Welcome everyone – this is my podcast conversation with Doctor Daniel J. Levitin

I met Dan when he was teaching at McGill University years ago, and writing his first book This is Your Brain on Music – at the time I was also lecturing there in a course about the legal and business impact of the streaming revolution with a common friend of ours, the late and great Sandy Pearlman (who was the producer of epic bands like The Clash and Blue Oyster Cult).

Dan is truly an anomaly in that he’s a world-class, super accomplished artist and scientist –

He’s an award-winning musician who’s written and recorded music for Santana, The Grateful Dead, Stevie Wonder, and many others.

He’s been credited with major findings in the field of neuroscience, where the “Levitin effect” is a commonly known phenomenon (people can apparently remember music in absolute pitch, not just in relative pitch).

He taught at Stanford and McGill, he’s a founding Dean at the Keck Graduate Institute. He runs his own neuroscience lab.

And one of the things we dig into in this talk are the similarities between science and the arts … they seem very different, Science is supposed to be hard and rational and logical the arts are supposed to be endlessly malleable and all about subjective taste… but really, they both have similar concerns and processes,they search for novelty, but they attack them in very different angles using very different tools, and there are a few people in the world that’s qualified to have that conversation as that, who doesn’t just write or think about these things– He puts them into practice at a very high level.
In this interview, we touch on all the interests that have marked Dan’s career from what music is all about in the human brain, to how to deal with the information overload that marks the digital era to the culture of lies that we see in the media to the latest findings on the science of successful aging, which is what his latest book is about.

For those who don’t know him, you’ll see right away. Dan is not a typical scientist, even though he pursues science at the highest levels, he’s warm down to earth. In fact, he moonlights as a standup comedian and as a musician when he’s not writing New York Times bestselling books or making major neuroscience breakthroughs.
I had an amazing time learning from Dan and I think you will as well.
Enjoy!

FRED:
Dr. Daniel Levitin, welcome and thanks for coming on today.

DR. LEVITIN:
Thank you for having me. Nice to see you again, Fred.

FRED:
Great. So I’ve been reading your work for years. For those who don’t know, you’re a widely published and award-winning author, cognitive psychologist, and musician. Your best-selling books cover a range of topics from the neuroscience of music to coping with medialized and cognitive overwhelm to the science of successful aging. You combined the most rigorous scientific standards with an open mind and a human touch. You gave one of the most popular ted talks of all time on how to stay calm under stress, which I think people really need nowadays. That’s got almost 20 million views, and you’ve been credited with major findings in neuroscience. There’s actually something called “The Levitin Effect” in the brain, science of music, where you discover that people tend to remember music in the correct absolute pitch and not just in relative pitch as what was previously believed. Dr. Levitin. Welcome.

DR. LEVITIN:
Thank you for that introduction, for choosing to focus only on the more productive parts of my life, not the many hours I spent sitting on the couch watching television.

FRED:
We can talk about that if you’d like. Is that part of the productivity that you need, sort of, that rest and recovery time?

DR. LEVITIN:
Oh, that’s good. I’m going to use that. Yeah, that’s it. Yes, exactly, Fred, that’s it. I need that time.

FRED:
Right. It’s like sort of like passive. You’re letting the ideas marinate.

DR. LEVITIN:
Yes. It’s actually very planned that I did it that way.

FRED:
Great. I want to talk to you about how you got into cognitive science. You actually started your career as a very accomplished musician. You played with Legends like Sting, Blue Oyster Cult, Neil Young. You’ve been part of making records for Santana, Stevie Wonder, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell and many others praised your songwriting. But despite all of the success in music, you decide in your 30s to go back to school to study cognitive psychology, and you went on to have this remarkable career, publishing widely, making breakthrough discoveries. I’ve worked with people in the music industry before, and I know the musician type, and it’s really really rare to see this kind of leap. You just don’t see a lot of people that went that deep into a creative career in music go even deeper in a highly technical and scientific field like cognitive psychology, where you have to be really meticulous and dig into the research, dissect serious science, grapple with complex ideas. Usually, those are two different kinds of people. How did this transition come about in your life and how does it play out today? Are those just two different parts of you, or is there a common thread underneath?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, so, you know, my experience with musicians was that, the musicians I enjoyed spending time with the most. And by spending time, I mean either in person, like you and me, just talking or just with one-way communication where they’ve made a record and I’m sitting and listening to it, and they’re not there. Spending time with them, either artistically or interpersonally. They’re very curious. They have an innate curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. And Joni and Sting, who you mentioned, are great examples of that, but they’re by no means, in my experience alone in having that engagement with the world, and they bring that to their music. And Sting contacted me because he was interested in learning more about the science and getting his brain scanned. The people I know, I’m thinking of my friend Michael Brooke, who made a number of records with Brian Eno and was the in-house producer for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records and an accomplished guitarist with solo albums. Michael is also an inventor and a scientist. He invented the infinite guitar, which The Edge and U2 play, and he reads widely in science and always has. So, you and I were talking about our mutual friend Sandy Perlman earlier. When I was working with Sandy in San Francisco in the 80s, we discovered that we were both interested in brain science and so we used to drive down to Stanford together a couple of times a week and sit in on classes, and that just seemed normal to us. So I think if you were to ask Sandy, who was my mentor, I, he would give the same answer I would give: they’re not two parts of us, they’re just us.

FRED:
So it’s that curiosity…

DR. LEVITIN:
Just like I could say, are you a podcaster or are you a lawyer or are you an entrepreneur or you have somebody’s son, you’re all of those things.

FRED:
Right. In my case, it’s really like the love of learning that sort of like, connects everything and that’s kind of the running thread in all these different aspects of what I do. And that’s what I hear from you, like the curiosity, the wanting to know how things sort of come together. It’s just that music is usually associated with something a bit more creative and emotional, and science is supposed to be this objective, dry understanding of how things work kind of technically. And I wonder how you see that distinction or that people often make between creative endeavours and scientific endeavours.

