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.
