Release date Feb 6, 2026
Guest Website : https://musicandhealing.net
Whether it’s rock and roll, classical, hip hop, or rap, most people enjoy music in one form or another. (Even newborn babies respond to it.) But why? What is going on in our brains when we hear our favorite tunes? Dr. Barbara Minton, a psychotherapist and neuroscientist, studies exactly how our brains react to various types of music, to provide targeted music therapy. And she goes one step further. As a musician herself, she is also creating the music, specifically designed for our brains, blending art and science to better harness its power to heal.
Phil Stieg
Whether we play music to relax, to dance, to recharge, or perhaps to evoke happy memories, it’s clear that music affects our mood or more specifically, our brains. It’s this powerful connection that is used in various forms of therapy to help patients with chronic pain, Parkinson’s, brain injury, and dementia. But what exactly is happening in our brains when we hear music? Do the various elements like tempo and rhythm affect different parts of the brain? And how do our brains react to a symphony versus rock music, a lullaby, or a love song?
Dr. Barbara Minton, a neuroscientist, therapist, and musician, is with us today to discuss her groundbreaking work, creating a new type of music that is both informed by and created specifically for the brain.
Barbara, thank you being with us today.
Barbara Minton
Thank you for having me. We’ll have a fun conversation.
Phil Stieg
I look forward to it. This is quite a mix for an individual. You’re a neuroscientist, you’re a psychologist, and you are also a musician. How did that come together? How did that play out in your life so that you ended up where you are now?
Barbara Minton
A few years ago, I was asked to write a chapter for an academic book on this subject, and I really had not read a lot of the research in this area. And honestly, it blew me away. I could not believe the studies that were lurking in these academic journals that hadn’t gotten out into the real world. And I was stunned. I started reading these studies about how people who were depressed, their depression improved by 40 to 50 % just by listening listening to music, certain music, not just any music. And I started reading about stroke recovery with music, all these things. And I just started thinking, oh, my gosh, we should be… Like, music is so cheap, and there’s really no side effects. Why are we not using this alongside with every other intervention we do? It makes so much sense. Music just lowers our heart rate and creates less what we call sympathetic nervous system activity. We’re less amped and more relaxed.
And the research on chronic pain is so interesting, too, because there’s actually now some studies that show that if you listen to music long term and you have chronic pain, it actually does seem to make the pain less over time.
So I start reading all these things, and I’m just like, holy cow. I got to do something about this because I am a musician. I know enough about the brain. I know enough about EEG. I think We might as well try this. And that’s really what we got, how I got into this.
Phil Stieg
I’ve got to ask then, in what disease is the pipe organ effective? I know, right?
Barbara Minton
Well, I’ll tell you something interesting about the pipe organ. I got obsessed with learning to play the guitar several years ago, and it was actually my first guitar teacher, a guy named Callum Graham, who’s from British Columbia. A wonderful guy. And I had told him, I was like, Wow, we were working on this song. I think it would sound cool on the pipe organ. And he said, You should do that. And I never… I said it as a joke, but I actually sat down and started working with the pipe organ, and then I realized that the frequency you can create with the pipe organ. So for example, you can get down into these lower frequencies that are very hard to get with other instruments. And I realized that it would make a very deep, resonant calming tone within which the other music could rest. And so that’s what we did on this album, “Calm the Storm”.
Phil Stieg
Yeah. You’d probably be happy to know. My daughter just gave birth to a child that’s eight weeks old, and she just informed me this past weekend that she finds Frank Sinatra to be very soothing. Who knows? And that led me to another thought with you. What’s the difference between the brain that says Led Zeppelin is relaxing and the other brain that says, Oh my God, this is just driving me crazy. It’s too agitating. What’s going on there?
Barbara Minton
Man, that is such a great question. So first answer, I don’t completely know. Second answer, I have a couple of case studies on this. And let me tell you about it.
So the first album I did was an album called Tasakaal, which means balance in Estonian. I did this with Callum Graham, and we were just trying to compose music to create different what we call band. So beta would be that bright, bushy tailed wave, right? High beta would be really on, et cetera. We did this song that has electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums, very fast paced, everything we know from the research that should amp people up.
