A riveting refrain

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This article was published 05/11/2022 (1354 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Music is nothing more than “auditory cheesecake.”

So declared Harvard University cognitive psychologist and best-selling author Steven Pinker in his 1997 book How the Mind Works.

Former Globe and Mail health reporter Adriana Barton’s book Wired for Music amounts to a rebuttal of Pinker’s glib dismissal of music’s role in our lives.

Music — appreciated, but still more so when created — facilitates a fount of benefits, everything from buffing cognitive skills and inhibiting dementia to general psychological well-being, according to Barton.

Her book is a hybrid. It’s part memoir (she’s a failed concert cellist, dogged by chronic trauma and remorse) and part scientific inquiry (distillations of medical studies, interviews with neuroscientists and recountings of biological and anthropological research).

The memoir episodes are an interesting aside that help explain and underline the genesis of her investigations. But on the whole, they pale beside her research.

She traces some interesting evolutions in how we regard our interactions with music.

For example, people struggling with depression often surround themselves with sad music. Psychologists used to consider this behaviour “maladaptive, a form of wallowing,” she writes.

No longer.

Apparently melancholy music beneficially befriends us, and in the words of one clinical study participant, helps us “cry a little and then feel relieved, and move on.”

The book’s title is a clever double entendre.

Wired is employed in the sense of we humans being constitutionally programmed to connect to music. But wired is also used here in the slangy sense of our being nervously excited or stimulated by music.

Most of Barton’s book tends toward the former meaning, but it’s not without a tilt toward the latter.

Her explorations of music in the latter sense of wired are coupled with a one-time personal dalliance with a powerful psychotropic drug native to South America, ayahuasca.

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The combined effect of music and psychedelics on the human brain is nothing short of amazing, in her telling.

Barton’s tripping experiment is no mere self-indulgent search for kicks. It’s a first-person attempt to understand how melodies and rhythms “shape the drug experience” in ways that are therapeutic, or at least lead to psychological betterment. And it aptly supports her documentation of music-cum-drug enhanced psychological growth across different cultures around the globe.

Apart from an occasional tendency to rapidly pile too many studies on top of each other, her prose flows, and is almost conversational in tone.

Barton does a nice job of finding the science in music, and the music in that science.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.