Stefan Kölsch Good Vibrations: Unlocking the Healing Power of Music Cambridge University Press 346 pages, 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches ISBN 978-1009366779
Stefan Kölsch
On Good Vibrations: Unlocking the Healing Power of Music
Interview of
December 27, 2025
In a nutshell
Good Vibrations is a book about the healing power of music: how it affects our brains, our emotions, and ultimately our health. Most people have heard that music can be good for us. What I wanted to do in this book is to show why this is true, and how it works.
Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, and everyday experience, I explore how music activates biological and emotional systems that are deeply linked to wellbeing. When we listen to or make music, almost the entire brain becomes active: areas involved in emotion, movement, memory, language, and even the immune and hormonal systems. These activations are not random, but they are the reason why music can calm us, energise us, and sometimes even heal us.
The book combines scientific explanation with real stories, showing what happens when music is used in therapy, in hospitals, or simply in daily life. It explains, for example, how music can reduce stress by regulating the body’s autonomic nervous system, namely the system that controls heartbeat, breathing, and digestion. It shows how music strengthens social bonds, promotes empathy, and releases neurochemicals such as dopamine and endorphins that support pleasure, trust, and connection. And it also describes how the wrong kind of music, or music in the wrong context, can have the opposite effect, reinforcing sadness, anxiety, or aggression.
At a deeper level, Good Vibrations is also about what it means to be human. Music connects us to one another and to ourselves. It has evolved with us as a biological and social force: a language of emotion that predates words, and one that still reaches where words cannot.
I wrote the book so that readers can not only understand the science, but also use it. Each chapter contains practical insights and simple exercises that can help readers apply music to reduce stress, improve mood, and nurture emotional balance.
I hope readers will not just read this book with their eyes, but listen with their whole being, to discover that music is not simply decoration for our lives, but one of the most powerful medicines we already possess.
The wide angle
Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book, I show that this view has changed dramatically. Music is now understood as a biological force that shapes the brain, regulates emotion, and supports health.
When I began my PhD, more than twenty years ago, this shift had not yet happened. At that time, fMRI studies on music and emotion did not exist. I proposed one, and my professors asked, quite genuinely: “Why should music activate any important emotion structures in the brain? It’s not food, not sex, not a dangerous animal – it’s only music.”
I replied that, for many people (including myself) music can evoke profound emotions, sometimes with strong physical reactions: goosebumps, tears, changes in heart rate. Fortunately, they let me conduct the study, which later became one of the most cited in the field. But this story illustrates a widespread belief of that time: that music might be “nice,” but it was not really emotional in a biological sense. Over the past two decades, that view has been revolutionised. We now know that music can influence activity in all emotion systems of the brain, from those processing pleasure and reward to those regulating fear, sadness, or social bonding.
This understanding is crucial for explaining the therapeutic power of music. If music engages the same brain systems that govern emotion, motivation, stress regulation, and social connection, then it can also help restore balance when these systems are dysregulated. That is one of the central ideas of the book: music is not just something we enjoy. It is something that can change us, biologically and emotionally.
My path to this book has therefore been both scientific and deeply personal. As a musician, I have always felt music’s power to move and heal. As a neuroscientist, I wanted to understand how it works. Good Vibrations brings these two sides together, showing that music is not a luxury, but a fundamental part of what makes us human, and one of the most natural ways to foster wellbeing, empathy, and health.
A close-up
Good Vibrations is written so that readers can open it anywhere and immediately find something that speaks to them. You can simply turn to a chapter that connects with what matters to you right now: perhaps the sections about emotional wellbeing, stress reduction, and resilience; or those about how music helps people with dementia, stroke, or Parkinson’s disease; or the chapters showing how music can support children whose language or learning develops in atypical ways.
Each chapter can stand on its own. Some readers might be most interested in the neuroscience, how music engages the brain’s networks for emotion, movement, and memory, or how it influences hormones and the immune system. Others might turn to the practical sections that explain how music can help in everyday situations: how it can calm anxiety, support concentration, ease chronic pain, or help someone reconnect with loved ones through song.
One reader with Parkinson’s disease told me after finishing the relevant chapter: “Every patient should know this!” I was deeply moved by that comment, because that is precisely why I wrote the book—to make scientific knowledge about the effects of music accessible to everyone who could benefit from it, whether they are patients, family members, or therapists.
Another reader, Martyn Ware (the founder of The Human League and Heaven 17) told me that he began by reading the chapter about music and emotions in the brain, planning to mark the most interesting passages for our podcast conversation. After a few pages, he gave up because he realised he wanted to earmark every single page. I take that as the best possible compliment: that the book invites curiosity and feels alive wherever you open it.
Ultimately, this book is for everyone who feels that music has something profound to offer: whether you are a musician curious about the science behind your art, a music therapist looking for new tools, a healthcare professional, or simply someone seeking balance, joy, or healing. Wherever you open Good Vibrations, I hope you will find words that enlighten, encourage, and inspire. And that the “good vibrations” of the book itself will begin to resonate within you.
Lastly
My hope is that the therapeutic power of music will be recognised and used much more widely than it is today. At the moment, music’s potential for health and healing is still massively underused. We live in a world that often treats health as something purely medical, something to be restored with pills, procedures, or protocols. But human beings are not just chemical systems; we are also emotional, social, and musical beings.
Music is not a replacement for medication, of course. The effects of music are usually smaller than those of a strong drug. A blood pressure tablet will lower your blood pressure more effectively than calming music; an opioid will suppress pain more quickly than a song; and dopamine medication for Parkinson’s disease has much stronger effects than the dopamine release evoked by music. Yet music has one unique advantage: it does all of this at the same time! It regulates heart rate and breathing, reduces stress hormones, stimulates dopamine, releases endorphins, strengthens social bonds, and brings pleasure and meaning. No pill can do all of that simultaneously, and without side effects.
So one wish is very practical: that we will use music more often in healthcare, in prevention, and in everyday life. In hospitals and clinics, where anxiety and loneliness are common, music can make care more humane. In schools, it can support emotional development, empathy, and resilience. In workplaces, it can reduce stress and foster cooperation. And at home, it can help us reconnect: with ourselves and with others.
But there is also a larger wish behind the book. In an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, where human contact risks being replaced by interaction with machines, music reminds us of what it means to be human. When we sing together, our breathing synchronises; our hearts, our movements, our emotions align. This is a deeply biological form of connection, one that has been evolutionarily tested for hundreds of thousands of years.
So if there is one message I hope Good Vibrations leaves with its readers, it is this: music is one of the most powerful ways to nurture both individual and collective wellbeing. It strengthens the mind, heals the body, and unites people across boundaries. And in a time when we need connection more than ever, I would choose the harmony of human voices over the artificial “connection” of machines. Any day.