We collected data on 27 people. Most of them said, Yes, I feel happy and energized. But I think two or three said, That is the most relaxing music. I just love to listen to that because it makes me feel so relaxed and calm. And I said, Wow, just like you did. Wow, what is going on here? So I went back and looked at all their data, and it turns out that these are people whose brains are very, very fast. Their baseline firing is extremely fast.
So if you think about it, if you’re like super-hyped or super-anxious and somebody plays you something just a little more calming, even though it’s still pretty fast, you’re going to experience that as calming. And that is my hypothesis about what is going on with that.
Phil Stieg
So that leads me then to the question about music and therapy, say in the autistic spectrum, where individuals are incredibly focused, incredibly intense, often in the genius spectrum. Where does music play in therapy for that type of individual?
Barbara Minton
I would guess that a music therapist that specialized in people with autism spectrum disorder could give you a better answer to that than I can. What I will say is that this is really where we need to go back to personalized approaches. I want to come back to what you said about Led Zeppelin or heavy metal and PTSD for a minute because I got really interested in why do many of my clients with PTSD listen to heavy metal?
I had one teen who would go down in the Mosh and get all beat up. You would think you’re in such a heightened level of arousal. Things are swirling around in your head when you have PTSD, you’re ruminating about horrible stuff. Well, I realized that what happens is when you get down there in the Mosh pit and heavy metal is playing, it eliminates all that. The only thing that is existing in your mind is that music. It’s overtaking you. I think heavy metal is very important this way because it drives everything else out of your mind. And because of that, she felt such relief. And she would go to heavy metal concerts a couple of times a week.
Phil Stieg
To relax.
Barbara Minton
To relax. To get rid of that swirling trauma.
Phil Stieg
A day in the life of Barbara Minton, you’ve got somebody coming in, and they’ve got anxiety or depression in their life. And how do you do your neurofeedback, integrate the music and make it work for them?
Barbara Minton
Neurofeedback and talk therapy are very synergistic. So neurofeedback normalizes the brain so the talk therapy works better. And that could either be with me or another therapist. So some of my clients see their other talk therapist and come to me to do neurofeedback. Then we might ask them, Would you like to try listening to music?
Phil Stieg
I was going to say; where does the music fit into the neurofeedback?
Barbara Minton
Let’s say they have anxiety, we will say, Well, Dr. Minton has this album, Calm the Storm, if you’d like to listen to it while you’re training. Most people say, yes, I’d like to give it a try. And if they do, what happens is, theoretically, it should make the neurofeedback work faster because the music is helping cue the brain.
You want to play one?
Phil Stieg
Yeah.
Barbara Minton
So this piece is actually written by the music partner, Pepino D’Agostino, that I worked with. And this is a melody that he wrote that we revised in order to fit the parameters of the brain. And so I’ve actually used this song with several of my clients that have insomnia
Let’s say you’re one of my talk therapy clients, and you come in and you’re like, Man, I’ve tried everything. I cannot sleep at night. I’m ruminating. I would say, Listen to this album three times a day. Just lie down, Let your mind follow the melodies, listen to it, and let’s see what happens. And I have one client who has terrible PTSD, and the events that created the PTSD happened at night. So this person has not been able to sleep in over 50 years, and they started to sleep after listening to this album.
And I think it’s the repetitive input that’s so important, that calmed the brain down, and it felt safe. So there’s something about many of these songs that create a sense of safety, and the brain appreciates that, and will take that in.
Phil Stieg
It seems to me so commonsensical. As I was listening to that piece, it reminded me of when you go to a spa, and they have the aroma in the background, and they have you laying there waiting to get a massage. They’re playing that peaceful soul-searching music, which is helpful.
Barbara Minton
Yeah, it’s helpful to many of us. I’ll argue against myself and give you a little bit of a counter-example. When you’re waiting on the phone on hold and they play music like this, no. Context is everything. So when you go to the spa, you’re seeking a certain experience. I think they should not play relaxing music when you’re on hold on the phone. They should play something a little bit.
Phil Stieg
Something upbeat.
Barbara Minton
I don’t know. I don’t know if anything would work.
Phil Stieg
Enjoy the torture of your wait. Enjoy.
Barbara Minton
Oh, yeah. So play Cool Breeze, because it has more of a Bossa Nova flavor to it. See what it reminds you of.
