(narrator) For the past 20 years, researchers in the neuroscience of music and in neuropsychology have combined their skills to understand and explain how the brain reacts to music.

(fireworks) (soft, energetic music) Music has incredible therapeutic virtues, but they are still largely unknown or unjustly underestimated.

(bright music) ♪ But beyond that, does music really have the power to heal us, to reconnect us with the world, and even cure us?

♪ Isabelle Peretz, a professor in the Neuroscience of Music at the University of Montreal, cofounded an international research laboratory, Brams, where the effects of music on the brain are studied in great depth.

(soft music) (bright music) ♪ ♪ (soft music, vocalizing) ♪ (mellow music) ♪ (subway car rattling) ♪ (siren) ♪ (hum of traffic, sirens, horns) ♪ (soft music) (drawer slides, paper rustles) ♪ Where is music located in the brain?

How, from our first to our last breath, does our brain manage to store and preserve so many sounds, words, and music?

(mellow music) That's what neuroscientist David Poeppel and his students are interested in.

(Poeppel) This side of the brain... A friend of mine found this for me from the library in Berlin, at the Humboldt-Universität, and it's particularly delicious because it looks very much like my lab, as you'll see, you know, like, for instance, the MEG machine looks just like this.

You stick a person in, and then we do something, and we try to understand what comes out.

And I think it's a pretty interesting and kind of modern notion that the head contains a list of elements, horses and animals and food and all kinds of, you know, houses.

What I find so compelling about this is that there are psychological primitives, you know, that there's a list of things that are in your head.

I mean, the parts list.

♪ In the case of speech and language, we have very clear theories of what it is that store it.

Informally, we call them words.

So what you do as the speech is coming towards you, is you parse the signal into primitives.

The elementary Lego blocks are these chunks about the size of a syllable.

♪ Now, in the musical case, it's--we don't actually know.

What are the primitives?

I mean, what are the Lego blocks that you store?

♪ How come as a musician, or even as a non-musician, you can recall minutes, dozens of minutes, even hours of musical information with great detail?

♪ I can play long sequences of Pink Floyd in my head, I can tell you, great accuracy.

♪ Well, now you can't say anymore that the primitive is just a single note.

That doesn't make any sense, right?

Now the primitive is sequenced, but is that the primitive?

Here's a musical score, for instance, -of a classical piece.

-Tell us about the-- Right?

So is that what you have stored?

I mean, that seems very strange.

Is it just an acoustic representation?

Here, this is what a spectrogram looks like.

Is that what you have stored?

I mean, who the hell knows what is actually living in your head?

(eerie piano music) ♪ But the notion of music as an aesthetic experience and as a medium of expression, emotion, performance, seems to be something very particular and cool and interesting.

And we're only beginning to understand what's going on there.

There, our understanding is even more woefully inadequate than everything else.

(intense piano music) (soft kalimba music) ♪ (drumming) ♪ (narrator) When some young people go through periods of high vulnerability, music helps them hold onto life.

♪ (energetic piano music) ♪ ♪ ♪ (guitar and piano music) ♪ ♪ (accordion music) ♪ (siren) ♪ (Tomaino) So what is it that happens in music that allows these responses?

Improvisation has really been at the core of music therapy practice since its inception.

(soft music) So, Charles Limb, when he was looking at these brain images of jazz musicians while they were improvising, said it's very interesting because creativity, this kind of spontaneous play, also requires a lot of brain activity.

Several parts of the brain are working.

The thing that caught my attention, though, was the fact of what areas get turned on and turned off in improvisation.

And it made me wonder about our patients.

(narrator) Connie Tomaino is a pioneer in the field of music therapy.

It's at Beth Abraham Hospital, along with her famous colleague, neurologist Oliver Sacks, that she discovered music's ability to heal and stimulate certain brain functions in patients suffering from different neurological ailments.

(guitar music) (gentle singing) This is interesting.

So, during a live interactive improvisation, the prefrontal cortex undergoes an interesting shift.

The part that's inhibited are the areas that are about self-consciousness, self-monitoring, self-inhibition, and evaluation of rightness.

