We need “new energy sources” to power our societal ambitions. Music, and its capacity to transform, is one of those
We are always on the lookout for “new energy sources” - the power of arts, culture, self-craft and other techniques to shake our settled worldviews, and give us motivation to realise alternatives. Music should be part of a “unbroken politics” - but it might be helpful to make the case, if we look at the deep science of music’s transforming effect.
This Big Think interview (also embedded above) with Micheal Spitzer provides that brilliantly. From the site blurb:
The oldest record of notated music, the Hurrian “Hymn to Nikkal,” is more than 3,000 years old. But in a sense, our relationship with music is far more ancient than that.
As Michael Spitzer, a professor of music at the University of Liverpool, told Big Think, humans have been making and learning to recognize music from the moment our species learned to walk on two legs, creating a predictable beat.
Music affects the brain in profound ways. It eases stress by lowering cortisol. It floods the brain with pleasurable neurotransmitters like dopamine. And it serves as a conduit through which we can process emotions that otherwise might not be describable in words.
More here. And below is an excerpt from the transcript of Spitzer’s interview:
SPITZER: We also love to imitate rhythm, and that's due to the existence of mirror neurons in our brains. When the brain sees an action, you don't have to move to experience that motion in your brain because the mirror neurons are responding sympathetically. We've always had an instinctive faculty to imitate. We call it 'mimesis.' Yawns are contagious. If I see you yawning, I yawn back. But also emotions are contagious.
When I hear a sad song, my body, my mirror neurons are instinctively sympathizing, are mimicking, are mirroring. The sadness of the song isn't just acoustic, it's also encoding the behavior which we associate with sadness, which is grieving. Emotion isn't just feeling. Darwin was the first to observe that emotion had an adaptive role in the field: that animals and people, they experience emotions in relation to goals which help them survive.
So happiness is when you achieve a goal. Anger is when the goal is blocked. Sadness is when you lose a loved one. Fear is the most archetypal emotion. When you are exposed to a threat, you have an instinctive response to either freeze or to fight or to flee. Music is full of similar responses, as an extreme reaction to music, which has been called "the chills," or 'frisson,' or the sublime.
There are moments in music which are so intense and they're often triggered by breakthrough moments of loudness or extremity. You have the same parts of the brain which responds to that as responds to fear. Which is why the chills give you goosebumps or piloerection. The hairs on your skin literally stand on end. But you enjoy this fear.
Photo by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash
And this is very strange, and we have a similar experience when we go on a fairground ride or when we're watching a volcanic eruption in the safety of an observation platform. It's almost as if music is violence without the danger. Nobody dies in music: it's why we think that music is able to express emotion in a very visceral way.
So when you are listening to music, it's a kind of mental time travel. When you are absorbed in the work, you are traveling back through layer upon layer of your brain, almost biologically, which is why I call music a sort of umbilical cord back to Mother Nature.