Without music life would be a mistake

Music engages many parts of the brain, bringing joy and, sometimes, sadness.

Ever wonder why many people wake up to music, work out in the gym to music, and play music while they are doing other activities? The reason lies in the fact that music engages many parts of our brain that integrate elements of emotions and memory. No wonder, listening to music does alter our mood and reduce stress. For good reasons, music is considered as important as the fundamental pleasures with a majority ranking music among the things that bring them the most pleasure, usually above money, art, and even food. Our brians are wired to find it as enjoyable as fundamental pleasures. 

Larry Sherman, a neuroscientist and lifelong musician, and Dennis Plies, a professional musician and teacher, collaborate to show how human beings create, practice, perform, and listen to music. They explore how music – whether instrumental or vocal - alters the air molecules that enter the ear and stimulate specialized nerve cells to generate powerful effects on our emotions. While neurons, the brain cells, do play a role a role in responding to music, it is unclear how we immediately recognize music after hearing just a few notes but distinguish the crescendo of flushing water as a sign of functional plumbing only. Charles Darwin suggested that the human brain evolved to engage in music, equipped to a draw a distinction between music and noise. 

Every Brain Needs Music is a musical journey into the world of music – from learning to play music to practicing and performing it, and from reacting to music to benefitting from musical experiences. Like human language(s), music has a language that can enhance the meaning of our words and our ability to express ourselves in subtle ways. In eight musical curated chapters the book connects cognitive, sensory and motor functions of the brain’s capacity for creativity. Of common interest are the final two chapters on how the brain listens to music and how the brain comes to like or dislike different types of music because there is a curiosity to learn why some compositions light us up while some other pull us down.  

To add more substance to the narrative, the authors conducted survey of over one hundred composers, professional, and amateur musicians, teachers, students, and music lovers to gauze their response on how music brings them pleasure. While acknowledging that music is the most fundamental of the higher-order pleasures, the majority echoed Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous words: ‘Without music, life would a mistake.’ Music is ingrained in human system much before language came into being. Music is known to create ‘aha’ moment for many – an Alzheimer patient after listening to his favorite number could recall his family members; a young woman with Parkinson could lift her foot after humming a rhythm; and a advanced stage cancer patient could forget the pain after listening to his favorite song. Music is a kind of key that opens countless doorways in the mind.           

Witty and informative, Every Brain Needs Music evokes the love of music in more ways than one. Learning to play an instrument or sing can drive the generation of new cells, new synapses, and new myelin in our brains. As music involves a high degree of sensory, motor, and cognitive integration, it generates a powerful effect on our emotions and memories. No other activity engages multiple networks within our brains. It is this that makes music exclusive to human existence. The authors call for the need to mainstream music education for the role it may play to enrich our aesthetic and cognitive lives.  

While researching and writing this book, Sherman and Plies were careful not to be swayed by poetic expressions like ‘music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.’  Instead, they took a deep dive into what music is to the human brain. For them it was important to capture the series of changes that the vibrating molecules (as music) generate in brain while travelling through the air at around 343 meters per second or 767 miles per hour. Every Brain Needs Music is for all those music aficionados who wish to learn how different areas in the brain change by creating, practicing, performing, and listening to music. Brain is what makes music music.

Every Brain Needs Music 
by Larry Sherman and Dennis Plies
Columbia University Press, New York 
Extent: 270, Price: US$32.

First published in The Hindu on July 14, 2023.

Mind over matter that seriously matters

To achieve climate change goals, a neuro- scientist urges the world to work on the mind.

The greatest paradox of our time is that while climate change has widely been recognized as an urgent problem, it does not press the emergency button for individual and collective action to counter it. Knowing well the root cause and the possible solutions to the problem, why it gets pushed on to others to fix it? Why are we hardwired not to change our behavior and consumer tendencies? Simply put, it is the neuroscience of decision making that works to prioritize short-term survival over long-term consequences. No wonder, the risk of anticipated 2°C rise in temperature before the close of the century remains disconcerting.

In Minding the Climate, Ann-Christine Duhaime, a professor of neurosurgery at the Harvard Medical School, explores why changing behavior in response to the climate crises remains challenging. Having lived life for eons on resource scarcity, human mind responds to better rewards for changing the old behavior. If a behavior isn't perceived as immediately rewarding, we probably won't change it - never mind that we know we should. In a market economy, just giving people information without incentives and rewards doesn’t work to change consumptive behavior. Writing lullabies won’t cure opioid addiction by itself.  

Environmental issues have been known to present challenges for behavior change, in part because the phenomenon and the fix are many steps removed from our immediate sensory perception. While the perception may have started changing due to increasing frequency of climatic events in recent times, we are physiologically not equipped with carbon dioxide sensors to reflect strong personal threatening experience to affect behavioral change. Add to this is the fact that behavior change research has focused on choices that individuals make in their domestic lives, rather than on a more collective and political sphere. Further, the invisibility of greenhouses gases adds to the visible challenge. 

Duhaime presents a systematic study of the human brain – from understanding its evolutionary origin to strategies for its pro-environmental shift. Taking a deep dive into the human decision-making apparatus, she found that the brain is heavily influenced by its evolutionary design but is also exquisitely flexible. The brain design both constrains and frees us. By linking neuroscience with evolutionary biology, consumer psychology, and environmental science, the author reflects hope that humans do in fact have the capacity to change. Minding the Climate is a groundbreaking work on how we might leverage our brains to fight climate change. 

It is a thinking man’s guide to encourage our neurological circuits to embrace new rewards, To demonstrate how indeed this could be possible, the Green Children’s Hospital has been initiated by the author and her colleagues as a prototype that makes connection between the environment and health. No reward is good enough for people to see their loved children have a good life. It works both ways as not only it helps cut down emissions from the sector that contributes 8 percent to the atmospheric carbon load but reminds people that hospital patients looking at trees recover faster than those who look at the brick wall. Such small, incremental steps that individuals take are necessary to look at rewards differently. 

Duhaime is not suggesting quick fix though. The task is to understand how our ingrained tendencies could be overridden by our brain's capacity to adapt. Minding the Climate is a pioneering work on a subject that has so far not been considered in the global discourse on climate change. It is a work in progress,and will only be considered complete when people in the 20-tons-of-carbon-emissions-a-year consider themselves a burden on the society. Our brain has got us to this point, it alone will take us into the future of possibilities. 

Minding the Climate 
by Ann-Christine Duhaime
Harvard University Press, USA 
Extent: 313, Price: Rs. 2996.

First published in The Hindu on July 2, 2023.