I Heard There Was a Secret Chord

Music as Medicine

By: Daniel J. Levitin

Narrated by: Daniel J. Levitin

Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals how the deep connections between music and the human brain can be harnessed for healing.

Music is perhaps one of humanity’s oldest medicines as well as its most universal: from China to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and pre-colonial South America, cultures have developed rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, spur healing, and calm the mind. Despite this history, musical therapy has long been considered the remit of ancient practice and alternative medicine, if not outright quackery and pseudoscience. In the last decade, however, an overwhelming body of scientific evidence has emerged that persuasively argues music can offer profoundly effective treatment for a whole host of ailments, from Alzheimer’s to PTSD, depression, pain, and cognitive injury. It is, in short, one of the most potent and remarkably promising new therapies available today.

A work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and joyful celebration of the human mind, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord explores the critical role music has played in human evolution, illuminating how the story of the human brain is inseparable from the creative enterprise of music that has bound cultures together throughout history. Music insinuates itself into our earliest memories; it is intimately connected to our emotional regulation and cognition; its shared rhythms and sounds are essential to our social behaviors. As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin demonstrates in this mind-expanding follow-up to This Is Your Brain on Music—which revolutionized our understanding of the neuroscience of song—medical researchers are now finding that these same deep connections can be harnessed to create profound benefits for those both young and old.

©2024 Daniel J. Levitin (P)2024 Allen Lane

Critic reviews

“For many years I have wondered why a bunch of frequencies organized into a piece of music has the ability, even without words, to make the listener cry and become emotional. Although I know this happens to me and many people, I have often wondered how this can be. Dr. Levitin, in this latest book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, has some fascinating insights into this great phenomenon.”—Paul McCartney

“Part memoir and part medical primer, Daniel J. Levitin wields expertise in all genres of music as well experimental neuroscience. He also knows everyone, from Bobby McFerrin to Joni Mitchell, revealing that no one else in the universe could have written this book.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist

“Daniel J. Levitin is a visionary neuroscientist, an extraordinary musician, a brilliant writer—and this is his best book yet. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord is inspiring and illuminating, as deep as it is delightful. I couldn’t put it down. So full of great ideas and delicious stories, it made me want to rewind my entire life and spend more of it making music.”—Daniel Gilbert, New York Times best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness