[Music] foreign [Music] at various points over the past 20 years i've studied two fundamental human experiences that have taught me an awful lot about emotion and that may hold the keys to a revolution in psychiatry the first is how we experience music the second is how we experience psychedelic drugs such as lsd and magic mushrooms or psilocybin which is the active component magic mushrooms you may be wondering what these two things have in common outside of woodstock after all music is not a physical substance uh it you know it's a it can be described as
a limited set of vibrations in the air that can be detected by your ear and music may seem to have more to do with aesthetics than with biology or chemistry psychedelic drugs on the other hand are physical substances they are chemical compounds that you can ingest that directly interact with brain chemistry and change your experience of the world this changes temporary but the effects of this change can alter the course of your life but let's face it psychedelics have the potential to trigger unexpected and potentially dangerous effects so what could these two very different things
possibly have in common i've found that music and psychedelics can impact our well-being in powerful and complementary ways music can have a direct impact on our emotions with measurable impacts in the brain psychedelic drugs under the right circumstances may have therapeutic effects these effects can be manifest in patterns that we can study and document with brain scans and together and leverage in a purposeful fashion music and psychedelics may have an even greater healing impact on patients what's more these effects can be manifest in healthier and happier lives and more integrated personalities i began my journey
into the mental health benefits of music long before i ever intended to make such a journey for roughly half of my life i've been a musician having played in community orchestras community theaters wedding bands a salsa merengue band i was a mummer in a string band in philadelphia for many years and and for the better part of my formative years i was the drummer in a weezer nirvana cover band that morphed into a hardcore punk band that's right drummer and a punk band but it wasn't until i really began my career in psychology and neuroscience
that i began to also appreciate how widely and how deeply we as a species both implicitly and explicitly use music as a tool to try to regulate our emotions and to heal and for some of us music keeps us going for others music isn't quite enough for me this led to some fascinating questions i began to use music as a tool to study emotion and memory in the brain my first scientific study was focused on music evoked nostalgia nostalgia is a rich and bittersweet emotion that is intimately tied up with our autobiographical memories we can
often encounter nostalgia in unexpected places you may have had the experience driving down the highway turning on the radio or firing up your favorite music recommendation service and you hear a song you haven't heard in ages and you get immediately transported back in time and dumped into this immersive memory something you haven't thought about in ages that was very meaningful to you maybe wedding day or senior prom or the birth of your first child or the death of a loved one music can serve as a powerful context cue for deeply meaningful and intensely vivid nostalgic
memories such as these nostalgia in a sense is deeply woven into our sense of self who are we at our most authentic selves by connecting us with our emotional histories nostalgia can help us to stave off sadness loneliness existential threat and even the imminence of death in the approaching horizon of our lives as we age to try to get a better understanding of how music may tap into nostalgia and and what that may be doing in the brain i began to work with computational models of music cognition i applied these models to interrogate brain activity
that was recorded while people were listening to nostalgia evoking and non-nostalgic evoking music and importantly at least to a brain geek like me i found that nostalgia was able to recruit a wide network of brain regions involved in multiple levels of different cognitive processes whereas non-nostalgic music could recruit brain regions such as heschl's gyrus involved in basic auditory processing or broca's area which is involved in processing grammar and syntax not only in language but also in music nostalgia was able to recruit these brain regions and more brain regions such as the substantia involved in reward
processing or the anterior insulin involved in the visceral experience of emotion or brain regions in the inferior frontal gyrus that are involved in autobiographical memories nostalgia was also able to recruit a wide network of brain regions and prefrontal frontal cingulate insular parietal occipital and subcortical brain regions to span nearly all of our cognitive faculties this may explain why nostalgia can have such an outsized impact on us but as powerful as it is in the moment the sav of music evoked nostalgia eventually fades nostalgia may be more of band-aid less of an antibiotic and typically far
from a surgical intervention for our emotional health music can draw nostalgia and music and nostalgia can can move our feelings but how do we make these feelings stick after studying the nostalgic brain i joined a team at johns hopkins university that was studying the effects of psychedelic drugs and i quickly began to learn how deeply a piece of music could impact a person during a psychedelic experience i was previously vexed by the difficulty in predicting precisely what musical stimulus would evoke precisely what response was in a given individual a song that evokes nostalgia in one
person could just as easily evoke disinterest or discuss in another person i began to learn how deeply most music seemed to impact most people during psychedelic experiences since at least the late 50s the value of using music to help people to navigate psychedelic experiences was clear we continue this tradition in our modern research asking volunteers to listen to music during the course of a psychedelic therapy session and despite most people being mostly naive to the music that we play before they get into the sessions after these sessions our volunteers practically beg us for the playlists
and some of them report returning to the songs that were most impactful to them during their psychedelic experience weeks months and even many years after the experience somehow these songs can turn into touchstones that can rekindle the most powerful and impactful and insightful experiences that people encountered during their psychedelic sessions of course i had to know what was going on here i began to deploy my batteries of questionnaires and my carefully crafted experiments on my big fancy mri machines to try to determine just what could be happening during these experiences that could explain the the