Phil Stieg
I have to say that as I was listening to this, instead of thinking of cool breeze, I was thinking of a warm breeze sitting on the ocean beach.
Barbara Minton
There you go. That works for me.
Phil Stieg
It’s context.
Barbara Minton
Context is everything. This one, I’m actually playing electric the piano behind the guitar. Pupino is playing the guitar, and the other ones I’m mostly playing pipe organ behind. And you can see this has a little bit more of a happy, upbeat, even though it’s still very calming. Like you said, lying on the beach, very calming, but it has a little bit different of an emotional tone to it.
Phil Stieg
So tell me, Two beautiful pieces. I like them both. How do you transform that into therapy for the patient.
Barbara Minton
Yeah. So we know certain types of music create certain states. The difference is that I’m trying to get a more powerful effect by holding the music to certain parameters, and then also collecting the pre and post brain images of people who have listened to these to see if it’s actually working.
Phil Stieg
So when you say parameters, what do you mean? Tempo, beat, cadence? Is that what you’re referring to?
Barbara Minton
Yeah, exactly. So tempo, timbre. So timbre is a very interesting one because the same note played on a piccolo versus a trumpet versus an oboe, the timbre is the color of a sound. So this is played with nylon string guitar. It’s a very warm intimate sound. So the timbre becomes important.
And then chords are another very important part of music. If we play major chords, they tend to feel more happy. If we play minor cords, they tend to feel more sad, and there’s more and more nuances to that. And then, phrasing. Phrasing is like the length of a sentence in music would be analogous to that. If you have a lot of little, short phrases; ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, it gives you a different effect.
Phil Stieg
You mentioned that you’re monitoring, and I wanted to get into that a little bit. I don’t want to get in the weeds, but the quantitative EEG that you use. Do you use the other devices where you measure sweat and heart rate and respiratory rate and all that and maybe even functional MRI.
Barbara Minton
Yeah. I wish I had an fMRI machine, access to an fMRI machine, because fMRI… Well, fMRIs are really great. Functional MRI really looks at where is the blood flowing in the brain? An idea is that the blood goes to the places in the brain where it’s most active. When you look at fMRI studies on music, what you find is that different genres of music activate very different parts of the brain. I love these studies. They’re just so beautiful to see how a known piece of music It affects the brain differently than an unknown piece of music. It affects the brain differently than language. ==Music pacing or tempo or rhythm gets encoded in very, very primitive parts of the brain that existed prior to even when we probably had a cortex. And so these are considered to be universal.
Interstitial theme
Narrator
We all get them. They just get stuck in your head — You don’t know how it got there – or how you’re ever going to get it to stop. Let’s take a moment to examine a most curious (and occasionally annoying) musical phenomenon; …. Earworms!
You know them – those little fragments of music that keep playing over and over inside your head. Despite the name, we are relieved to report that they are not actual worms. Nor do they actually reside inside your ears.
The experience of music involves many different parts of the brain. Researchers at Dartmouth University have found that earworms seem to reside in the “Auditory Cortex” – which they describe as functioning somewhat like your brain’s “i-Pod.”
As a part of the study, the research team played familiar tunes to volunteers while scanning their brains in an MRI machine.
Recorded music – echo of guy humming along
As the volunteers listened to the music, their auditory cortex lit up. But – when the music suddenly cut out … the auditory cortex kept going… The tune played on in their heads – and an earworm had been hatched!
The researchers likened this to “perception in reverse” – music coming from memories deep inside your head instead of sounds from outside your head.
So, … how do you stop an earworm from nagging you all day long? Some people swear by the use of “eraser tunes”. Like swallowing the spider to catch the fly, one simply thinks of a “catchier” melody to drive out the annoying earworm.
Start humming “There was an old lady…”
Of course, there’s always a risk that the new tune will lodge in your brain as a “replacement earworm”, … starting the whole process all over again…
Phil Stieg
One of the most fascinating things I learned was the different neural connections within the brain that are involved with singing versus speech. I was thinking more along the line, somebody that has a really difficult time verbalizing whatever emotional situation they’re coping with. But if you play music or sing through it, do they find it more palatable, easier to communicate that way?
