Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Science Series 5: Larry Sherman / Understanding Alzheimer’s, MS, Parkinson’s / Music & the Brain

Transcript

Science Series 5: Larry Sherman / Understanding Alzheimer’s, MS, Parkinson’s / Music & the Brain · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come TOGETHER.
• 0:15
  We're Live. Doctor Larry Sherman, Welcome.
• 0:17
  How are you? Great.
• 0:19
  Great to see you. Great to see you too.
• 0:21
  We are going to have so much fun I want to dive right into it.
• 0:25
  I had a whole list of your credentials, but I wanted to
• 0:33
  talk to you. The reason I reached out to you
• 0:35
  was to talk about neurodegenerative diseases.
• 0:38
  And I did see that on your, on your page.
• 0:40
  I forgot whether it was your website or university page that
• 0:43
  you that you also studied music in the brain.
• 0:45
  And so I wanted to talk about that as well.
• 0:48
  But why don't you, you know, you just told me about two seconds
• 0:51
  off air. But tell me a little bit about
• 0:54
  the main research that you do. And we kind of break that down
• 0:56
  from there. Sure.
• 0:58
  So I went a research laboratory out at the Oregon National
• 1:02
  Primate Research Center and at Oregon Health and Science
• 1:04
  University, which is a medical school in Oregon, in Portland,
• 1:07
  OR. And I'm a professor there.
• 1:10
  And my, my lab is focused on understanding ways to repair the
• 1:14
  brain or protect the brain in people with diseases like
• 1:18
  multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease or other
• 1:21
  forms of dementia. We made a, a really interesting
• 1:25
  discovery back in 2000 and, and five where we found that this
• 1:30
  molecule, you might have heard of it, hyaluronic acid.
• 1:33
  And you watch any face cream commercial, they always say they
• 1:36
  add hyaluronic acid to it. And hyaluric acid, it's just a
• 1:40
  big old sugar molecule and people have been injecting it
• 1:45
  into joints for arthritis. Actually the number one
• 1:48
  commercial use of it was in race horses.
• 1:50
  Interestingly, after races they it's actually reduces the
• 1:53
  inflammation. But some more horse medicine.
• 1:57
  Yeah, yeah. This is not Intermectin trust.
• 2:00
  Me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:02
  But but so it turns out, you know, when you have any kind of
• 2:05
  injury anywhere in your body, this molecule builds up as a
• 2:09
  protective response, right? It's anti-inflammatory.
• 2:11
  It kind of, you know, keeps the the tissues in in check.
• 2:15
  The brain is really bad about getting junk out of it itself.
• 2:19
  And so this happens in the brain too.
• 2:21
  But if it keeps happening, this molecule it, it accumulates to
• 2:26
  excess. There's too much of it.
• 2:28
  And then the cells around these areas where there's damage
• 2:31
  actually make an enzyme, it's called a hyaluronic dace, which
• 2:34
  chews up the hyalic acid. And what we figured out over
• 2:37
  years is that these little pieces of hyalic acid that get
• 2:41
  chewed up feedback on the cells and tell them not to do their
• 2:44
  jobs. And so, and that's probably a
• 2:48
  protective response over time. Who knows why, but but we found
• 2:53
  out that if you block that enzymes activity that higher in
• 2:56
  a days, we can actually see repair in the brain, which is
• 2:59
  really amazing. And so for patients with Ms.,
• 3:02
  it's mostly about a substance called myelin.
• 3:07
  Myelin is, it's this kind of fatty protein substance that
• 3:11
  wraps around nerve cells like an insulation, like on a wire.
• 3:16
  But it really it's main function is to make everything go faster.
• 3:19
  I lived in Germany for 3 1/2 years, so I was referred
• 3:22
  everything relative to the Autobahn where there's no speed
• 3:24
  limit. So if you have myelin and your
• 3:27
  nerve cells, it's like driving on the Autobahn at midnight when
• 3:29
  there's no traffic and you can go 200 miles an hour and no
• 3:32
  one's going to stop you. And if you lose your myelin,
• 3:35
  it's like driving on pick your favorite freeway to drive on at
• 3:38
  rush hour, lucky to be going two hour 2 mph, right?
