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

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

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

Daniel J. Levitin is Founding Dean of Arts and Humanities at the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute and James McGill Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience and Music at McGill University. He is the author of four bestselling books, including This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

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“Dan Levitin is a triple threat—a visionary neuroscientist, an extraordinary musician, a brilliant writer—and this is his best book yet. I Heard There Was A Secret Chord is inspiring and illuminating, as deep as it is delightful. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Dan Gilbert

“Lookin’ back at my life, it’s pretty easy to see how music has profoundly benefited my wellbeing, all while drawing me further & further into its mysteries—and there appears to be no end to this path. Dan’s take on this mirrors mine—and he can both explain it and tease the possibilities presented...”
—Bob Weir, The Grateful Dead

“Working as a cross-culture detective, Daniel J. Levitin unravels the mysteries of how music heals us and fires our emotions, inspirations, and desires. Levitin cracks the case wide open while synthesizing his research and experience in a book that is an important addition to our understanding of the human experience.”
—Michael Connelly, New York Times best-selling author of Bosch