Music

4 1 With this purpose, he set sail, and came first to Crete. Here he studied the various forms of government and made the acquaintance of their most distinguished men. Of some things he heartily approved, and adopted some of their laws, that he might carry them home with him and put them in use; for some things he had only contempt. One of the men regarded there as wise statesmen was Thales, whom Lycurgus persuaded, out of favour and friendship, to go on a mission to Sparta. Now Thales passed as a lyric poet, and screened himself behind this art, but in reality he did the work of one of the mightiest lawgivers. 2 For his odes were so many exhortations to obedience and harmony, and their measured rhythms were permeated with ordered tranquillity, so that those who listened to them were insensibly softened in their dispositions, insomuch that they renounced the mutual hatreds which were so rife at that time, and dwelt together in a common pursuit of what was high and noble. Thales, therefore, after a fashion, was a forerunner in Sparta of Lycurgus and his discipline.

Men, he wrote, ‘should humbly try to remember how much they resemble dogs in their brain functions’.⁵⁷ Music crops up regularly in Sargant's Battle for the Mind and The Mind Possessed.⁵⁸ Although he suggested that the stimulation of jazz was exactly what the European mind needed after the First World War, he portrayed rock ‘n’ roll as a genuine and alarming threat to the mind.⁵⁹ He wrote that, ‘From the Stone Age to Hitler, from the Beatles to the modern “pop” culture, the brain of man has been constantly swayed by the same physiological techniques. Reason is dethroned, the normal brain computer is temporarily put out of action, and new ideas and beliefs are uncritically accepted’.⁶⁰ Sargant underlined the potential power of musical brainwashing when he suggested that loud rock music had been used to brainwash the heiress-turned-bank-robber Patty Hearst.⁶¹

^Meerloo wrote more about music in his later book Dance Craze and Sacred Dance, where he displayed a very ambivalent attitude to rock music. He explicitly stated that ‘the contagious rhythm of Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is ‘a form of rhythmic mass hypnosis’.⁶³ Although he made it clear that rock ‘n’ roll is just another dance craze that will burn itself out, he argues that it ‘may go over into the madness of oblivion and self-destruction’.⁶⁴ Meerloo and Sargant were thus crucial in taking earlier theories of automatic response to sound from Charcot to Pavlov and applying them to the budding cultural and political struggles of the 1960s.

From this website http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338126/