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, in some senses, I understand why people say it, but I see it as a false duality. I don’t see them as opposite ends of continuum with nothing in between, you’re one or the other. Actually, I would say it’s more like a circle, and they come together at one point on the circle. So many of the musicians I know, Fred, describe their work as experiments. I’m experimenting with some new chords. I’m experimenting with some new instrumentation. Well, we scientists do experiments, too, of course, and so many musicians I know are looking for some kind of an emotional truth. And when they hit it, they know it and other people feel it. And so in that sense, it becomes not an objective truth, like E=MC2 or in electronics, E=IR, but it becomes something that’s widely accepted. So Robert Sapolsky, a friend of mine who’s a biologist at Stanford, says science is not meant to cure us of mystery. It’s meant to reinvigorate it. And so I think, yeah, some scientists are dry, but the ones who tend to be making advances, like the musicians who make advances, are childlike with their sense of experimentation and wonder and their giddy enthusiasm for what they’re doing. And then on the technical side, although very few people want to hear a musician who’s just using technique and nothing else, there is a certain amount of precision required to be a good musician. You can’t always go for a C sharp on your saxophone and hit the C instead by mistake. You know, just like with science, you can’t get the numbers wrong.

FRED:
Right. There’s a level to which you’ve got to play the chords correctly. There’s a timing element you can’t get wrong, so, these are broad categories that people kind of think about. And when you listen to practicing musicians, they do very often kind of break it down into these technical abilities that they’ve had to develop. So that’s interesting.

FRED:
So your first two books are about the brain science of music and the power it has. And a fascinating concept that you write about is that even the building blocks of music, like pitch, only exist in the human brain. In other words, they don’t exist out there in the universe per se. They require a brain to sort of construct and make sense of them. So you write that music is a kind of a relational concept, almost like, like taste, right? It only exists when you put something in your mouth. And it’s the relationship between these sounds that creates the more advanced concepts like melody and harmony, and then all the emotions we experience when we listen to music. You write this: “Music can be thought of as a type of perceptual illusion in which our brain imposes structure and order on a sequence of sounds. Just how this structure leads us to experience emotional reactions is part of the mystery of music, knowing the powerful emotions and experiences that music can give us.” You also write about how, unlike language, which only lights up parts of our brain networks, music tends to light up almost all of our brain networks at the same time. What is it, exactly, from a neuroscience perspective, that makes music so powerful and so emotional for us?

DR. LEVITIN:
We don’t know. I mean, it’s still mysterious. We don’t really know. There are a bunch of stories that need to be tested. I guess when they go beyond stories to the point where somebody figures out how to conduct an experiment, then they’re hypotheses. But for the most part, we don’t even have those yet. It might be that music is in many respects a richer stimulus than language. Now, all those elements that we talk about with music, some of which you mentioned, pitch and rhythm, language has that. There’s the melody of language. I can say “Isn’t that exciting” or “Isn’t that exciting?” and the melody is telling you two different things about my intention. And if I’m really upset, I might hear a shake in my voice or something. And there are all these different things that music and language share. But music tends to have more repetition. And the point at which language and music approach one another is with great oratory like the Reverend King’s famous I have a dream speech, or, of course, with poetry. Part of it is that music, because of the repetition that’s built into it: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, that kind of thing, and because there are… It’s possible to have multiple musical lines going at the same time. Very difficult to have multiple speaking gestures, multiple conversations going on at the same time and be able to follow of them. So I’m kind of waving my hands and giving you some imprecise answers because that’s all we’ve got.

FRED:
No, that’s really, that’s really really interesting.

FRED:
So that idea right there, because you write about how the social function of music, how it brings groups of people together. So, so with language, right? Is it the case that language is a little bit more top-down just because, like you say, it’s really hard to listen to more than one person speak at the same time, whereas music can be the sort of symphony of different elements? And would music be maybe a language that’s a little bit more compatible with sort of group phenomena? Is that maybe part of the answer? How music sort of, tends to bring really large groups of people together, or is that kind of simplifying it too much?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, there is some neuroscientific evidence for what you just said. And that is, it comes out of my laboratory in collaboration with Vinod Menon at Stanford. And that is that when we listen to music together, our brainwaves actually synchronize with one another’s. That doesn’t happen with speech, with language. So the brainwave synchrony, partly driven by tempo, music tends to have a beat. The part that you snap your fingers to or clap your hands to is called the tactus. And that tactus, that moment in time when you’re compelled to move, is related to the meter and the tempo and the neural populations that synchronize to that. If you’re running, if you’re a runner and you want to get your times lower, meaning you want to run faster, if you listen to music that’s slightly above your gate, your brain waves will synchronize to that tempo and you’ll run a little bit faster. So part of it is that, the brainwave synchrony. Part of it also is that language, though not always, tends to refer to things. It’s very specific. “Please open the window.” “I think I’ll have the turkey sandwich.” These are things out there in the world. There’s no song I can play you that says, “I’ll have the turkey sandwich”. Unless that song is “Fred, I’ll have the

turkey sandwich now.” I’m being silly, but music has this ambiguity built into it, and that causes us to hear in it what we’re feeling and what we want to hear in it, to interpret it for ourselves. That makes it a more active process. If you tell me to shut up because I’m going on too long, that’s a very clear message. If you play me some piece of music, it’s not as specific, usually. Unless you were to play me, that music they play when the Oscar speeches go on too long and I’m supposed to infer.

FRED:
And we know that because of the context of the award shows doing that over and over.

FRED:
And here we are, you know. We’re trying to sort of make sense of what music is, and it gives us so much, and we’re trying to understand it. On the other end of the spectrum, in the theory of the meaning of music, Steven Pinker once wrote that music is just auditory cheesecake, that it’s nothing but a pleasant byproduct of evolution, not something that’s essential. He writes: “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless and music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” It’s a really odd idea to consider for many of us who intuitively believe that music gives us access to something really special in human experience. It amplifies our emotions. It’s part of our sense of identity, the music we love. It makes powerful statements about life. It was a huge part of cultural revolutions. There’s even forms of music therapy out there. I don’t know what you think about those, but at the same time, the idea comes from Steven Pinker, so it deserves to be taken seriously. And I know that you’ve responded to this argument before. First of all, is there a Steelman version of Pinker’s argument that I’m missing here? And have you updated your views on the evolutionary and human utility of music overall, or is it just we really love cheesecake?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, this is not a simple… Well, it is not a matter of whether it’s simple or unsimple. It’s a matter of it’s not an easy thing to unpack with the care it needs in a short amount of time. But the Steelman version of Steven’s argument is that it’s not derogatory to say that music isn’t a byproduct and that it wasn’t an adaptation directly. It’s not meant to disparage music. It’s a very… You were talking about scientists being dry and technical. It’s a very dry and technical argument about what might have happened 250,000 years ago that led to current Homo Sapiens and was, were there a series of adaptations that first gave us language and then music built on that, or was it vice versa? He’s saying that just because you like something doesn’t mean that it was an adaptation. And he gives cheesecake as the example. We like cheesecake, but it’s actually harmful, at least to diabetes and obesity and, you know, sugar, insulin signaling problems. But you can have a bite now and then. I’ve actually seen Pinker eat cheesecake and listen to music at the same time. But if he were taking heroin also, he’d have the trifecta things that in his mind, we didn’t evolve for.