depth and impact uh that people were encountering at a basic psychological level my colleagues and i determined that for instance lsd can increase positive emotions that are uniquely encountered during music listening this may have relevance just by itself uh for healthy individuals as well as people suffering from mood and substance use disorders but what was happening in the brain earlier we learned that the entire brain listens to nostalgic music when applying computational models of music cognition to interrogate brain activity that was recorded during music listening under the effects of lsd we found that the entire
brain was listening to music and psychedelics were turning up the game where nostalgia could recruit brain regions involved in language memory and emotions psychedelics were recruiting these brain regions at least twice as strongly brain regions such as uh the thalamus that's involved in basic sensory processing or the medial prefrontal cortex in the posterior cingulate cortex which can be involved in memory and emotion and mental imagery these brain regions were recruited up to four times as strongly during the effects of lsd than without lsd psychedelics turn the knob up to 11. sensory information is more richly
experienced in the brain emotions memories and mental imagery are supercharged and it may be the wholesale and strong recruitment of a wide range of brain regions during these experiences uh that is the necessary key to unlocking change that sets these drugs and these experiences apart from others and the effects can be long lasting in a study of healthy individuals i demonstrated that a single high dose of psilocybin could reduce negative affect in volunteers for at least a week after psilocybin and increase positive affect for at least a month after a single high dose psilocybin the
reduction in negative affects that we observed after psilocybin administration was accompanied by a reduction one week after psilocybin in the response of a primitive brain region called the amygdala to emotional stimulate in a separate study in patients with major depressive disorder not only did we observe a substantial decrease in depression severity in most of our patients after two doses of psilocybin but we also observed a reduction in the amygdala response to negative effective stimuli specifically one week after psilocybin this reduction in amygdala response was associated with an enduring reduction in depression severity for at least
three months after psilocybin administration but frankly we're still counting so what does this all mean it means that music and psychedelics may be able to alter the entire brain for a period of time and that may lead to a change in neural circuitry that may be stuck in patterns of negative emotional bias this may be able to give people a period of relief from the grip and the claws of negative emotion and that may be just enough to give someone access to new perspectives on their selves and their lives and begin on the road to
healing from years of depression these drugs are early in stages of research but they're now being researched for a wide range of medical indications there's evidence growing that psychedelics may be effective in helping to treat mood disorders such as major depressive disorder treatment resistant depression and the depression and anxiety that accompany a late stage cancer diagnosis there's also evidence accumulating that psychedelics may be effective in helping to treat a wide range of substance use disorders including smoking drinking and cocaine use additional studies are either being planned or are already underway to determine whether psychedelics may
be effective in treating an even wider range of intractable disorders such as ocd ptsd opioid use disorder and anorexia at this point it might be reasonable to take a step back and say are psychedelics being sold as a panacea and if so we should be rightfully skeptical why should we expect such a small family of compounds to be so effective in treating such a wide range of disparate disorders here's a perspective we might consider some of these disorders share common thread at some level mood disorders and substance use disorders involve negative affects and a disconnection
from our most authentic selves psychedelics may break that mold psychedelics in music may represent a one-two punch that can operate on psychological and neural processes such as negative affect that cut across and contribute to multiple disorders it may be that targeting such trans diagnostic processes is what's necessary to really help people to to develop the resources that they need to begin to recover from years of depression and substance use they say you never get a second chance to make a first impression and that may be true for psychedelic drugs after all no matter how much
data come out for the potential of therapeutic effects of these drugs there's still some who are stuck on the stigma from the 60s and 70s myths of the wildly addictive properties of these drugs or myths of genetic abnormalities or birth defects after having been exposed to these drugs or fears that people are going to lose their minds and go insane or maybe even most pervasive is the sense that these effects are necessarily real and that they're a necessary outcome of having been exposed to these compounds it may be time to change our thinking on that
point no one should expect psychedelic drugs to work for everyone no one should expect psychedelic drugs to work for everything there are powerful compounds that need to be administered under carefully controlled circumstances and there are almost certainly people in this world for whom psychedelics are incredibly dangerous but antibiotics administered to the wrong person under the wrong conditions can be incredibly dangerous if not worse but administer to the right person under the right conditions antibiotics save lives administer to the right people under the right conditions psychedelic drugs may save lives it can often feel like it's
impossible to to heal our hearts and our minds and to grow but i truly believe that we all have the resources within ourselves to do just that the challenge is often identifying and connecting with those resources and it may be that psychedelics and music can help people to do just that together psychedelics and music may be able to open our minds to change and direct that change reconnect us with our most authentic selves and allow us access to the things that really allow us to make meaning in this world and reconnect with our most authentic
thank you