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  And so you can imagine what that means for our brains because our
• 3:47
  brains have all these different parts to them.
• 3:49
  And you have to have very high speed connections between all
• 3:52
  these different parts of the brain to make it work, right?
• 3:54
  Right. So people that Ms. their immune
• 3:57
  system is attacking their own myelin and stripping it off of
• 4:00
  these cells. And so now these different areas
• 4:03
  are. Attacking their their brains.
• 4:05
  Yeah, they're attacking their brains.
• 4:06
  Yeah. So, so, so that's so the result
• 4:09
  is now these areas, it's like you've got all these areas that
• 4:11
  are supposed to be moving on the Audubon, and all of a sudden
• 4:14
  it's like you're they're not moving at all, or they're moving
• 4:16
  at 2 miles an hour. And so now movement is affected,
• 4:21
  feelings are affected, being able to see all these things are
• 4:24
  affected and even even learning a memory can be affected.
• 4:27
  Yeah. So what we found out is that if
• 4:29
  we block this higher on a dace activity, we can actually get
• 4:32
  some of the myelin to come back. And maybe it's not getting you
• 4:35
  out of the Autobahn, but maybe it's getting you up to legal
• 4:38
  speed limits in the state of Florida, so.
• 4:41
  I see, OK, there's I have a lot of follow up questions, but that
• 4:45
  was that was that was an awesome introduction to this.
• 4:48
  To be clear at the beginning, right, you said so the way that
• 4:53
  the problem begins is by our body's immune system, our
• 5:00
  natural immune system, whose job it is to attack potentially
• 5:03
  dangerous cells. Every time that it functions,
• 5:07
  some of it makes its way to the brain.
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  Is that what you said? So, yeah, our immune system and
• 5:14
  people that mess, OK, what's happening is your immune system
• 5:19
  is, it's supposed to be attacking foreign things, right?
• 5:21
  Like bacteria, infections or viral infections, right?
• 5:25
  And in this case, for some reason that we still, we're not
• 5:27
  entirely sure about a people with MS. what's happened is
• 5:31
  their immune system has decided that their myelin, which is this
• 5:34
  really important substance in the brain, is a foreign body.
• 5:37
  It's not supposed to be there. I see.
• 5:40
  And so it's getting into this, immune cells are getting into
• 5:42
  the brain and attacking the person's own myelin that's and
• 5:47
  someone. Someone whose brain is but but
• 5:49
  but everyone's brain has myelin in it because anyone whose whose
• 5:53
  immune system is working means that they have to have a mile a
• 5:55
  certain amount of myelin in the brain, period.
• 5:58
  Right. And if your immune system is
• 5:59
  working right, it's not attacking your myelin, right?
• 6:01
  That's one of these. It's an autoimmune disease.
• 6:03
  It's your immune system attacking you as opposed to
• 6:06
  attacking things that shouldn't be there.
• 6:07
  Crazy, crazy. So it's interesting.
• 6:10
  It doesn't sound, you know, the way that I've heard, for
• 6:12
  example, diseases like dementia or Parkinson's is like the
• 6:16
  connection between the our brain is faltering, is my
• 6:22
  understanding, the connections kind of dissolving.
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  This isn't so much that the connection dissolving as much as
• 6:26
  they're slowing down communication almost to a halt,
• 6:30
  right? Right.
• 6:31
  So that's a different thing and but there is a longer term
• 6:33
  consequence of that. So it turns out one of the other
• 6:36
  things that myelin does is it keeps those neurons, the nerve
• 6:39
  cells healthy. So over time, what happens in
• 6:42
  Ms. patients is I see the neurons start to die.
• 6:46
  And so now you do start to lose all these connections, and
• 6:48
  that's a real problem. So that's where the
• 6:50
  neurodegeneration comes in. Exactly.
• 6:52
  The brain is attacking the protective part of the neurons
• 6:55
  or the body. Yeah.
• 6:56
  The wow, Yeah, wow. Now it, now in Alzheimer's,
• 7:00
  what's happening is, and, and you mentioned Parkinson's.
• 7:03
  I mean, Parkinson's is really interesting because it's really
• 7:05
  selective neurons that are dying mostly it's so-called
• 7:09
  dopaminergic neurons, which are, you know, important for ulcer
• 7:13
  movement, coordination and everything else, among a lot of
• 7:15
  other things that we don't talk about with Parkinson's patients,
• 7:18
  but that they also experience. And in Alzheimer's though, it's,
• 7:21
  it's even broader. It's, it's more lots of
• 7:23
  different nerve cell centers where the nerves are really
• 7:25
  dying off. And now my own research on on
• 7:29
  Alzheimer's about the hyrinic acid is we, we see the changes
• 7:32
  in myelin happening in Alzheimer's patients too.
• 7:35
  So this protects the substance, but now it's, it's just damage
• 7:39
  to the neurons and myelin is going away because of the damage
• 7:42
  associated associated with the neurons, but it's not coming
• 7:45
  back after the damage the way it does and other diseases.
• 7:49
  But in addition, what we figured out was that hyrinic acid
• 7:53
  actually helps protect blood vessels in the brain.
• 7:58
  And, and what's amazing we think is that the reason it's doing
• 8:02
  that is, is it's responding to some sort of long term
• 8:05
  inflammation, all the other things that we do to our bodies,
• 8:08
  long term hypertension, all these things.
• 8:10
  And eventually again, the cells want to clear that stuff out
• 8:14
  with these higher endidases. And So what we're finding is
• 8:18
  that this higher endidase activity may lead to leaky blood
• 8:22
  vessels in the brain, basically because the cells are dying in
• 8:25
  the tiny little blood vessels. And so we may have a second
• 8:29
  benefit of blocking this activity by protecting the
• 8:32
  brain's. Blood vessels, I'm sorry.
• 8:34
  And leaking blood vessels in your brain could lead to strokes
• 8:40
  or God forbid, or blood. What's the consequences of that?
• 8:44
  So, so, yeah, in a big sense, for the bigger vessels, yeah,
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  that's a stroke. For these tiny little vessels,
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  though, they're more like a little tiny, tiny mini strokes
• 8:52
  that you probably don't even notice.
• 8:54
  But over time, as those pile up, and now you add to that the
• 8:58
  things that happened in Alzheimer's, which are these
• 9:00
  things called plaques in these two angles, and you put all that
• 9:04
  together, that's when you really have a problem.
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  That's because it's not just the plaques and tangles, it's not
• 9:08
  just the vasculature, It's that combination that seems to be
• 9:12
  read. Hey everyone real quick if
• 9:14
  you're enjoying the show, click subscribe and rate the show. 5
• 9:17
  stars helps a ton. Thanks so much.
• 9:20
  Really driving dementia so. Wow, wow, wow.
• 9:24
  OK, that's crazy. That's all, that's all.
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  And and I guess this process can begin.
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  Is it this process happened quickly?
• 9:34
  Does it happen over the course of time?
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  Because I know, for example, actually, and is a pretty crazy
• 9:39
  story. I know someone from college who
• 9:42
  I think when we were 25 married a 35 year old girl.
• 9:45
  And I think within a couple, I, I think within a couple of years
• 9:50
  she was diagnosed with MSI. Thought that.
• 9:52
  And, and my previous association with Ms. was that it manifests
• 9:55
  in people's sixties, 70s. You know, I didn't realize that
• 9:59
  it happened that early. Yeah, I mean, people in their
• 10:02
  20s and there's even, you know, there's pediatric forms as well.
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  But wow, really? And this is a disease that,
• 10:08
  sadly, even today, you don't really know you've had it until
• 10:12
  you've had it for a while. I met the actress Terry Garr
• 10:16
  years and years ago who had Ms. And she was telling me how, you
• 10:22
  know, she was hanging out at a party one time, and she woke up
• 10:25
  the next morning and she had a real weakness in her arm and was
• 10:30
  about to go to the doctor. And then it got better.
