Wired for Music: A Search for Health and Joy Through the Science of Sound

“It’s not about thinking versus feeling,” he explains, “but about two kinds of thinking.” We need both kinds.

drew this theory from Iain McGilchrist’s epic book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. McGilchrist, a Scottish psychiatrist, believes the modern brain is dangerously out of balance. Over the past two hundred years, our analytical left hemispheres have reshaped the world in ways that threaten our well-

mid-twentieth-century survey of 488 distinct societies found that 74 percent had practices involving trance or spirit possession. To this day, many believe someone can be inhabited by a spirit, whether Satan, the Holy Ghost, or the malevolent jinns of Islamic mythology.

their original tunings, the metal tongues of mbiras whisper ephemeral melodies. Unexpected overtones buzz from the bottle caps and metal beads wired to the mbira and the giant gourd used to amplify the sounds. When multiple players get together, interlocking melodies combine in a “helix-like weaving,” said Martin Scherzinger, a mathematician at New

Sylvan immersed himself in communities of ravers, Grateful Dead fans, hip-hoppers, and metalheads in scholarly research that led to his book Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music.

When people with Parkinson’s dance to music, said Meg Morris, professor of clinical rehabilitation at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, their movements tend to speed up and they show less freezing of gait. “What the music does is to trigger the movements trapped inside.” In other words, music provides an external rhythm to compensate for

are ready to sing different parts as a group. Rehab for “bad singers” has taken off in England as well. Shy warblers can join one of several “can’t sing” choirs, or take a class at London’s Morley College called “Tone Deaf? No Way.”

reframe our musical dabbling as “neuroplasticity building” instead of “mistress of none.”)

language or taking up a new sport. In general, we get the best neurological workout by pushing our limits. The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, whose most recent book is Successful Aging, spells it out: “If you’re just thinking the same thoughts and doing the same things you always did, it doesn’t force the brain to keep making new pathways available