How many of us psych ourselves out when we overthink what we're doing, right?

By losing yourself in the music, losing yourself in that moment, you're able to actually bypass all that inhibition.

It activates arousal of sense of self, which is important, self-expression, and even some of the language areas.

You know, even though you may not be using words, if somebody's just playing high-low or a certain rhythmic pattern on a drum, and you're listening to that, you have to process the framework of that sound in order to make a response that makes sense.

And, actually, language areas of the brain are utilized to understand the patterns of that sound.

When people are exchanging musical phrases, the language areas of their brain are actually lighting up as if they're speaking to each other.

(soft piano music) ♪ (mellow music) (narrator) A lot of Canadian veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

(faint explosion) But what if music could silence the war?

(faint gunfire) Silence their inner struggle?

(faint war sounds) ♪ (Lowther) '96, '97, I went to Bosnia.

Well, the war was ended, but people were still killing each other, and we found mass graves.

It was ethnic cleansing.

(waves crashing, seagulls calling) The destruction, the death.

Unbelievable.

And to witness and to have to deal with.

♪ My son, Jordan, and I, I took Jordan to a movie.

It was about an American soldier whose plane went down in Bosnia, the same place I was at.

And he was running through villages and stuff 'cause they were chasing him, and I was in the--I was-- I recognized all the scenery.

And something happened, something triggered, and I actually got up out of the movies and I threw up in the garbage can.

I had to get out of there.

I couldn't breathe.

Because he fell into a pit of mass graves, and it was real.

And that triggered my PTSD, and I was never the same.

Never the same.

♪ Anywhere you're at, doing whatever, you have a daydream and you're transported out of where you are into the situation.

It's like a cycle of despair that goes on and on and on in your head with all of these thoughts and images and flashbacks and pictures and the noise.

You just can't shake it.

(explosion) (siren) ♪ You're in combat.

You're in combat in Canada.

Everyone around you is a threat.

People, you know, putting their hands in their pockets and doing things quickly.

And--and you're-- you know, you're-- it's a hard way to live.

I didn't know what was happening to me.

I thought I was literally going crazy.

(eerie music) Then I picked up my guitar one day.

I had a guitar in my closet, you know, I just picked it up and started just bangin' on it.

And I noticed, it was weird, for about 15 minutes, I completely drifted away.

(bright guitar music) ♪ Like a lot of musicians and artists will say that when they're on stage, they're in the zone.

Well, that's what I felt, like I was in the zone.

And it was like being gently lifted out of that insanity and put in a place of calm and peace and relax.

It was like being put into Heaven for 15 minutes.

(soft music) ♪ (narrator) In Montreal, a group of girls who are on the autism spectrum have formed a band.

(Usher-Jones) Jade.

Peekaboo.

Who came up with the name Fireball Rainbow?

♪ Sophie.

And you.

Did you both come up with the name?

-Yeah.

-One of you wanted Fireball and one of you wanted Rainbow.

-So we decided to make it: -Fireball Rainbow.

(Usher-Jones) Fireball Rainbow.

Two.

(girls) ♪ Fireball Rainbow ♪ ♪ That's the name of our band ♪ (narrator) Some of them are less verbal.

(girls) ♪ Fireball Rainbow ♪ ♪ That's the name... ♪ (narrator) But with a mic in hand, they sing, and the words are set free.

(girls) ♪ Fireball Rainbow ♪ -♪ The all-girl cool band ♪ -Very nice, Jade!

♪ (Catherine sings softly) ♪ ♪ (Catherine) ♪ Fireball Rainbow ♪ ♪ That's the name of our band ♪ ♪ ♪ Fireball ♪ (Catherine singing softly) (indistinct chatter) ♪ ♪ I don't like when someone pushes me out ♪ (soft music) ♪ ♪ I don't like when someone says to go in time-out ♪ ♪ ♪ I don't like when someone hurts my pets ♪ -Mm.

-Mm-mm.

♪ (Usher-Jones) Wow, that was very nice.

Jade, what did you hear from Sophie?