Barbara Minton
Well, tell me if this answers your question. Pepino and I do this workshop called Music, the Brain, and healing. I talk a little bit about the brain, and then I have him play music to give the example of what’s going on. And what happens every single workshop is people say, “Oh, my gosh, something just let loose. I remember my mom said so and so to me when I was 15 years old, and how it just was so wonderful, and it changed my life.” Or they might say, I remember this or that.
And what’s happening, I think, is music is creating a portal to access certain types of information that otherwise might not be accessed. And we know that the music and the language networks do overlap. So if I had a stroke and it affected the language centers of my brain, that’d be the first thing I’d do is put on the music, man, because I want those areas to be stimulated.
Phil Stieg
I had a patient that had a stroke, and she reiterates how important having her earpods in was important for her recovery.
Barbara Minton
Totally believe it. Let me give you another really cool example. The pain network.
The pain network is super interesting, and there are several networks that work together, registering pain. There’s the network that actually registers the sensation of the pain. There’s the network that registers how much you suffer from the pain. That’s the suffering network. And then there’s the network that registers how much attention you paid to the pain, the salience network. What’s salient.
And so you can actually, in neurofeedback, you can down train these different networks. You can make the registration, in other words, make the brain less sensitive to the pain, or you can just say, “Well, I don’t care if I feel the pain. I just don’t want to suffer from it”. So you train the suffering network. I mean, it’s really pretty cool. But let’s think about Cool Breeze for a minute, that song we just played a minute ago, and I said it’s a little more happy, light-hearted. So if you think about this and you think, I’m in pain and I’m going to play this cool breeze song, it’s going to calm down how intensely I feel the pain. But it also evokes, it makes the emotional centers of the brain a little happier.
And so wouldn’t that be nice to experience this? And so this would be neuroscience-informed music. We’re thinking about the neuroscience of the brain and how the brain works and constructing the music to affect those different brain networks.
We like to have simple answers, right? Like, music does this to us. Well, music doesn’t do that to you. Music combines with what you bring to the situation to create something else. And I would say that’s the same thing about pop music, heavy metal, reggae. Everybody who… You don’t listen to reggae and all of a sudden, and start smoking weed and get high every day and move out and live on the beach and grow your hair long, right? The music doesn’t cause that in you. We’re making an illusory correlation here.
So I think there’s a lot of room to think in a more nuanced way about music. And one way you can do that for yourself is to not think so much about whether you like the music or not. But the next time you listen to a piece of music, think about how it’s registering in your body. Think about, is my heart beating faster or slower? Am I feeling more amped or am I feeling more relaxed?
Phil Stieg
But which of those characteristics is good and bad? Sometimes you want your heart to beat faster. Sometimes you want to feel amped, right?
Barbara Minton
Yeah, exactly. And that’s why maybe you want to have different playlists for different things. If I want to be concentrating — I mean, think about it in the operating room. So if you’re operating on somebody, you want to be alert, but not over-aroused, but not under-aroused.
Phil Stieg
I don’t let anybody play music.
Barbara Minton
You don’t do music?
Phil Stieg
No, I want total attention on the task at hand. A lot of people do play music.
Barbara Minton
Here’s what I’ll tell you that’s so interesting to me about that comment; your brain has a very high capacity for focus. And you see this among musicians. I’ll go out with a musician friend to a restaurant, and they’re like, I can’t go to any restaurant that plays music. Because immediately, the music takes over and they can’t pay attention to the conversation.
Phil Stieg
Good luck with finding a restaurant that doesn’t play music these days. Yeah, I know, right?
Barbara Minton
Yeah, you eat at home, I guess. But what that tells me about you is that you’re paying attention to how that music is registering for you. And you’re saying, you know what? This is not optimizing me. This is actually making me worse. And if I’m in the operating room, I want to be optimized. And quiet, silence is a huge form of music. In a lot of ways, we don’t get enough silence.
Phil Stieg
I wanted you to touch a little bit upon your concept of mind track and how you’re trying to develop music that goes to specific parts of the brain. This, I want to hear how you do that. So explain mind track.
Barbara Minton
It’s so funny. Do you know that old program, Garage Band? It came out with Apple, and it was like, you could not really play the guitar, but you could play the guitar. And I thought, Oh, man, wouldn’t that be cool to be able to have garage band in your brain?
