From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
He was playing it and people were dancing. They didn't need to know who the band was, they didn't know what Nile Rodgers… didn't mean anything. They were just going crazy.
Music can help us heal and achieve therapeutic outcomes by tapping into various neurochemical circuits that influence mood and behaviour. Ours was the first lab to show that listening to music releases the brain's natural pain relievers—opioids. Relaxing music can modulate prolactin, a soothing, tranquilizing hormone. Music also releases dopamine which helps us to focus and motivates us to stay on task.
Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes.
Music is also incorruptible in many ways. I can hear when music isn't authentic, or when it isn't coming from the heart and soul. Music is a pure, universal, language that can transcend boundaries at a time. Particularly now, when politicians are using semantics to erect more boundaries, music continues to be more and more relevant.
At its best, music is empathic… we can relate to it… it moves us and makes us feel connected. The best music for me captures a zeitgeist, captures something of the time and something of what we feel.
I genuinely believe that if music comes from your heart and soul, that people will hear that and will be able to connect with the truth of it. For a musician, that's really important- you have to be true to yourself and to the feelings you have when you make music.
We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one. We integrate all of these and 'construct' music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music.
Music is definitely a form of communication, and it gives me a good feeling. If I'm hungry and sit at the piano to play, I'm not hungry anymore. I'll forget everything when I make music. I think when we listen to music, it allows us to feel things.
In our low moments, music is our therapy, it helps us to cry, to breathe, or gives us the encouragement we need… it's our therapy. In our moments of happiness, music is our celebration… it's extraordinary.
We tend to remember the things in life that deliver the biggest emotional wallop. Music ties into memory in two ways. First, music itself can be tremendously impactful, so we remember it — and we also remember everything happening around us when we heard it. That makes them highly effective memory tags, because they're anchored to a very specific time and place.
Most fundamentally- we respond emotionally to music- sound is communicative, it affects us, it causes feelings and connections. Sound making and listening are communal activities, they're communicative activities… music moves us, and when we listen to it, we feel transported.
For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.