Hi there,
In 1968 a violinist named Helen Bonny took a job at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Her role was choosing the music for LSD sessions. She arrived at a conclusion that sounded eccentric at the time: that music was the primary mover of the therapeutic process.
Almost a half-century later, a Dutch neuroscientist decided to investigate her thesis.
Mendel Kaelen grew up in rural Holland and has played music his whole life. Midway through his neuroscience studies he took a year out to sit with ayahuasca in the Amazon. In 2012 he arrived at Imperial College London, joined David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris, and started scanning people's brains to understand the role of music in psychedelic journeys.
His first study showed LSD amplifying specific music-evoked emotions, wonder and transcendence among them.
Then came the result that shifted the field. Kaelen interviewed 19 people who had taken psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. How patients experienced the music predicted how much their depression lifted a week later. The intensity of the drug did not.
Music went wrong too. Some patients described feeling misguided by it, and spent the session resisting it.
Which raises the obvious question. What should be playing? The default answer has long been Western classical. A Johns Hopkins team tested that against overtone-based music, gongs and bowls and didgeridoo, and found no advantage for the canon. Most participants picked the overtone playlist for their third session.
He left academia to build Wavepaths, a system that composes music adapting to a person in real time during a session. It has since supported more than 50,000 clinical sessions.
His argument now reaches past accompaniment. Music, approached with real attention, can be psychedelic in its own right. Soul-revealing. Something that brings into awareness what wasn't there a moment before.
Dr Mendel Kaelen is running a two-hour online workshop on 27 August on the science and art of therapeutic playlist design, drawn from fifteen years of research and practice:
If you want to go considerably deeper, his nine-month training, Foundations of Therapeutic Music, opens in September. Get 10% off with code PSYSOC10
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