Music and the Flow State
One of the most dramatic effects of music’s power is the induction of trance states, which have been described by ethnomusicologists in nearly every culture.” — Oliver Sacks, The Power of Music - Brain
Jaguar Shaman Dancing
Music and the Flow State
A flow state is a mental state of total absorption in an activity or process. In a flow state you are not distracted by self judgement or past references or comparisons. A flow state is an experience of the perceptual present, the now.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist, Claremont Graduate University, coined the term Flow State.
Because of the way music unfolds through time, it has the power to carry us through tasks in a way that enhances and facilitates a flow state. Work becomes focused and more like play, an enhanced state of awareness where all faculties come to bear on the task at hand, beyond prescribed formulas of action. This is an intuitive creative attention, the state an artist enters to create. While an artistic state might be called work, in a flow state it is more like play, with an openness to discovery and a trust in emotional cues. Intuitive information is available faster and more mysteriously than while following logical and formulaic approaches. My album Flow was created in that spirit of playfulness and is often used in Myofascial self-care, dance and theater therapies such as Interplay, as well as in therapy sessions.
“A fascinating aspect of humans is their capacity to experience feelings of pleasure from highly complex patterns of auditory or visual stimulation such as music and artwork. Intriguingly, as it is the case for music, these activities do not provide survival values, as primary pleasures (such as food or sex) do, thus raising questions about the ultimate goal of the reward-related signals they can induce in most humans and the neural circuits underlying such particular pleasure.
Dopamine modulates the reward experiences elicited by music.
Previous research has consistently shown that music-evoked pleasure is accompanied by physiological changes in the autonomous nervous system, as well as modulation of the mesolimbic reward pathway, which are similar to those found in response to primary (such as sex or food) and secondary rewards (e.g., money). Notably, a PET study found that, similar to the processing of biologically relevant rewards, preferred music induces dopamine release in striatal regions, particularly in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the caudate. These findings have led to a model whereby the recruitment of dopaminergic circuits by music—through communication with sensory and cognitive areas involved in the processing of musical information—would result into changes in emotional intensity and arousal, leading to pleasurable and rewarding feelings.”
Laura Ferreri et al - Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, 08907 Barcelona, Spain;
Studies show the dopamine reward system is engaged in music cognition.
Therapeutic music and the flow state
The focus of “healing music “ has very much been on the patient, but in the therapy setting there is another very important participant, the therapist. If the therapist can use music to enter a flow state this focused, centered flow will benefit the patient through the power of entrainment. This is the very nature of the healer patient relationship. Healing is a form of entrainment, where the patient is given the opportunity to reorganize their energy and metabolism at a higher state through the centered participation of the healer/therapist. If the therapist is in a flow state the session will be significantly more efficient and effective. Since entrainment provides momentum, music enhances healing through the metabolic shifts inherent in the relaxation response experienced by the patient, but also by the organized centeredness of the therapist. This therapist/patient resonant field is a kind of fusion-meld of consciousness, a deeply focused social entrainment localized to two participants in a treatment room. Mindful music can facilitate and support a flow state for the therapist and simultaneously allow a relaxation response for the patient.
Creating an entrainment soundtrack needs to accommodate both the relaxation response for the patient and the focused flow state for the therapist.
Music in therapy is a subset of Functional Music. With the development of streaming audio, it can be argued that most music is now consumed as functional background music rather than focused, intentionally chosen entertainment.
How has this happened?
Music created as art, from artistic inspiration, and then packaged for commercial release ends up being used in a utilitarian fashion, background in a waiting room, ambience in a coffee house. Where once music was communication from artist to fan increasingly the artist is part of a playlist of similar stylings in the near universal need to pave over silence without commanding full attention. Our daily sound track as we move from malls to cafes to waiting rooms, our cars, and even in our private moments, contains a wash of music that distracts without engaging too much.
This leverage of the power of musical entrainment is the great secret of streaming services, playlists curated increasingly by sophisticated algorithms that analyze behavior and performance, history and preferences. It can seem as if the algorithm is reading your mind, providing a stream of mildly satisfying music. It achieves this through a process of anticipation based on accumulated data. Your previous choices, playlists cross referenced with analysis of other people like you leads to a curated stream of music tailored to your tastes. It can even approximate a flow state, but sooner or later your musical genius mind will become bored. These algorithmically curated playlists do not connect with the universal flow the way human creations do.
