By Carly Mallenbaum
Scientists are learning how music can do more than lift our mood, from easing anxiety to helping experimental drugs reach the brain.
Why it matters: Music could supplement therapy, help people manage pain and anxiety — and someday even boost treatments for brain disease.
State of play: Music has the power to stimulate the body’s reward system, similar to the way that warmth, food and social connection do — and that’s one of the most significant discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades, according to Daniel Bowling, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Stanford School of Medicine.
That finding is “really important for mental health” because it means music can help activate brain regions and feel-good chemicals when someone is anxious or depressed, he says.
What we’re hearing: Beyond the physical reaction of hearing music, the exercise of actively listening to music and songwriting could offer anxiety relief similar to cognitive behavioral therapy — at least that’s what research music therapist Sean McNally has been seeing in an ongoing study of cancer survivors at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.
In that study, cancer survivors get one-hour Zoom sessions with a music therapist like McNally. The sessions vary, but can include listening to music and discussing the emotions it evokes, then songwriting together based on how the patient is feeling.
Music therapy is “not about distraction,” but about “giving people agency over their emotion,” McNally says. “When a patient hears their own story sung back to them, there’s something that shifts.” It’s often a powerful moment of joy, and possibly tears, he says.
The latest: New music therapy apps are leveraging AI in curating scientifically informed playlists to help users feel more calm, focused or energetic.
Zoom in: App Spiritune has developed specific “sonic recipes” (that’s an internal company term) with 20 or so specific acoustic guidelines to help users feel a certain way, says Bowling, the app’s scientific co-founder and a musician.
Producers make the songs and an AI model assesses the compositions for quality and the emotions they evoke.
For example: Calming songs tend to be 60-80 bpms and have repeated patterns.
The intrigue: Although there are parameters that can help make for groovy tunes, musical taste is deeply personal — and often crystallizes in your teens and 20s. “We don’t know why,” Bowling says.
But there are factors: That’s typically the time that humans are often nostalgic for later in life, and when they were the most hormonal and spent the most time listening to music.
What’s next: Music might make medicines more effective in reaching the brain.
In a recent peer-reviewed study, mice that were injected with nanoparticle-based drugs and exposed to low-frequency sounds had more medicine reach their brains.
“The capability of these particles to cross inside the brain is extremely low because the brain is the most protected organ,” says Patricia Mora-Raimundo, a former post-doctoral research fellow at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, who led the study. So the fact that the music increased the uptake of medicine in the brain was “really surprising.”
Her hope is that exposing patients to different music patterns — like low-frequency sounds — could ultimately help treat neurodegenerative diseases.