FRED:
That would be a heck of a visual.

DR. LEVITIN:
They’re built upon… according to Pinker, they’re built upon systems that evolve for something else. And there are lots of cases of this. We look at birds and we think, “Oh, well, their wings evolved. Their wings and feathers evolved for flight.” And we now know that they didn’t. They evolved to keep them warm, and it later became the case that they used them to fly, since it was already there. Pinker and I have reached some sort of truce in this. We went for a hike a couple of summers ago in the redwoods in Northern California and kind of hashed it out because this had been bothering him for over a decade and it had been bothering me. I’ll tell you a little story. You may or may not use it. But, before… I know Steven. I’d met him many times. He had been a student at McGill. I was a professor at McGill. He had been a student of Al Brightman, who was my close collaborator. He gave a commencement address at his junior College, Dawson College. Well, Cegep in Montreal. I was in the audience and went to the reception, met many times, had dinner many times. Each time I met him, well, each time I saw him, he’d say: “Nice to meet you.” And I’d say: “Well, we’ve met five or six times before.” “Oh, yeah. Well…” Seemed uninterested. And then before my book came out, as an homage to him, as a tribute to him, I named one of the chapters The Music Instinct, because he has a famous book called The Language Instinct. And I wrote to him and I said: “I want to be sure that I’ve represented your views fairly here. And you don’t have to read the whole book. I’m sending you the whole book. But just look at these few pages.” And he never got back to me. And I wrote

and I called and never got back to me. So finally I asked Al Brightman, his former research supervisor, to call him. And he called Al back, and he said: “I’m sorry, I’m not interested in this topic.” And then I went on a radio show, NPR on Point, to discuss this. And usually it’s in point-counterpoint format. So they asked Steven to come on. “I’m not interested in this”, he said. So there was never any public opportunity to engage with him after the book came out, but more importantly, never any private opportunity to see what his thoughts were, he just didn’t engage. I think what we’ve come to agree on is that we don’t really know if music was an adaptation or not. And whatever happened, music and brains co-evolved. The emergence of music caused brains to evolve differently and that evolution led to different music and so on.

FRED:
Okay. Well, yeah, I can understand how you guys could come to an agreement on that point. And I feel it in the book how very carefully you take that argument. It’s not in the style of writers who sort of, the opposite, like strawman an opinion of something that they happen to disagree with. You do the opposite. You really go very much in-depth. You try to give it proper, its proper respect. I believe you refer to it as a spandrel in evolutionary theory as something that just co-evolved with something else that was useful. But this thing in and of itself is not necessarily part of the evolutionary process. And the part that kind of really, I’m just going to say, maybe again, I’m such a cheesecake lover, that my opinion is super biased and I’m not a cognitive psychologist by any stretch of the imagination. But my sort of intuitive reaction to a statement like this is, if we can agree that music makes our lives better and you can sort of measure that with certain objective metrics. If it makes your health better, if it makes your mood better, if it makes your social interactions a little bit easier, if we could agree to that, can we really also simultaneously argue that our life would be unchanged if we lost it? That’s sort of where, and I’m not asking you to, but I know with your intellectual integrity you will, you would be comfortable taking a Pinker side in this argument. But that’s sort of the way I sort of approach it- is if we could agree that we derive these benefits, some of which are measurable, can we really say that music would leave our lives unchanged if it disappeared?

DR. LEVITIN:
Let’s unpack this. You’re very carefully, studiously not saying that if it, if we could lose it and our lives wouldn’t change, that means it must not be an evolutionary product. It could only be an evolutionary product if we lose it and our lives are the worst. You’re not saying that because there are many examples of things that if we lost them, our lives would be worse, but we clearly haven’t evolved for them, like the internet. Brains aren’t evolved for the internet, so… But if we lost it, you and I wouldn’t be talking right now and so forth. I wouldn’t be able to Google how many films has Kevin Bacon been in, that kind of thing. But an interesting question is, yes, would our lives be worse if we lost music? I think so. I think most people think so. But the other side of it is that not everybody likes music to begin with. Pinker doesn’t particularly like music. And as David Huron says, there’s probably five or ten percent of the population who don’t understand what the rest of us are spending all our money on. But this falls out of evolutionary theory. Dissent with modification means that there are going to be these random mutations every now and then that are just odd. There’s people who don’t like chocolate. There’s people who don’t particularly want to have sex. There’s people who like different things and you can’t really explain it. Yeah sure, there’s some percentage of the population who don’t like music, but as my grandpa used to say: “If everybody liked the same thing, they’d all want to get with your grandma.”

FRED:
Right? That’s an interesting way of putting it.

FRED:
So okay. I mean, I love music. I’m going to keep listening to it. I get tons of benefits from it. It’s just, when I… And I think you also argue for, that music can also denote sexual fitness and that it can sort of promote group bonding. That’s, I believe that’s how you responded to the argument in This Is Your Brain On Music, correct?

DR. LEVITIN:
That’s Jeffrey Miller’s argument. I pulled together half a dozen or so arguments from others and just said, these are the arguments against Pinker’s view. The whole thing came about in a really interesting way. I tell the story in the book, but we were all people in the field of music cognition and music neuroscience. We were all at a conference in 1997 at MIT. Conferences moved from one university to another, and Pinker was asked to give the keynote. And he started out by saying: “I don’t know what any of you do. I’ve never read any of your work, but I’m going to spend the next 40 minutes telling you why I think you’re wasting your time.”

