“Music,” the great composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on the people of the world, because they all understand and love it… And when they find themselves enjoying and loving the same music, they find themselves falling in love.” But there is something beyond human perception in this basic reality – something woven into the structure and senses of our bodies; as the great neurologist Oliver Sacks noted, “music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
Psychologist Dacher Keltner he explores what that intractable element is and how it cuts through it in the most fascinating part of his book Miracle: The New Science of Everyday Miracles and How It Can Change Your Life (public library) – a body of wonders found in his study of twenty-six cultures around the world, where music, above all other forms of beauty and spirituality, emerges as our universal portal to the world to transcend.
After watching virtuoso concert singer Yumi Kendall physically respond to the music she plays and create a collective magic for those who hear it, Keltner writes:
When Yumi moves her bow to the strings of a cello, or when Beyoncé's vocal cords vibrate as the wind moves through them, or when Gambian superstar Sona Jobarteh plucks the strings of her kora, that friction moves air particles, producing sound waves – vibrations – that go out into the atmosphere. Those sound waves hit your eardrums, whose rhythmic vibrations vibrate hairs on the cochlear membrane just beyond the eardrum, triggering neurochemical signals that start in the auditory cortex on the side of your brain.
Sound waves are converted into a pattern of neurochemical activation from the auditory cortex to the anterior insular cortex, which directly influences and receives input from your heart, lungs, vagus nerve, genitals, and gut. It is during this time of making musical interpretations in the brain that we actually listen to music with our bodies, and where the feeling of music begins.
This emotional representation of music, now synchronized with the vital rhythm of the body, travels to an area of the brain known as the hippocampus, which adds layers of memories to the ever-expanding meaning of sounds. Music easily transports us from the present to the past, or from the real to the possible, a spatiotemporal journey that can be amazing.
And finally, this symphony of neurochemical signals makes its way to our prefrontal cortex, where, through language, we give this web of sound and personal and cultural meaning. Music allows us to understand the great themes of social life, who we are, the background of our communities, and how our worlds must change.
Looking at a series of studies that examine the neurophysiology of fear through the lens of music – how different types of music affect our heart rate and hormones, how different people's brains synchronize when listening to the same music – he adds:
When we listen to music that moves us, the brain's dopaminergic circuitry is activated, which opens the mind to questioning and exploration. In this physical state of fear of music, we often break through and find chills, those combined signs of meeting others to face mysteries and unknowns… Music breaks the boundaries between us and others and can unite us in feelings of fear… When we listen to music and others, the main rhythm of our bodies — heartbeat, breathing, hormonal changes in sex at once, hormonal changes in sex, different, synchronized pattern. We feel that we are part of something bigger, a community, a pattern of energy, a vision of the times – or what we might call sacred.
It features the poetic philosopher Alan Lightman on music and the world, Nick Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of algorithms, and other thoughts on music and the value of what we value, and revisits the science of “soft interest” and how nature helps us think.
