Music can be used as an effective neurological intervention …

There is a reason movie directors care so much about what the audience hears. Put different music beneath exactly the same scene and the person walking toward the camera can seem dangerous, ridiculous, romantic, or heartbreaking. Nothing on the screen has changed, yet the experience has. Music has influenced how the brain interprets what is happening.

Now take the movie away. The same brain that responds to the soundtrack in a theater is responding to the music in the car, at the gym, through headphones at work, or at home after a difficult day. We usually choose music because we like it or because it fits how we feel. But music can also be chosen for a different reason: to help change how we feel, where our attention goes, how activated or calm we are, or how motivated we feel to act. Used deliberately for effects such as these, music can function as a neurological intervention.

Henry Dryer was 94 years old and living with dementia when a short video of him became famous (you can watch it by clicking here). At first, Henry appears almost unreachable. His head hangs forward, his eyes are lowered, and attempts to engage him produce little response. Then headphones are placed over his ears and the music he loved when he was younger begins to play. Henry lifts his head. His eyes open wide and he begins moving with the music and singing. When the headphones come off, the change does not immediately disappear. Henry is suddenly animated and talking about Cab Calloway, one of his favorite performers.

Henry’s response offers a vivid glimpse of something happening inside all of us. Music can become bound to people, places, emotions, and periods of our lives so thoroughly that hearing a familiar song years later can reactivate pieces of that experience. For example, a favorite song from your senior year in high school does not arrive in the brain as a collection of notes. It may arrive with the car you drove, the person sitting beside you, and a version of yourself you had almost forgotten.

That ability is now being put to practical use. At care facilities, staff and families have built individualized playlists from the music that belongs to a person’s own history. The choice is deliberately personal. Frank Sinatra may mean everything to one person and nothing to the person in the next room. At one San Diego care center, volunteers became “musical detectives,” talking with residents and families to find the particular performers and songs capable of making that connection.

One resident there was an elderly woman with dementia who became confused and agitated because she did not know where she was or why she was there. A volunteer brought her personalized music. As the familiar songs played, the woman began singing along. The music had not restored everything dementia had taken from her, but in that moment it changed what her brain could reach and how she was able to engage with the people around her. That is a neurological intervention in an unexpectedly familiar form: carefully chosen sound being used to influence brain function for a specific purpose.

The same idea becomes fascinating when the target is attention rather than memory. Music is exceptionally good at capturing the brain’s predictions. Once a rhythm is established, the brain begins anticipating what comes next. A melody creates expectations too; we can feel the pull toward the next note before it arrives. That capacity to hold attention is one reason music can be deliberately incorporated into activities that would otherwise be difficult to sustain.

It also explains something ordinary people have been doing intuitively for years. A person may have a playlist that seems to make it easier to begin a dreaded task, another that belongs to concentrated work, and another that signals that the day is finished. Used carelessly, music can be distracting. But used intelligently, it can become part of the environment a person creates for the brain state they are trying to achieve.

RaMonica Felton discovered a more consequential version of that idea while dealing with PTSD. When her symptoms intensified, her heart could race and her emotions could become difficult to control. Through music therapy at a Veterans Administration medical center, she learned to use familiar music deliberately when that escalation began. A song became something she could use outside the therapy room — at home, in the car, wherever she needed it — to help slow herself down and regain control.

That example reveals why the word “intervention” is important. Waiting until a mental state has completely taken over leaves fewer opportunities to influence what happens next. Learning which music reliably changes the direction of that state gives a person something they can introduce while it is unfolding. The music or song becomes purposeful input to a brain that is already responding to sound, memory, expectation, and emotion.

When it comes to using music as a neurological intervention, there’s not a universal playlist. Henry needed Henry’s music, the woman in San Diego needed hers, and Felton learned what worked for her. The usefulness of music partly comes from the fact that brains do not hear music or songs without a history attached to them.

That suggests a practical experiment that requires no laboratory. Pay attention to the music that produces a reliable change in you. Notice the songs that sharpen your attention, interrupt an escalating mood, bring inaccessible memories surprisingly close, or help you move from thinking about doing something to actually beginning it. The useful discovery is not simply which music you enjoy, it’s learning what your brain has already learned to do when that music begins.

Scotty