FRED:
Wow.

DR. LEVITIN:
So I remember sitting between David Huron and Ian Cross, who are two very eminent people in the field. And, you know, the conversation there was “We’ve got to get to work and show, dig up evidence in an unbiased way so we can weigh it and figure out if he’s right or not.” It’s not like we had an axe to grind and we wanted to prove him wrong. It was more like, “Well, okay, he’s thrown down a testable hypothesis to some degree.” I know earlier I said, we don’t really know and it’s not testable. We just have stories. But that was about why music activates the brain so widely in terms of it, whether it’s an evolutionary adaptation or not. We’ve collected some evidence, and anthropological, archaeological neuroscientific… But ultimately, what I try to do in this book, This Is Your Brain On Music, and in all my books is not to cajole the reader into believing something, but to lay out the evidence so they can make up their own mind. I don’t see it that… As a professor, I don’t see it’s my job to tell anybody what to think. I can teach a student how to think and how to evaluate the evidence. Ultimately, isn’t democracy the idea that once we have access to the same set of facts and we know that they’re unbiased and not manipulated to the extent possible, we know that, then it’s for everybody to make up their own mind. And again, we don’t all like the same thing.

FRED:
Yeah and that’s something I really love about your books is that, first of all, the respect for evidence. So sometimes it brings you down a certain path, and even if you can’t tie it up with a bow tie and make it sort of this super neat, coherent story, you still sort of leave it out there and you make it possible for people to draw different conclusions and to draw multiple conclusions from the evidence. And that’s what I really enjoy. I could sort of just settle down and just kind of take in all these really interesting raw materials and kind of slowly, slowly piece it together. Obviously, these are very complex problems. So I mean, music is just, I just love your first two books about music. Then you go on to write two books on sort of like information-related problems, The Organized Mind On How To Deal With Cognitive Overwhelm, and A Field Guide To Lies, which won many prizes on how easily truth can be twisted and falsified in today’s media culture. Technology is changing everything super-fast today, right? And we sometimes have a hard time catching up to it. You just mentioned the sort of, the evolutionary mismatch there is between what our genes have evolved us for. Focusing on a few things, being really connected to our immediate environment and the pressures of our super-fast modern, highly technological environment. And one of those pressures is just the volume of information we’re bombarded with daily seems to be
just exponentially growing, and not just on the internet. You give the example of how grocery stores went from 9,000 products to 40,000 products and you can get pretty much everything you need in 100 products and how the brain consumes energy to make all of these little decisions, even when they’re small and trivial and then it can sort of leave us distracted and depleted and distorted when we’ve got to make bigger decisions. It seems like we’re stuck in this reality whether we like it or not. With VR and the Metaverse and all that stuff on the uptick, we’re only going to be more immersed in technology and more bombarded with information as we go, not less. What do you think of this reality, for overall? Like, is it good for us? Is it bad for us? And what can we do practically to better cope with it and make better decisions?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, I’m probably not in a position to say what’s going to happen. I mean, I’m an old white guy and we’re talking now. My students are millennials. They are digital natives. They grew up in a very different world. And when the telephone and the automobile first came out, there were people that didn’t like them. And as I wrote in the book Seneca, the ancient Greek was petrified that once people started writing things down, the art of conversation would be lost, which was echoed in my own childhood. I was born in the 50s, and most people I knew didn’t have a television set well until the late 60s. But there was all this talk. Well, television is going to rot your mind. And people will no longer talk. And they won’t play musical instruments anymore because they’ll just sit like zombies in front of the TV. So change is inevitable. So to pronounce that it’s good or bad, I think, is not something I’m qualified to say. But I can tell you the effects that I’ve observed because I get a new crop of 18-year-olds every year. And students, and in general, not, this is not to a person, these are just statistical trends. People born in the last 20 years, last 25 years have shorter attention spans, in general, are uninterested in or unable to sit and read a book for half an hour. They’re accustomed to constant distractions. Now, not speaking as a neuroscientist, but just as an art lover. I think that’s a shame, because I don’t think that the Police album Ghost in the Machine, just to get back to Sting or for that matter, Beethoven’s 6th Symphony could have been written if those writers had cellphones and were checking their Twitter feed every two minutes. We need sustained concentration to do many of the things we want to do that are worthwhile. On the other hand, digital natives say that they’re able to synthesize information from a wider variety of sources because they’re constantly grabbing. So far, though, the brain doesn’t really like that. As you alluded to earlier, all this information processing and decision-making is tiring. It uses up glucose in the brain, which is in limited supply. And, what I recommend to anybody who will listen is that you do try and turn off your communication devices now and then. I have a no-email block every morning when I’m writing, turn off the email, turn off the phone. Now, right now, my father just got out of the hospital and so I leave the phone on. But the particular brand of phone I have, which I’m not necessarily endorsing, but it has a do not disturb function that’s set up so only my mom and dad can get through right now. Normally, I don’t take calls between six in the morning and ten because I’m writing then. And then later on in the day, I’ll just turn it off if I’m having… Right now, I’m talking to you, Fred. I’m not checking my email and my phone and texts and WhatsApp and Twitter, and I made a posting on Facebook. Did somebody else like it in the last five minutes? I don’t think it’s polite to do that, and I also don’t think it’s brain healthy to do it.

FRED:
I think I’m getting a sense that you are open-minded to a fault. In other words like, even if you sense that a certain conclusion might be warranted, that you will not completely take it because you try to stay sort of humble at the level of your hypotheses. And I love that because it’s true. Maybe digital natives do, are going to do things just differently, right? Maybe this is just older folks kind of reacting to change. But at the same time, this is like, I’m going to bring to you an argument that I felt very strongly when I was reading your books. I feel like this is an argument that, I may be overreading it, I may be over-interpreting your perspective, but it seems like there are certain decisions that simply require a certain amount of bandwidth, like biologically in the brain. We have to be able to sort of sink a little bit deeper into concentration. We have to be able to dedicate sort of mental resources to make certain decisions. And this clutter that we’re getting up here, right, social media and all the notifications and all of this bombardment and all of these different institutions sort of arguing with one another, and we don’t know what’s true, what’s not true. It seems to me that that would sort of sap away a lot of the brain resources that we would need to make certain important decisions. Am I overshooting the state of brain science as you’ve explained it, or am I doing a decent job of bringing an argument that I think follows from a lot of your analysis?