What did she not like?

(soft indistinct speaking) "Sophie--" start like this.

"Sophie doesn't like..." (soft indistinct speaking) -...to go to time-out.

-True.

So say that one more time.

(snapping fingers rhythmically) -Sophie doesn't like... -Sophie doesn't like when someone says... -...somebody in time-out.

-Okay.

(strumming guitar) Beep, beep, beep.

Autism comes in many different forms, and there's probably not one-- a one-size-fits-all, and a big range, a big--you know, this is why it's a spectrum.

And possibly many different causes and different phenotypes.

But this is possibly one interesting contribution to that understanding that is the perceptual analysis of the world is not properly aligned.

(tuning guitar) The contribution of rhythmic information to learning, it obviously helps you structure auditory signals.

It gives you chunks.

If you have very rhythmic information, it segments the signal for you.

(strumming guitar) Yeah, and a temporal organization of information so that you can-- maybe making the next steps of processing easier.

(singing softly) ♪ (Usher-Jones) If you look at the brain when you're active in music, you're using almost the entire brain.

These little flashes of strength come out.

(singing softly) ♪ -Bravo.

-Wow.

Where a client would have exceeded, let's say, a parent's expectation, a doctor's expectation.

A-one, a-two, a-one, two, three, go.

(Jade) ♪ My favorite song is Five Green and Speckled Frogs ♪ ♪ Because it's a story about five little frogs ♪ ♪ ♪ My favorite song is Five Green and Speckled Frogs ♪ ♪ Because they jump in the pool ♪ ♪ ♪ My favorite song is Five Green and Speckled Frogs ♪ ♪ Because frogs like to eat flies ♪ (Usher-Jones) Very nice, I loved that!

-Now it's my turn.

-You know why I loved that?

'Cause she said, everything about that song, she said it clearly and she knew everything she wanted to say, it came out like butter.

Nice job, Jade.

(street noise) The street noise, this doesn't bother me.

It's the sound of people talking, people whistling, dogs barking.

That's much more likely to bother me.

When I was a little kid, I couldn't get my speech out.

I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn't get it out.

And I also had some problems with receptive language.

If the adults and the teachers talked really fast, it sounded like blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.

And I thought grownups had their own language, because when they talked fast, I couldn't understand them.

(speaking in French) (soft music) (Usher-Jones) Okay, so, Sophie, what song do you want to hear?

(Grandin) Build on the thing the kid's good at.

When kids get a label like dyslexia, autism, ADHD, or some other kind of label, you tend to have uneven skills.

Good at one thing, bad at something else.

And there's too much emphasis on the bad and not enough emphasis on building up the thing they're good at.

(Usher-Jones) If I have the expectation that my client will never speak, then my client will rise to that expectation and stop there.

If I have an expectation that my client, um, would never be able to show a certain emotion or empathy, then I believe that client will go there.

(girls) ♪ Twinkle, twinkle, little star ♪ ♪ How I wonder what you are ♪ (narrator) Catherine has an exceptionally good memory and ear for music.

She can recall perfectly a melody she only heard once.

(girls) ♪ Twinkle, twinkle ♪ (Usher-Jones) Often, these kids with autism appear to be in their own worlds.

(girls) ♪ What you are ♪ -Beautiful.

-Bravo!

(indistinct chatter) (Usher-Jones) There tends to be that one thing for--for people on the spectrum that clicks, that connects them to how we view the world.

(piano music) ♪ Music can often be that door, that connection.

♪ (speaking French) (applause, indistinct chatter) I also want to see kids that are like me be successful.

I'm seeing too many kids, fully verbal, really smart, quirky, socially awkward.

You can call 'em autistic, you can call 'em Asperger's, you can call 'em whatever you want.

You can call 'em nerds.

That's the same thing.

And they're getting labels and they're getting kind of a handicap mentality.

When I was a young child, I was taught how to go up to the counter and order food in a restaurant.

I was taught how to do shopping.

But I'm seeing too many kids today get a label.

And they go, "Oh, little Tommy has autism, so we'll order his hamburger for him."