The algorithm forgets that you are human and therefore that you are a musical genius. Just because you don’t play an instrument or compose sonatas doesn’t mean you don’t have the same musical creative abilities as Beethoven or Prince. You still possess the power of appreciation and the innate ability to alchemize music into emotion via a powerful biochemistry that no AI can begin to approximate. Noticing how music makes you feel is the first step to moving beyond the algorithm. The machine can’t do this. It can only analyze the past and find patterns in past behavior. In this way the algorithm is perpetually out of the flow of time. When the stream of music seems perfect it is not the machine that made it so. It was your musical genius mind that found the patterns in the flow of music and the flow of time.
So what does this have to do with the Flow State? A musically enhanced flow state can be characterized as rhythmic entrainment combined with an intentional light focus. Music has always had the power to engage and motivate human imagination while synchronizing movement and metabolism. This combination of metabolic ease, relaxed heart rate, deeper respiration, and focused attention defines the flow state. The flow state has been characterized as being timeless, focused and satisfying.
Because music evolves over time, it helps keep the mind lightly engaged with the harmonic and melodic symbolism while the metabolism entrains physically to the rhythmic tempo of the music, subconsciously adjusting heart rate and respiration, as well as potentially altering brainwave states in response to the oscillations in the waveforms of the music.
Our usual thinking is concerned with events outside ourselves. Music can facilitate the Inner Journey, the opening of awareness of essence through the universality of sound, waveforms welling up from the sound current, invoking Oneness. To quote the great English poet Lord Tennyson music can evoke an almost mystical state “. . . All at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest . . . utterly beyond words — where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. . . .” Letter to Benjamin Paul Blood from Alfred Lord Tennyson 1874
The perceptual present is fluid, and in this sense, time is also fluid. In music the paradox is that slower tempo, a slower flow of information, can change our perception of time. It can expand the perceptual present, unlocking the infinite sense of timelessness. Music in the therapeutic space is beyond entertainment. While it leverages the dopamine reward system it also boosts oxytocin, the biochemical that enhances trust and bonding in the human psyche.
Most of us modern humans have grown up with a view of music fulfilling a role of entertainment while also establishing tribal identity through cultural association. The latent powers of music have become co-opted by commerce. The belief in the healing forces of rhythm and melody and harmony belong to another time, another understanding. People still use music to relax, to connect, to move, but the wondrousness of this power is often taken for granted. When the sequencing of the musical flow is outsourced and not set up intentionally this power is diminished.
There is a fundamental difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is involuntary, Listening is an act of will, a conscious choice. It is like breathing. Breathing can be automatic, but it can also be intentional.
Beyond hearing and listening, there is a third state of music consumption, immersion. This is often what happens in therapy. The patient has entered the hypnagogic dream state and is experiencing a relaxation response. The right music, typically ambient with a slower tempo around 60 bpm - 75 bpm can be processed in the state between hearing and listening, in the immersive state.
Music is an expected adjunct to manual therapy in a treatment space, particularly when the treatment is one on one in an enclosed room. The value of music in this setting has led to the development of a genre of music that is loosely categorized as spa and has search tags of healing, massage, relaxing, ambient, new age. Mostly defined by elements of music that are missing, such as loud drums, engaging vocals, and jazz chordal complexity, spa music fills a spatial void. It has been described as “aural wall paper” and while it adds color to the scene it often adds little structure or support.
My albums Primal, Manu, and Well of Ancestors all contribute to somato-emotional shift states and are an integral part of the healing experience.
Music in therapy draws upon the great tradition of healing sound. Forest Bathing, my latest release, is more than background, and has the potential to be therapeutic in ways that combine the power of physical vibration, vibro-acoustics, and mental emotional symbolism. Music is a true mind/body tool in the therapeutic setting.
A fundamental role of a vibrational harmonic sound or tone is the facilitation of the Relaxation Response. This is similar to the Shamanic State of Consciousness, a shared state with blissful creative awareness, opening the channel to self healing as a co creative dance.
“…there appears to be common elements in almost all cultures which enable individuals to periodically change their everyday mode of thinking…” The relaxation response p109, Herbert Benson MD
Creating a therapeutic playlist is a form of therapeutic art.
To understand how to use music and how to build the framework for a healing progression the first thing to determine is groove, the Tempo and motion of the music. Layering tracks is like creating a collage, the tracks need to flow together with similar tonalities and tempo range to create an overall mood, a sense of motion as well as a sense of safety. This is a precise and detailed skill your musical genius mind has evolved to master. I can talk about music theory and the physics of sound but ultimately it is a ‘feel’ thing. There will be more about this in an upcoming bulletin and future book, The Art of Entrainment.
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