DR. LEVITIN:
I think you nailed it. You said, I believe what you said is the current state of knowledge. I’ll circle back to something you said at the beginning of that question about open-mindedness. It is, of course, a cornerstone of science that we don’t prove anything. There is no finding that is 100% undoable. We… The whole point of science is that we have to be open-minded, that some new observation may come along. It will completely change our understanding of things, that’s been the history of science, particularly in the last hundred years of physics. And it will be the future of science, if science progresses. It’s not inconceivable. 500 years from now, we’ll look back on us, people 500 years from now will look back on us and say: “How could they believe those crazy things about physics and chemistry and biology? That’s nuts!” I mean, it’s always a matter of how sure we are. We have very, very high confidence, but never 100%. And I would say musicians also have that open-mindedness, or more accurately, the really good ones. If you watched The Beatles Get Back series, they’re playing around all the time with the approach to the songs. They’re speeding them up. They’re slowing them down. They’ll switch instruments. Lennon will be on the drums. Paul will give up the bass and put Lennon on the bass. They’re just open-minded and open to the possibility that the first thing that sounded good to them might not be the best thing. And I had the great fortune to tour with Victor Wooten across about 20 or 25 gigs. Victor is the five-time Grammy-winning bass player, solo artist, and also perhaps best known as the bass player for Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, and we never played the song, a song the same way twice. And it was, Victor was always encouraging us in a Miles Davis-like way, to experiment and just be free and just not assume that what we did before is the best way. Or maybe it is, but it was only the best way for the Minneapolis crowd. And what’s best for the St. Louis crowd is something different.

FRED:
I think it’s the first time I hear this analogy between the open-mindedness of the scientists, let’s say, at the hypothesis level, right? In order to generate new hypotheses and be open to new evidence and not sort of get locked into confirmation bias and the sort of aesthetic openness of the artist was always trying to find maybe a better way or a new way to express a song. So I guess that would be another connection point between the artist and the scientist that I was referring to at the beginning. So that’s really interesting, that sort of analogy between the two forms of open-mindedness. And who better to bring it forward than you? You’ve got so much experience in both modalities, both ways of thinking. Going back to this information overload thing, I often wonder whether the price we paid for this great thing that we celebrated in the 90s and 2000s, the democratization of information, right. Anybody can produce information. Anybody can spread information with anybody. And it’s led to a lot more information. It’s simply just tons more bad information that we have to sift through and we have to work just to sort of get to the quality information, let alone truth. And if it’s harder to construct truth because there’s just so much more information out there and you don’t know if the information is biased. You don’t know if it’s true, if it’s not true. The source is kind of just spinning it if people are just making an argument. If it’s 50% true, if it’s 30% true. If it just looks impressive because it’s got a brand attached to it or graph attached to it. At various places in your books, you write that neurochemically, and you cite some studies on this in successful aging as well, dealing with a lot of uncertainty on a regular basis can increase stress. So you call it allostatic load and sort of increases in cortisol and how this can have negative effects on your health, cardiovascular health, immune function, so on and so forth. Do you think, and again, maybe I’m trying to connect thoughts here, but I’m trying to sort of get to a picture where I’m kind of drawing conclusions from a lot of your research with a lot of the stuff that I’m living today, that a lot of people are living today in terms of the information society that we live in, do you feel that this information overload, even before social media, COVID and the sort of the marriage between the two that we’re living today, but especially since then, can contribute to this kind of low grade, long term chronic stress that so many people suffer from today and that can be so detrimental to our health?

DR. LEVITIN:
I very much do believe that. The information overload is a major stressor, and stress leads to all kinds of bad health outcomes. It’s not just in your head, I mean, not just something you made up. The other thing you said about the democratization of information. I do have a strong opinion about that. When Jimmy Wales and Lawrence Sanger founded Wikipedia on the idea that they would crowdsource knowledge, it seemed like an interesting idea. There had been some research showing that if you put a jar of jelly beans at a county fair and you ask people how many are in there, nobody comes up with the right answer. How could you? I mean, you can’t count them, you guess. Rarely do people come up with the precise right answer, but the precise right answer tends to be about the average of what people guess. So there’s a series of weird experiments on crowdsourcing, things like that. I don’t actually know what the explanation is for that.

FRED:
That’s crazy.

DR. LEVITIN:
I’ve never looked into it, but I’m sure there are explanations. The idea that you could crowdsource information backfired horrifically. And part of it was that by design, Wikipedia doesn’t accord any more respect to an acknowledged expert as to a non-expert. Anybody can edit Wikipedia. And in general, the idea was, “Well, okay, let anybody at all edit it. And then there are enough people who know the correct answer out there. It will be self-correcting”, sort of like newspapers that publish an article and then somebody calls in and complaints and they say: “Well, that wasn’t right.” And then the newspaper prints a retraction and then they make a typo in the retraction and somebody else calls it out. The idea is at the end it works out. But that’s not true. I have been a Wikipedia editor for things that I know about and had contributed to a number of entries, created entries, and contributed entries on things having to do with brain science or albums that I worked on. And every once in a while, an edit I had made would get reverted or removed. And then you have to go to the Editor’s discussion page where you say, “Well, why did you do that?” And they say: “Well, I don’t believe your source.” And so you say: “Well, this is in the Journal Nature Neuroscience, and it was peer-reviewed. And here’s a couple of more sources that back that up.” And then the other person says: “Well, I just don’t think it’s true. And those sources don’t mean anything to me.” And then I can say: “Well, peer review matters, and not everything that gets published in the peer review is correct, but it’s better than anything else we’ve got.” In the end. It turns out I was arguing over a period of months with a twelve-year-old who just happened to have more time on his hands than I had.

FRED:
Wow.

DR. LEVITIN:
And so I couldn’t keep up. And I’ve seen this happen in all kinds of articles not involving me, where the expert just throws in the towel or a bunch of experts throw in the towel because some, it doesn’t have to be a twelve-year-old, it could be a conspiracy theorist. They’re just going to win if they’ve got more time on their hands. That is not democracy. The democratization of facts isn’t the same as having a democracy.

