We have used music to enhance spirituality, to get closer to our maker, to unite us for a cause, to marshal us in wars, to swell us with pride, and to mourn and resolve sadness and grief. Additional data-driven discoveries in the past 60 years show us the promise of music in healing.

We have learned about the neuroanatomy of the limbic system. In the 1950s, when psychosurgery was legal in the US, experiments on the brain of death row inmates showed that stimulation of the ventral nucleus of hypothalamus by 70 millivolts of electricity would throw the subject into rage. If one played soothing classical music while stimulating this region, the patient would not show anger. Clinical experiments at Columbia Hospital in the 1950s and early 1960s showed that patients with a propensity to religious orientation and enjoyment of classical music were a third faster to respond and heal postoperative retinal detachment than those who were not.

Manfred Clynes (born 1925), a neurophysiologist whose family fled from Austria to Australia, published extensive data documenting the relationship between music, brain, and mind. His classical textbook Music, Mind, and Brain, published in 1982, is the benchmark of excellence in the field. The limbic system, consisting of thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, mammary bodies, andfornix, all subcortical structures in the brain, comprise the “anatomy of emotions.” They are responsible for the autonomic or the vegetative functions, such as breathing, appetite, body temperature, and moods (e.g.,anger, sorrow, love, hatred, violence, compassion, sadness). Music brings about the excitation of the limbic system with corresponding changes in neurotransmitters, such as catecholamine, indolamine, dopamine, endorphin, and the latest, neuron growth hormone.

GENOMES AND MUSIC: The most exciting discoveries of the effect of music on brain comes with the discovery of the Genome Project and the work of Venter et al published in 2001 in the journal Science. A Japanese geneticist and musician, Susumu Ohno (1929–2000), author of the seminal work Evolution by Gene Duplication (1970), was the first to propose the hypotheses of the Barr body and human paleopolyploidy and also contributed articles to the journal Immunogenetics.  Ohno observed that music is like deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in repetition and development.

For example, each organism’s genes are composed of strands of DNA, which are made up of four nucleotides containing the four amino acids—adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. The order of these bases of repeated four is far from random. Indeed, within a gene, certain oligomers, which are short chains of bases arranged in a set sequence, frequently occur in a predictable manner. Ohno stated that this is hardly surprising because recurrence is rampant in nature.

According to Ohno in his classical paper Genomes and Music, “evolution relies on gene duplication; very much like music, it requires changes in ariations on themes. All and all, truly new coding sequences generated by modern organisms recapitulate the first prehistoric coding sequence of eons ago…” When Ohno assigned notes to each of the four bases—cystine for do, adenine for re and mi, guanine for fa and sol, thymine for la and ti, and cytosine again for do, the genes made music. And that music wasn’t just melodies repeating endlessly, because in genes, wrote Ohno, “the monotony created by the endless recurrence of these decamers, hexamers, and their derivatives is broken by refreshing appearances of randomly recurring base oligomers that are not directly related.”

For example, a section of the ribonucleic acid mouse gene for polymerase II sounds like music from genes that encode cell adhesion molecules, which sound like a musical score Debussy would have written. And the sequence of human X-linked phosphoglycerate kinase (the enzyme for breakdown of glucose) played on violin is hauntingly melancholy, as though reflecting the Weltschmerz of the gene that persevered for hundreds of millions year ago.

FINAL WORD: Music makes us feel like we are back in the arms of our mother, the ultimate source of love and security. When all is said and done, it is Socratic elenchus of self examination and self acceptance (how we feel internally about ourselves) and external love; mom, music, warmth, fresh air, and support of the family bring us security and fulfillment of our maximum potential. I, for one, am grateful for the gift of music.

© 2010 Assad Meymandi, MD, PhD, DFLAP

Dr. Meymandi is in private practice as a psychiatrist and neurologist and serves as an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a noted physician, editor, and philanthropist who frequently speaks and writes on diverse topics that relate to his
interests in medicine, the arts, religion, and philanthropy. He lives in Raleigh, NC, with his wife Emily.