You could have one part of your brain playing the drums, one part of your brain playing the lead guitar, and another part of your brain playing the piano in the background.
y daughter is a computer scientist, and I said, Hey, I can track all these different parts of the brain and what they’re doing. Can you make a program that if I give you tracks of music that will play the tracks to the different parts of the brain? And then we’ll give it signals that they have to reach a certain threshold in order for the music to play. And she was like, Yeah, I can do that. And I said, Okay, and that’s what mind track does.
And the first client I tried it with, I just put together a super simple song, and I said, Hey, you want to just try this? And she And I said, Yeah. And I said, Okay. I think it was flute, oboe, and pads. Pads are like these soft background cords. And I said, Okay, well, your job is to make the flute and the oboe play.
And she was one of these people with chronic anxiety for 20 years. It was horrible, just horrible torture. And she really got into it. The next time she came, she was like, I want to do that again. And she did that for 60 hours, 60 hours. And at the end, she said, I’m not anxious anymore. My life has completely changed. And she said, Can I take a recording of that song home with me? And I was really stunned, but I said, yes. And I think then it reminded her, it reminded her brain to go back into that state whenever she heard that song. And it was so exciting to see that and it’s so gratifying.
Phil —
At some point, I usually ask the “Aha question”, what transformed? But you’ve given me multiple Aha situations in your life.
Phil Stieg
I want to get a little bit scientific here is, can you give us any data on music and how it affects well-being and healing in the brain.
You know as well as I do that anxiety, depression, and loneliness are the three major psychological issues that people are coping with in America. So what does music do for one or for those three?
Barbara Minton
Okay, so let me tell you for anxiety, we know a lot about anxiety associated with procedures. In other words, Going to the dentist, having a biopsy, having an operation. Everybody should listen to music because it calms that sympathetic nervous system arousal. It’ll help you get through the experience. It’ll help you heal faster because if you’re anxious, your immune system is impacted by that. You have cortisol, all these other chemicals going through your system. You want to use music. That’s a huge effect. I think the effect of 40 to 50 % improvement in depression is huge.
Phil Stieg
For me, it’s funny whenever I miss my mother, if I have “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” on, It allows me to reflect on my time with her on this planet. And it would seem to me unusual that that isn’t true for almost everybody, that there isn’t some piece of music or bits of music that help reflect on the meaningful parts of their lives.
Barbara Minton
I call these things Anthem songs, and I think they’re songs like Amazing Grace, for example, that’s been songs across so many genres. It doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or not religious, there’s something about these songs that speak to something very deep inside us, and using them intentionally can really change our lives.
I think this issue that we don’t think about them and our providers don’t think about it, probably the people who do the best job in the current traditional health care system, including psychology, I include my own field in this, is probably hospice. I know they’ve been most open to using music to help people with their emotions and the transitions that they’re going through. The rest of us has done a very poor job, I’d say.
Phil Stieg
Yeah. Has music ever played a therapeutic role in your life?
Barbara Minton
Well, I think every day.
Phil Stieg
Other than treating somebody. But I mean, personally.
Barbara Minton
Every day, I get up. Right now, I get up and I practice my guitar first thing in the morning, and it changes the 10 of my whole day. And when I get on and practice, I practice the pipe organ several times a week. It changes everything. I have to watch out that I don’t get myself overhyped, so I have to pay attention because when you practice, you repeat things over and over. So if you’re practicing a really fast passage, you can start to get yourself too high in the level of arousal. But yes, music is a huge part.
There’s a really wonderful guy named David Tannenbaum. He’s a classical guitarist, A plus level classical guitarist. And he said the other day, he plays concert so that he can practice. The practicing, the being with the music by himself and fully embodying that experience means everything.
And it’s such a gorgeous example of the impact of music. And by the way, musicians have less dementia than other people, and certain parts of their brain, their cortex is bigger. And I think this just says a lot about the richness, the true richness of what music can do for us.
Phil Stieg
Dr. Barbara Minton, thank you so much for taking the time to explain to us the impact that music has on our lives. It’s so important, and I hope that over time people start to understand. Music is so important. Thank you for being with us today.
Barbara Minton
Well, thank you so much. It was just a joy, as I hope you can tell, to chat with you.
