The Intersection Of Music, Nostalgia and Psychedelics
Written by: MADELINE FERGUSON
Recently I came across a TED talk that helped bring coherency to a bunch of thoughts I have had swirling in my head for quite some time regarding the power of music and how that power gets turned up to 11 when psychedelics are involved.
The talk was titled “The neuroscience of psychedelic drugs, music and nostalgia”. It was given by neuroscientist Frederick Streeter Barrett, who has spent time studying how music can evoke nostalgia and meaningful experiences that better connect us to ourselves. He then studied how music and psychedelics could help take these experiences to the next level.
It’s no secret that concerts are often a setting where people experiment with psychedelic drugs. And oftentimes, people recount these experiences of combining live music with psychedelics as some of the most profound experiences of their lives. Just look at the impact of the Grateful Dead acid tests from the 60s.
Now, scientists are opening their eyes to the healing properties of psychedelics for depression, PTSD, anxiety and many other mental health problems people are suffering from at alarming rates across the world. It was only a matter of time before someone connected the power of music to this growing body of research.
“I’ve found that music and psychedelics can impact our well-being in powerful and complementary ways,” said Barrett. “ Music can have a powerful impact on our emotions and a measurable impact on the brain. Psychedelic drugs under the right circumstances may have therapeutic effects … together and leveraged in a purposeful fashion music and psychedelics may have an even greater impact on patients.”
Barrett first studied music’s ability to evoke nostalgia. He found that the emotion of nostalgia lights up the brain and recruits activity from all over. While powerful in the moment, he learned that this music evoked positive feeling eventually fades, the researchers then wondered, how do we make these emotions stick to help people heal?
It turns out, psychedelics could make that emotion last longer, having far greater impact.
“I quickly began to learn how deeply a piece of music can impact a person’s psychedelic experience,” Barrett said, speaking of his time on a team of researchers studying psychedelics at Johns Hopkins.
He described research where people were given a playlist to listen to during a psychedelic experience and most of the time, people ask for the playlist so they can revisit it at a later time.
Listening to the playlist at a later time will likely bring back some of those warm and fuzzy emotions experienced during the trip, which sounds a lot like… nostalgia. The songs act as a touchstone to take your brain back to that place.
“We found that the entire brain was listening to music and psychedelics were turning up the gain,” he described.
This rigid study likely sounds very familiar to anyone who's ever listened to music while on psychedelics. It’s magical. And those positive effects can provide just enough of a break in the negatives of daily life (for those with and without mental health problems) to be able to glimpse a new perspective on the path to healing. Being able to revisit that break could prove to be very powerful.
