The Jordan Harbinger Show
1147: Daniel J. Levitin | The Science Behind Music as Medicine
01 May 2025
Can music replace drugs? Daniel J. Levitin shows how your favorite songs can release natural opioids, restore memory, and heal neural pathways!Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1147What We Discuss with Daniel J. Levitin:Music functions like a Swiss Army knife in the brain, not just a hammer. Different music triggers different neurochemical systems — dopamine for motivation and pleasure, endogenous opioids for pain relief — explaining why personalized music choices are crucial for realizing therapeutic effects.The brain's default mode network can be activated by music, providing a restorative mental break that replenishes depleted glucose levels — like nature's reset button for our exhausted, decision-fatigued minds.Music therapy shows clinical evidence for treating Parkinson's (by synchronizing movements), memory disorders, and pain management — sometimes reducing or eliminating the need for pharmaceutical interventions through our body's natural neurochemical responses.Musical processing uses different neural pathways than speech, which is why people with speech disorders like stuttering or neurological damage from stroke can often still sing fluently — offering alternative communication channels when primary ones fail.You can start your own music medicine cabinet today by creating mood-specific playlists for different needs — and counterintuitively, when feeling depressed, choose songs that match rather than oppose your mood. This validates your emotions and creates a feeling of being understood.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!This Episode Is Sponsored By:NordVPN: Get an exclusive deal at nordvpn.com/jordanharbingerIQBAR: Text "Jordan" to 64,000 for 20% off all IQBAR products with free shippingNorthwest Registered Agent: Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com/jordanNotion: Try it free at notion.com/jordanAirbnb: Find out how much your space is worth at airbnb.com/hostSign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Full Episode
Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's not two kinds of medicine. There's not Western medicine and alternative medicine. If something's been shown to work, we call it medicine. If it's not been shown to work, there are some people out there who will call it alternative medicine. If we knew that it worked, it would not be an alternative. It would just be plain old medicine.
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. even the occasional mafia enforcer, Fortune 500 CEO, or Hollywood filmmaker. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, and of course I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. It's a great place to begin.
These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today we're talking about music.
Hey, normally I'm not that interested in this topic, but as we will learn today, music is not just for jamming and relaxing. It can actually help your immune system. It can trigger memory, even in people with impaired memory or diseases. It can treat other diseases like PTSD and a whole lot more. Daniel Levitin has been on the show before.
He has a knack for picking super interesting science topics and then just doing a killer job communicating his research on the show. If you love music, you'll love this episode. If you love science, you'll love this episode. And if you love science and music, well, you do the math. Here we go with Daniel Levitin. I read the whole book, by the way, really enjoyed it.
I think that stuff is just so fascinating. We as humans, we kind of know music does something because we feel it, right? When I play music in the gym, I feel like my workouts are a little bit better, a little bit more fun. When I play music when I'm hiking, I'm less tired for some reason. But no one until recently maybe has really thought about why this happens.
And you really do a good deep dive in the book on this. The book starts with this concept of, I think you called it fusion, where your awareness changes when listening to music. Can you explain this for me? I've never heard of this.
Well, experiential fusion is a term coined by Richard Davidson at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who works closely with the Dalai Lama about altered states and meditative states and such. And the idea is that it's sometimes referred to as flow, although it's slightly different, a flow state. You're in the zone if you're a basketball player, or if you're a coder, you just lose track of time.
But the experiential fusion that you and I are talking about with music is that under the right circumstances, you forget that you're listening to music. You might even forget who you are. You become one with the experience. And the brain basis of this gets to a circuit called the default mode network that my colleague Vinod Menon discovered at Stanford.
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