I'm going, "No, he's got to learn how to go up to the counter and order it himself."

(soft guitar music) ♪ (Lowther) Chemically, something is happening, you know what I mean?

Like something is shifting.

♪ And it could even be the harmonics of the chord.

The music itself... (strums guitar) ...might align, you know, your brain.

♪ I don't know.

♪ Three years ago, we had a lot of soldier and veteran suicides back to back.

It was like three weeks or a month where every second day someone was committing suicide.

And I felt so obligated to do something.

So that's when I had the idea of, "My guitar helped me, maybe it'll help everybody."

(strumming guitar, humming) ♪ You remember D?

I know that people have guitars that they got for Christmas, they got for their birthdays, that are in the box, under the bed, in the closet, brand new, 'cause I had one.

So I thought, "What if I could get those guitars and put them in the hands of soldiers and veterans who are suffering with PTSD and other disabilities?

What if I could do that?"

(guitar sounds, indistinct chatter) These are all ours.

-Yep.

-Yep.

We got from donations from people.

Instead of donating a guitar, they donate enough money to purchase a guitar, so we've got 40 guitars here.

These are all going to veterans or soldier-- soldiers suffering with PTSD.

Brand new, either slightly, gently-used guitar or a brand new one that we send out.

We send these right across the country.

-Wow.

-And there's no stigma with saying, "Yeah," you know, "I'm going -for my guitar lesson."

-Yeah, exactly.

-You know, as opposed to-- -Because people will be like, "Wow, cool, you're playing guitar?"

(veteran) Yeah, as opposed to, you know, "I got therapy this week."

(tuning guitar) -Teach, teacher.

-(laughs) (soft guitar music) (speaking in French) ♪ (Gallagher) Your feelings of frustration and your feelings of anger, it's like the guitar actually absorbs it into it.

(energetic guitar music) ♪ (dog whimpers) ♪ -You all right?

-Oui.

I had a shitty day, shitty week.

-Did ya?

-Yeah.

-Look at the wall.

-Hm?

I don't know where this is from.

(Ryan) Well, it's grief, it's grieving.

It's, uh, it's normal.

We don't cry for years.

And then we talk to somebody that understands and it comes out.

It's not all the experience.

See, it's--it's-- for me, it's October 14th, 2006.

-Huh.

-Right?

So it's both October.

But that's our most difficult day, but that's where our healing is.

My healing is to be with you, or my vet--my veterans.

-That's right.

-Helping all the vets.

(Ryan) That's part of it, big time.

Being in the Legion.

(dog whimpers) Hanging out with a puppy.

(exhales) -Doing good.

-All right.

(strums guitar) (soft music) ♪ (narrator) Using magneto and cephalography technologies, neuroscientist David Poeppel measures brain activity to see if there's a difference between hearing a song or remembering one.

(siren) ♪ (Poeppel) We're in the middle of Manhattan here, and there's elevators and constructions and the subway goes by here, and there's traffic and cell phones and God knows what's going on, it's a mess.

And we try to keep the electrical environment as contained and as silent as possible, because, as you imagine, brain activity is really tiny compared to, say, my watch.

So we're trying to hear a needle dropping in the front row of a rock concert.

So you need to--you need specialized detectors, these superconducting quantum interference devices inside the MEG scanner, you need the shielded room, you need liquid helium to keep everything at superconducting temperatures, and then you need some clever experiments, the most important part.

So what's happening in the brain as you're analyzing a sound, as you're recognizing a word or a melody-- and it's not scary, you literally lie in here-- your brain activity is measured, and we control what happens in the experiment.

Most of the things you do, you do in your head.

You talk to yourself in your head, right?

We do that a lot.

Let's say the first five bars of a fame--I don't know, you know, "Yellow Submarine," all right?

Let's play that in our heads, okay?

One, two, three, go.

(rhythmic popping) (soft music) It's very precise, as it turns out.

And if I measure my brain with this machine, for instance, you're going to see a precise mapping in the auditory cortex of that song.

So, suppose I ask you right now, stick your head in this, and now play in your head "Yellow Submarine," okay?

