magic happens.” With these words, everything clicked. My music training was almost guaranteed to induce a stress response—enough to dampen my immune system, along with my pleasure pathway. I loved music, loved the sound of the cello. But I almost never played with a sense of creative freedom or fun. Through all those years of persevering, I had

None of this rigidity and tradition of fault-finding comes from the music itself. Rather, it’s the harsh teaching methods and soulless motivations behind classical training that often trip people up.

industry got him slapped with a drug charge. Reluctant to face the

Dementia is an umbrella term for Alzheimer’s and a cluster of other diseases that alter memory, mood, cognition, and behavior.

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

My classical training had left me anxious and depressed.

our brains process words differently when they are spoken versus sung.

Growing fears about music coincided with booming piano sales and a mushrooming middle class. In 1824, a wellness book called The Family Oracle of Health underlined “the bad effects of music on the nerves” and claimed a single performance of a Rossini opera had caused “more than forty cases of brain fever, or violent convulsions.” Music needed a

When music builds to a peak moment during, say, a drawn-out drumroll, we get a surge of dopamine. Then, if the climax exceeds our expectations—with, perhaps, a spectacular crash of cymbals—dopamine spikes again. Dopamine isn’t the only chemical involved in musical pleasure, though. The brain makes its own versions of heroin, morphine, and cocaine.