FRED:
Right.

DR. LEVITIN:
The notion that everybody has equal access to facts, that’s the democratization of it. The fact that everybody has equal access to being able to change those facts or make arguments that are not sound, but through the sheer force of will, get those arguments pushed out to lots of people, that’s going to undermine democracy in the long run. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said something like: “You are entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

FRED:
Right. But that’s really interesting because there’s a real falsification of our relationship to truth. And if you look at the idea of science that truth gets arrived to after this really rigorous process of experimentation, of acquisition of previous generations of knowledge, sort of it’s very incremental building and testing and constant challenging of information on one hand, and then on the other, you’ve got this notion that everybody’s got an opinion and that’s it. Your opinion and the twelve-year-old’s opinion on a matter of brain science, right, well, it’s just your opinion. Right. And I think you’ve written about this as well. There’s a real price we pay when we start compromising our relationship to truth in this way. Correct?

DR. LEVITIN:
Yeah, and you know, have you read anything by Lee McIntyre?

FRED:
I have not.

DR. LEVITIN:
You might have him on your show. I think he’d be a great conversation. He’s a philosopher who studies the spread of fake news. And one of the things that he points out is that it was humanities departments, some years ago, that helped to accelerate this notion that everything is equally valid. When they said: “Okay, well, your interpretation of this artwork is just as valid as anyone else’s.” And to some degree, I believe that if you tell me that listening to a particular song makes you feel happy, and then I tell you: “Well, you’re an idiot. That’s a funeral march in Poland.” I’m negating your experience and your feelings and what it was written for and what other people take from it is their business. And of course, you can have your experience. But for you to say: “This is a joyous piece. It was written as a joyous piece. And everybody in the world who is sane must find it joyous.” That might be contradicting facts. And often what would happen in humanities departments is students would say just crazy stuff. And then the historical record would show, well, no, the author didn’t know this person and so couldn’t have based it on that person. They lived 100 years apart, you know. Historical facts intrude. But we weren’t allowed to negate the student’s opinion, which is crazy.

FRED:
Which is absolutely crazy.

DR. LEVITIN:
One of the things that changed my life so dramatically was in 2013, Stephen Kosslyn from Harvard reached out to me and said he was starting a new University in San Francisco. From scratch along with Ben Nelson and Jonathan Katzman and some other very talented folks. And the idea was they were going to teach evidence-based humanities and would I be the founding Dean of humanities? And I said: “Yeah!” And the idea was to turn back the tide of anything goes and say: “Well, look, you’re entitled to your opinion, but there are also factual records.” Students would come in and they say: “Well, I think Shakespeare was one person” and another student would say: “Well, I think he was actually several people.” They would say: “Well, let’s test it.” There are linguistic tools that will allow you to do an analysis and give you a probability as to whether these works were written by the same person or not having to do with diction and word choice and flow and poetic qualities and things like that. It’s not definitive, but it’s evidence, right.

FRED:
Let me ask you a question on that. Do you believe, and I know your answer… Do you believe evidence-based is just a social construct intended to impose power structures of some on others?

DR. LEVITIN:
Oh, boy.

FRED:
Is there something else going on?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, the difficulty here is that evidence has been held for centuries by mostly old white men, and people who are not old white men weren’t taken seriously when they wanted to contribute to evidence or when they wanted to challenge it. And that’s a tragedy. And worse than that, it’s immoral. It should never have been that way. And so in this long overdue time of reckoning, we have to consider that some of the facts are biased against nonwhites and against non-cisgender men. And the best case of that, that comes to mind, is the IQ test. So since we’ve had IQ tests over the last 100 years or so, we tend to think, “Well, your IQ is your IQ. It’s an objective fact. You take a test, maybe you score a point or two different on test-retest. Basically, your IQ is this number. That’s what it is.” But we now know that IQ tests are tremendously biased against people of colour. They skew towards, as a function of socioeconomic status, education level of the parents, how much money the family has in the bank. (Noise) Sorry. So they’re very far from objective and they’re very far from factual. And Howard Gardner and myself and others have been trying to get rid of their use and for that matter, the use of SAT and GRE tests because they have, they give the illusion of factualness.

FRED:
But you’re still looking for factualness. In other words, the corrective to that is just better evidence, right? Or a higher standard of scrutiny, a fact. It’s not doing away with the approach of scrutinizing a test in light of the fact I always think that proper science would, by definition be diverse and inclusive, because it shouldn’t matter what your gender is. It shouldn’t matter what your sexual orientation is. None of that stuff would matter to a truly evidence-based approach where you’re looking at the evidence for what it is objectively.

DR. LEVITIN:
Right. And it shouldn’t, and in many cases, it doesn’t. But there are still barriers to entry. We have very few Hispanic and African American neuroscientists. And so it’s not that their observational style would change something like looking at blood flow in the brain. But it’s the questions I might not even be able to think of, hypotheses I may not even generate or issues I might not know are there to study on the basis of background. They’re not being addressed because, you know, they’re underrepresented and by the same token, very few members of the LGBTQ community in neuroscience. I imagine that the established neuroscientists didn’t allow for a comfortable environment or that they were discouraged early on, maybe in high school. I don’t really know, and we’re not talking, when I talk about brown people or black people, people of colour in general, LGBTQ in general. They’re not one thing, everybody who would identify in that group differs from one another as much as others.

FRED:
So that’s really interesting though, because where you situate that need for inclusiveness is again, at the level of open-ended hypotheses, right? They may think of things, they may set up
different experiments, but it’s not like you’re looking for a different outcome or it’s not like you would ever justify their difference on some metric, sort of taint your evaluation of a particular outcome. It’s more on the level of the openness of that first step of the scientific process that we’ve got to be as open and inclusive as possible so as to bring as many ideas, as many different hypotheses as possible. Is that, is that accurate?

DR. LEVITIN:
Yes, but I’m probably being ham-fisted here and I’m not describing it the way someone else would. Look, I am, quite frankly, a child of privilege. I was born into a family where my parents were college educated. They were both professionals. My mother was a teacher. My father was an attorney and a CPA. I had a good education. I went to very good schools. We weren’t wealthy. We could only afford for me to buy one pair of shoes a year at the beginning of the school year. But I never worried that there wouldn’t be food. So my life experience is tremendously privileged and I don’t feel comfortable talking about these issues of inclusiveness in the sense that I think it’s presumptuous of me too. I’m aware that there’s a problem, but I’m also aware that there are a whole bunch of aspects to this that I don’t know.