And then I'm gonna play "Yellow Submarine" to you.

I can show you, and I have, you know, these are experiments we are doing and have done, that the patterns are gonna look the same.

Even the timing is very similar.

It's within very small error.

Your estimate internally, because let's say it's a song you've heard a lot, is extremely precise.

(energetic music) ♪ (soft guitar music) ♪ (singing bowl ringing) (distant siren) (Harris) I was told that I was medically untreatable, incurable, and that there was nothing, nothing that could be done.

And it was said by leading cancer doctors from a leading cancer center, world famous.

And it was said with complete conviction... (strikes match) ...that I would die from this.

I would die probably in four to six months.

If I was really lucky, maybe nine months.

(singing bowl ringing) But I couldn't believe that.

I had to find a brilliant oncologist who believed that I could get well again.

(narrator) New York medical oncologist Mitchell Gaynor, who trained at Cornell and Rockefeller Universities, adds music listening along with sound vibration sessions to his strict medical protocol for cancer treatment.

-You feel okay?

-I feel good.

(narrator) He considers that music and its vibrations help the body fight against the illness.

(Gaynor) Just, uh, it's very, very relaxing.

I was very fortunate because I was at Rockefeller University when epigenetics was really first being described.

Epigenetics has to do with gene expressions.

What we know now is our genes are dynamic.

Like life itself, they can be changed depending on the foods we put in our body, the toxins we put in our body.

And I was really amazed to see that there were nutrients that could activate tumor-suppressor genes.

There were nutrients that could inactivate tumor-promoter genes.

So there are a number of drugs that are what we call pro-apoptotic.

They can restore the ability of a cancer cell to die.

(soft music) Marisa was treated with conventional chemotherapy for six months and really did beautifully with it.

She ran around the reservoir, I think, every day in Central Park that she was getting the chemotherapy.

(Harris) I had this disc playing over and over and over in my head that just kept on saying, that voice kept on saying, "There's nothing that's gonna be done, you're going to die."

(Gaynor) What I teach people is that there are two ways of thinking, there are two ways of seeing.

So, there's seeing and thinking with the mind, and that's very good for your job.

But for trying to understand why you have an illness, why cancer, it can't help you.

It'll just make you more and more upset.

So the other way of understanding is with your heart.

And, you know, the heart is the seat of our emotions.

So the only way you could start to understand with your heart is by quieting the mind.

You can't quiet the mind with the mind.

(singing bowl ringing) 'Cause the mind's job is to think.

(soft music) The sound aspect happened when I was asked to see a patient at Cornell.

It was a young Tibetan monk.

He improved enough to leave the hospital and brought me in as a gift a Tibetan metal singing bowl, which are musical instruments.

They're made of between seven and nine different metals, each vibrating at a different tone so they sound like church bells.

And I was so taken with how quiet that made my mind.

And I'd already been working with my patients with guided imagery and meditation, but I started incorporating the sound into that.

(singing bowl ringing) (Harris) And then Dr. Gaynor walks in, and he's carrying this big white bowl.

And I don't remember exactly, but he played the bowls.

And it wasn't that these voices disappeared, but they became part of many, many, many, many voices.

It was like the whole world, the whole universe.

The birds were singing everywhere.

There were all these sounds.

And I could also hear Dr. Gaynor's voice saying, "You could get well again."

There was this possibility.

(singing bowl ringing) So when you play one of these when you're holding it, you literally feel the vibration going through your arm and then through your whole body.

(singing bowl ringing) Or if you play it near somebody, they can feel it.

You don't just hear it with your ears.

You feel it throughout your entire body.

That starts to change heart rate variability.

(soft guitar music) (narrator) Logan was born very prematurely.

He was born without an esophagus, went through many surgical procedures, and experiences a lot of pain.

(therapist speaking softly) (soft music) (speaking in foreign language) ♪ (speaking in foreign language) (singing softly) ♪ (singing softly) (Heather) I just couldn't believe that music or singing to a little baby would make any difference.

I just couldn't believe it.

I mean, they're just so tiny.

