Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power

"Levitin is also the author of a book called This is Your Brain on Music . He’s a researcher, a musician, and a scientist. So he’s an interesting person with a very varied perspective. A lot of this book is about how music influences the brain, and how music can be used to treat neurological issues. Yes, it talks about particular kinds of music that seem to work. It’s not all classical music; there’s also music by Beyoncé and a whole bunch of other things. One of the real messages that comes from this is that there is no one-size-fits-all. Music as medicine is highly personal. Something that works for you might not work for your wife, your brother, your sister, your child. There are certain things about every person’s brain that work in particular logical and electrical shapes. So how this work depends on the individual. He cites a lot of recent research—a lot of it from his own lab—about how this works in the brain, and what kinds of areas of the brain are stimulated or talking to each other while listening to music. Some of it is correlational, but I think there’s more than correlation here. There’s some very good science and experiments with different sets of people, looking at control groups. Music is meant to stimulate your brain. I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘Mozart makes your kids smarter.’ This is deeper than that. He goes into how these things work, and the details of the actual studies themselves, not just reporting the results."

"Daniel Levitin’s Music as Medicine: How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power — a follow-up to his 2006 hit, This is Your Brain on Music —offers an overview of the potential healing properties of music, and its apparent ability to soothe the symptoms of conditions as diverse as Alzheimers’ Disease and chronic pain. Music As Medicine was featured on our site earlier this year when it was shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Book Prize , which celebrates the best popular science books of the year. As the botanist Sandra Knapp, chair of the judges, explained: “One of the real messages that comes from this is that there is no one-size-fits-all. Music as medicine is highly personal. Something that works for you might not work for your wife, your brother, your sister, your child. There are certain things about every person’s brain that work in particular logical and electrical shapes. So how this work depends on the individual.”"