FRED:
Again, that beautiful, humility and open-mindedness that suffuses all of your work.

FRED:
I want to talk to you a little bit about aging. It’s the topic of your latest book, Successful Aging, which really, I think everybody should read. I mean, aging is something that we’re all doing all of the time. Unless we’re dead, of course. Aging sucks. But what are the options? In the words is Stephen Wright. There’s a commonly held belief, at least in Western culture, that aging is just a kind of loss and decline. And you start the book admitting that’s how you initially saw it, that aging was only a failing of the body, of the mind, and even of the spirit. But empirically, you show that aging is actually not all entropy. There are some very specific and important aspects of human life that seem to actually get better with age in large population sizes. So many forms of intelligence, like abstract thinking, get better with age. Also, we seem to get happier with age. People tend to report more happiness in their 70s and 80s than they do in their 40s. How can this be? Is this just, like an optical illusion, like a coping mechanism? In other words like, is it just that we accept more things as we age because we kind of don’t have a choice, or is there something deeper here? Are there, like, actual reasons we get better with age in some very meaningful and measurable ways?

DR. LEVITIN:
Yeah. There are reasons, evidence-based, demonstrable reasons, why these things happen. One thing is that we, as humans, are pattern-matching machines. We look for patterns. I remember being in a hospital bed once as a kid, and they had those ceiling tiles with the little holes in it. And I was running a fever, and my brain was just making all kinds of pictures out of those holes, connecting them like paint-by-numbers kind of a drawing. And I realized although the holes were random, my brain was not, wasn’t having it. It was trying to import order on that chaos. And so by the time you reach the age of 70 or 80 or 90, you’ve seen so many more things on average than a younger person. And if your pattern-matching brain is intact, it’s learned to predict outcomes better across a variety of scenarios. So older adults tend to be better at making predictions about what will happen. They tend to be better problem solvers because they’re able to see, having experienced so many different things, they’re able to see how they fit together in a way that somebody who lacked that experience might not see it. And they become happier because of changes in neurochemical, neurochemical balances such that, well, for one thing, structurally, the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, shrinks as you get older. And your body is producing effectively a different neurochemical balance that makes you worry less. And older adults tend to feel more gratitude. Part of that neurochemical part of it is what you might call psychological meaning that- I mean, all of psychological things have a neurochemical basis, of course, but it lends itself more to an explanation that doesn’t rely on a bunch of Latin words. So Greek words, and chemical names. So in the psychological terms, you realize your life may not… I have lost an earbud, but I still got you. You realize life may not have come out the way that you wanted it to, but you’re still alive and things are pretty good and you just enjoy what you have. My father, who is 89, just got out of the hospital four days ago where he had COVID and pneumonia, and he’s doing really well now. And I’ve never seen him so happy. And he says: “I am just so happy not to be in the hospital. I’ve never been this happy.” It’s one of those things where you take away something you take for granted, like being at home, and then you get it back again. He’s very happy.

FRED:
So that perspective you gain can actually be an advantage from a sort of subjective well-being perspective as you get older. I found the same thing with my parents. My parents are in their 70s. They’re by far the happiest I’ve ever seen them. And it’s a strange kind of thing, right? Like you said, the cultural belief that aging is just lost and decline. And then that’s the beauty of evidence-based science is that you sort of look at the data sets and it kind of points to a very different story, and now there’s an opportunity to sort of shine a light on that story. According to the research that you cite in the book, the number one predictor of successful aging is quality relationships. And you cite one study in particular that gets real, real, real specific and says that it’s your quality relationships at age 47. And I thought that was really interesting as it creates a kind of focus. And I’m in that age group, and I find that this is a time when a lot of relationships fall by the wayside. People just get super overwhelmed with work, taking care of young children, family obligations, financial obligations, etc. You mentioned that even things like religious belonging and not ever retiring can be good for aging because they come with sort of social contact and relationships. What is it about relationships that make them so beneficial as we age, and what kind of relationships should we aim for as we get older?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, relationships are a lot of different things depending on the relationship. There are people that you know you can rely on who care for you and have your best interests in mind and help you make decisions. Many people have had the experience that they had a tough decision to make, so they call a friend and they talk it over with them, and then that helps them to, it’s not that the friend necessarily tells them what to do. It’s that through the process of talking it out, the person who asked for help is able to see themselves more clearly through the eyes of this person. They’ve been through a lot. With relationships, also, particularly new ones, require you to be on your toes and to think carefully about what the other person knows and what you know, and you want to not offend them, and you want to… I can’t just tell you out of the blue: “I noticed that Bill has parked his Volkswagen in front of Sue’s house.” We don’t have that common- You and I don’t know, I know who Bill and Sue are, and I know what the Volkswagen has to do with all this. You don’t. So talking to you means I have to work a little bit differently than somebody I don’t have a lot of shared life knowledge with. And that keeps me, keeps my brain active. It keeps me tuned. And particularly, you ask, what kind of relationships are good to have when you’re older… Relationships with people who don’t make you feel bad about yourself.

FRED:
That’s certainly a start.

DR. LEVITIN:
They aren’t scolding you, aren’t you telling you’re an idiot or whatever. And relationships with younger people. And people who have a different perspective. So people from another country, from another city, just from a different background. All of that challenges you to crawl out of yourself a little more and engage with another person. It’s tremendously stimulating for the aging brain to do that.

