Brain Shaman
Brain Shaman is a philosophical and scientific journey towards better brain health. Michael Waite discusses how you can change your brain state and overall nervous system via behavior, nutrition, nature, and technology. Mental illness, addiction, and low brain function are destroying so many people and societies. By becoming increasingly disconnected from our natural mind-body-world and plugged into the artificial ones, we are getting sicker, weaker, and less free. We must become more conscious of how the information that we consume (in the form of action, food, drugs, sensory input, media, etc.) affects our brain. This podcast teaches you how to reconnect with your primordial nature, reprogram your brain, regain your freedom, and redirect your life.
Brain Shaman
Barbara Minton: How Music Heals the Brain | Episode 146
Barbara Minton is a psychologist and musician who creates neuroscience-informed music designed to support and heal the brain. In this episode, we explore the relationship between music and the brain, and how we can use it to guide or change our mental and emotional states.
We talk about how music affects the brain, the difference between making it and listening to it, and why different genres influence us in different ways. We get into transcendent and altered states, how music can support grief, loss, pain, insomnia, and emotional processing, and how individual differences like ADHD or PTSD shape the nervous system’s response. We also look at music as a tool for social connection and the unique experience of creating and playing music with others.
We discuss how different instruments feel to play, what makes the guitar and pipe organ special, and how music ties into memory. We explore how to use it deliberately to enhance learning and recall, why our emotional reactions to songs change over time, and how lyrics shape the way we see the world. We also explore why certain genres explode at particular moments in history, why pop music remains so consistently popular, which musical elements most strongly affect the brain, what it feels like to make and play music, how live music differs from recorded music, and the overall healing power of music.
Connect and Learn More
Website: musicandhealing.net
Album: Calm the Storm
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/barbara-minton-057957164
RESOURCES
People: Ana Lapwood, Aretha Franklin, Calum Graham, Freddie Mercury, Hans Berger, Peppino D’Agostino, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Songs: Amazing Grace, Pavane for a Dead Princess
Studies: Contrasting effects of music on reading comprehension in preadolescents with and without ADHD (Madjar et al., 2020), Human song: Separate neural pathways for melody and speech ( Hamilton, 2022)
