Music as Medicine: How to Harness its Therapeutic Power, with Daniel Levitin (Part One)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm head of programming, Connor Boyle. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event in London Smith Square Hall with Daniel Leviton. He's a neuroscientist, musician. An author of the new book Music is medicine. how we can harness its therapeutic power. He was joined in conversation by journalist and broadcaster Riddler Shah, and music was played by violinist Anna Mitchell. If you're an Intelligent Square Plus subscriber, you can get access to the full conversation right now.

Now without further ado, let's go to the episode Good evening, everybody. Welcome to this Intelligence Squared event. I'm Rithala Shah. Five nights a week I present Calm Classics on Classic FM and the whole premise of the show Is that classical music should help you relax at the end of the day. And judging by the messages I get and by the audience figures, it seems to be quite successful. Well

I'm delighted then to introduce tonight's speaker who takes our understanding of the power of music much, much further than that, with a rigorous and really scientific approach. Daniel Leviton is the author of Music as Medicine, How We Can Harness Its Therapeutic Power. And Daniel knows a thing or two about how our brains work. He's a neuroscientist and a cognitive psychologist and is Professor Emeritus at McGill University. And he's written a number of best-selling books, including This is your brain on music, the world in six songs, and of course music as medicine, which we'll be talking about tonight. And to bring some of Daniel's ideas and research to life, I'm delighted that we're also going to hear from Anna Mitchell. Anna's a violinist for Sinfonia Smith Square. And she's also played with the Irish Chamber Orchestra and the RTE concert orchestra. So it is going to be a fabulous evening. Welcome. Right, Daniel, there are so many brilliant stories peppered throughout your book. I am gonna start a bit weirdly in the middle of the book and then we'll we'll circle back to some definitions.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (27 minutes, 4,269 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.