. His name's Christopher Harrison. As a gift to me, he got his dad to give me this thing that his dad, given Harrison, makes, which is he takes the wheel from an old bicycle with all the spokes, but the inner tube off, and he mounts it on a spindle, on a pole, and then attaches to the spokes, actually to the outside of the

• 31:01Speaker 00

  wheel, little wooden baskets that hold bird seed. And so there's about eight of these baskets going around the wheel, and the wheel spins. So I fill it with bird food, and the birds land on it, and they have sort of this Ferris wheel ride as they eat. And I could look at that for hours.

• 31:22Wendy Zukerman?

  And the birds, are they into it? Is it fun for them?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Oh, they love it. They just love it. And I know this because I did the experiment. I have a conventional bird feeder just two feet away. And if there's food in the wheel, they prefer the wheel. But see, because I have aphantasia, I can't describe what it looks like to you very well.

• 31:43Wendy Zukerman?

  Thank you so much, Dan. This was so, so wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Thank you, Wendy.

• 31:51Wendy Zukerman?

  That was emeritus professor Daniel Leaverton. His book is called, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, or if you are in Australia or the UK, it's just called Music as Medicine. I'm Wendy Zukerman. Back to you next time.