They eat, they sleep.

If they're crying, you give them a suce, and that's it, you know?

And I just thought, you know, I was really, seriously, rolling my eyes.

"Really?," you know, "you're gonna come and sing to this little creature?"

Like, "Sure, whatever."

Um, but when they do their music, it's very much designed to connect with the age of the baby, normalizing their respiratory status and their cardiac status.

(speaking in foreign language) (soft music) ♪ (soft guitar music) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (soft music) ♪ (narrator) Dr. Gaynor conducted research on how sound had been used throughout history.

He noticed that in all cultures, from Native Americans to ancient Greeks, through Ayurvedic medicine and Tibetan medicine, they all used music.

(singing bowl ringing) (soft music) He realized that our medical system was the only one in the world that didn't rely on sound and music for healing.

(machine whirring) He took an active interest in psychoneuroimmunology and the effects of music and sound on heart rate variations.

(machine whirring) He also looked into the brain's neurotransmitters as well as the brain waves themselves.

(machine whirring) (Gaynor) And later, there were even studies showing how music and relaxation and meditation could affect numerous genes that had to do with cancer in a positive way.

(soft music) (narrator) He realized that when our heart rate is regular, our brain waves are equally calmer, more relaxed.

♪ However, the opposite is also true.

(increasing heart rate sound) (Gaynor) If somebody's very nervous, they have a high heart rate variability.

Their heart rate might be 80, then it'll be 92, then it'll be 76, then it'll be 98.

That's associated with brain wave patterns that are associated with anxiety.

♪ (baby crying) ♪ It's about changing neurotransmitters in the brain.

(electrical zapping) All the neurotransmitters, for instance, release, if you're having a chronic anxiety worry, fear, depression, there are receptors for those neurotransmitters on all the lymphocytes in your body, the cells that are responsible for preventing the development of or recurrence of cancer.

(harmonica music) ♪ (Ryan) Yeah.

♪ Oh, brothers, let's go down ♪ ♪ Let's go down ♪ ♪ Come on down ♪ ♪ Oh, brothers, let's go down ♪ ♪ Down to the valley to pray ♪ ♪ To the Ottawa Valley I went to pray ♪ ♪ Studying about that good old way ♪ ♪ Who shall wear the robe and crown ♪ ♪ Good Lord, show me the way ♪ ♪ (Lowther) I think music does come from something-- somewhere else, something else, you know?

It's the voice of God maybe.

It's the vibration.

It's being in harmony with things.

I can't explain it.

(soft music) It changed my life.

♪ (bright music) ♪ (Tomaino) How does music, how do the components of music trigger, excite, engage these neural networks into action to allow ability where there seems to be some disability?

And so I think that's what we do so well, and, you know, just in some way, that neuroscience is helping us understand that.

Certain parts of the brain get excited and other parts get inhibited.

And we've seen it clinically, so there has to be something like this going on, there has to be.

It's just a matter of time before the scientists will actually show us how.

Yes, catch up, thank you.

That's exactly--Oliver and I used to say that all the time.

"Connie, they're finally-- they're finally catching up with us," you know?

That's true.

Good, so, thank you.

Have a--it's been nice speaking to you today.

(applause) (soft music) ♪ (Poeppel) The brain is a complicated place, right?

It's a small place, but it's a complicated place.

It's only this big, right?

So it's only... Let's say it's, you know, 80-90 billion cells, and they live in this tight space, but each one has thousands of neighbors.

Just to give you a sense of the scale of the problem, our neighborhood galaxy in which we find ourselves living here, the Milky Way, right, is--has about 100 billion stars.

That's a big place, right?

A very big place.

The same number, order of magnitude, cells are squished into this amount of space.

So, just the local interaction is so staggeringly complicated, we don't even have the mathematics to figure it out, right?

So there's--so, in some sense, it's a hopeless problem at the moment, so we should just go home and, you know, watch some Netflix.

(soft music) ♪ (singing in foreign language) (narrator) Since this movie was shot, Logan finally left the hospital and came home for the first time.

♪ (singing in foreign language) ♪