FRED:
And I feel like we’re touching again on the theme of openness. So relationships with younger people and people that you don’t know kind of forces you to adapt and to open up. And you’ve analyzed the phenomenon of aging in relation to personality traits, and the big five personality traits, and two of the big five personality dimensions stood out as being particularly predictive of successful aging. You had conscientiousness and you had openness to experience. And what I found really interesting in the studies is that conscientiousness seems to sort of naturally go, I don’t know if naturally is the right way to put it, but it seems to sort of go up with age, while openness to experience tends to kind of naturally go down with age. And you write that with aging, for example, our dopamine receptors deteriorate and we have more cognitive and physical limitations, and all of this can make sort of learning and doing new things more difficult.
So this seems to be a really key challenge to successful aging. Right. How do we find ways to promote openness to experience as we age? The other personality trait, conscientiousness, we seem to have an easier time getting better at as we age. And one thing I found interesting is one of the concrete ways you referred to is the use of psilocybin and how even a single dose in older adults caused a lasting, positive change in openness to experience. So more magic mushrooms and nursing homes, is that part of the solution? And jokes aside, what would be a smart and safe approach to mind-opening substances as we age? And what else can we do to sort of stimulate more openness to experience as we age?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, I think the first thing is to recognize that we’re going to become more complacent as we age and less open to new experience and fight against that, push against it. And that could happen from a group of people who are younger than you or pushing you to do that or just your peer group if they’re more open than you. It could come from therapy. It could come from reading a self-help book, being inspired by a fictional character in literature who went out and did great things are real people like Julia Hurricane Hawkins, a 104-year-old retired schoolteacher from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who took up competitive running at age 100 and has been sweeping the senior games with all kinds of gold medals and such.

FRED:
That’s unbelievable.

DR. LEVITIN:
There are all these inspiring stories, and there’s no one way to do it. Others, I mentioned I would add meditation, and yeah, medication, maybe something that stimulates dopamine. Maybe psilocybin, maybe cannabis. If you’re going to do something that involves a mind-altering drug, of course, you want to be careful that it doesn’t interfere with other drugs you might be taking, and you want to make sure you check with your doctor to make sure it’s safe for you. And is my heart going to be able to take it, that kind of thing? And then, of course, although psilocybin is now legal in a handful of states, it’s illegal in most, and I am not going to advocate that anyone break the law.

FRED:
Of course.

DR. LEVITIN:
I’ll tell you one thing. A way to not age successfully is to end up in prison when you’re 80.

FRED:
I’m sure that’s not great for the aging process. But you also talked about Michael Pollan’s book, a first-person account of that experience and I know that it’s a burgeoning sort of scientific literature around, around the use of psilocybin and use in certain therapeutic settings as well. So I just found it interesting and I know that you’re not the type to sort of hunt for that kind of stuff. It’s just like, wow, you noted the evidence, and again, you just sort of laid it out very honestly and truthfully. And now it’s like, okay, obviously you’ve got to sort of be careful how you interpret it, but here it is. The fact is there and that’s interesting. Let’s see where this goes.

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, that sort of happened. I’m open to serendipity. So Michael called me on the phone while I was working on my book, and he just said: “Oh, yeah, I thought you’d like to know I have this new book coming out in a couple of months, and this is what it’s about” and “Tell me more”. And we talked about it, and then I thought, “Oh, I can use that in my book.”

FRED:
So looking at the road ahead, you’ve already done so much and contributed so much in your fields of interest, from music to cognitive science to aging, all these different aspects of the human condition. What exciting challenges and topics do you want to tackle next?

DR. LEVITIN:
Well, we always have a lot of work going on in my laboratory. So the big ones now are- we’re looking at ways to combat the proliferation of fake news- little videos that we can make that will help people to think twice. We’re looking at the future of higher education. What can universities do better at, in terms of the kinds of diversity, equity and inclusion we were talking about and in terms of preparing people for jobs in a global digital economy? We have another project that looks at the impact that COVID had on music and music listening and that’s- we got neuroimaging going on, looking at musical structure and music listening. And apart from that, I’ve gotten back in touch with my earlier self and been more diligent and more, I’d say, I’ve applied more of a work ethic towards my own songwriting and musicianship over the last few years. And just a few weeks ago, I released an album of my own material with a live band, live in the studio band, great musicians. I’m doing a little bit of publicity about that and getting ready to make another record.

FRED:
That’s cool. That’s awesome.

DR. LEVITIN:
This record is called, you’re going to like this, the title of this record is called Sex and Math.

FRED:
That’s good. That makes for a great t-shirt. Sex and Math. That’s really cool. So you’re sort of going back to that, that original passion you have for music and getting more into that. I also noticed that you’ve dabbled quite a bit in stand-up comedy. And when I say dabbled, you’ve done some pretty remarkable things. You’ve performed at the Democratic National Convention with Robin Williams. You’ve contributed jokes for Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall. I look at your work and it’s been the sort of, the way I perceive it, the sort of relentless pursuit of novelty combined with scientific rigour and depth, but also around topics that are very intimately connected to regular human life. And I was just thinking, as I was sort of putting these questions together, “Wow. If Daniel Levitin wrote a book about the neuroscience of comedy, that would be something.” Is that a topic that might interest you? Might interest you… I know already that you do stand-up comedy, right? Have you ever thought of kind, of turning the neuroscientific lens on it?

DR. LEVITIN:
I do think about that. And it’s something I could see myself doing. I have a friend named Eric Kaplan who is a professional comic writer. He wrote for The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons, Futurama. He now writes for Young Sheldon. And he came over to my house yesterday and we were having coffee, and it’s clear that he is a professional comedy writer. He comes up with stuff without even thinking about it. That’s the funniest thing I ever heard. And in my case, I came up with funny stuff every once in a while that I was able to sell the gags and I love doing it. But it’s the same with me and guitar. I’m good enough that I can go out and do it and not embarrass myself and appear on a stage with someone else who’s really good at it and I don’t embarrass them, but I’m not at that level. I just enjoy it and that’s the reason for it. But yeah, I have thought about “This is your brain on comedy and this is your brain on drama acting.” I haven’t gotten there yet.

FRED:
Those will be some pretty awesome topics for books. Do you think, just looking at the general climate, the general sort of cultural climate, in the midst of the culture wars and cancel culture, COVID politics, all that stuff, that we’re kind of taking ourselves a little bit too seriously that we’re losing our ability to laugh and connect a little bit more naively? Is that something that occurs to you?

DR. LEVITIN:
You’d have to ask a sociologist, I don’t know. I still laugh all the time.

FRED:
Love it. Love it. Dr. Dan Levitin, it was an absolute pleasure and honour, and I hope we can do this again sometime. Maybe when you’re in Montreal.

DR. LEVITIN:
Thank you, Fred.

FRED:
Thanks a lot.