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  So she didn't go. And then a few years later, it
• 10:35
  happened again. And this time it lasted a
• 10:37
  longer. She still didn't go to her
• 10:38
  doctor. And then finally, like 10 years
• 10:41
  later, she had this attack where she's really not feeling well.
• 10:44
  She finally went to the doctor and they finally got diagnosed.
• 10:48
  So by the time she was diagnosed, she'd already had
• 10:51
  this disease for a decade. And she was in her 30s, you
• 10:55
  know, her late 30s and, and and she was trying to hide it from
• 10:57
  people, too, because in Hollywood, you know, people with
• 11:00
  disability not to get jobs. Yeah.
• 11:03
  But but yeah, she said, she's really had a lot of disability
• 11:06
  long before she even got diagnosed.
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  Wow, wow, wow, that's OK. That's crazy.
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  And I guess it gets worse over time.
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  And at a certain point you can't, you can't fight it,
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  right. And the only, the only reason
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  why I think why, why the story strikes so is because on one
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  hand, it feels like every time that anything happens, you know,
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  I mean, I'm 30 and like, my back is just starting to, you know,
• 11:34
  hurt me more often. Or, you know, I'm getting more.
• 11:36
  Taking a little longer to recover.
• 11:39
  I'm at the age where when I wake up and I feel all the pains in
• 11:41
  my body thinking I'm still alive because I know the pains there.
• 11:46
  But, you know, you never know whether to take, you know, what
• 11:49
  to take seriously or not. You know, and like, I guarantee
• 11:52
  you that I've woken up with, you know, pins and needles or
• 11:54
  something weird happening. Like, I don't know, that's
• 11:56
  weird. I just kind of get up and I
• 11:57
  forget about it and like years between episodes would even
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  imagine is like you can't even connect them necessarily.
• 12:03
  No, no, absolutely not. That's actually, that's
• 12:06
  absolutely right. And and that's the thing.
• 12:08
  So the cool thing about Ms. now, compared to when I started this
• 12:12
  research, we used to have like one or two drugs and I've got
• 12:14
  over 20. Yeah.
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  And these drugs are great because what they're doing is
• 12:19
  they're stopping your immune system from getting into your
• 12:21
  brain, right? So they, they really slow down
• 12:23
  the progression of the disease. So people are living longer and
• 12:26
  better than MSL than they have ever before, but we still
• 12:31
  haven't addressed the ability to repair that damage that happened
• 12:34
  leading up to where they are now.
• 12:36
  And so that's what my lab is trying to figure out, and that
• 12:38
  for both Ms. and Alzheimer's. Why has that been so
• 12:41
  challenging? So, you know, the brain is kind
• 12:47
  of is, we still don't know as much about the brain as we do
• 12:51
  about other organs. And that's because the brain is
• 12:54
  this amazing computer and there are so many, you know, think
• 12:59
  about the billions of cells and trillions of connections between
• 13:02
  cells and that brain and all the ways, different ways that it
• 13:05
  works. And you know, it's funny because
• 13:08
  I talk to my students and they're like, you know, what's
• 13:10
  the most surprising thing to you right now about research?
• 13:14
  And I said, well, when I was where you are, we didn't know
• 13:17
  anything that we know right now. And it was All Star Trek.
• 13:19
  It was all like, you know, this is, this is like science
• 13:22
  fiction. And now it's like, Oh my gosh,
• 13:23
  we can actually, we may actually be able to cure some of these
• 13:26
  neurological diseases, you know, which is incredible.
• 13:29
  We have proof of concept that that's true from various
• 13:31
  experiments and model systems, right?
• 13:33
  So, so that, but that's been a challenge because there's so
• 13:39
  many things we still don't quite understand to the point where
• 13:41
  we're going to have an effective therapy.
• 13:43
  I'm actually giving a talk, a public talk about the history of
• 13:46
  Alzheimer's disease. And I talked with and it starts
• 13:50
  in ancient Sumatra from these old tablets they found
• 13:53
  describing elderly people who have these symptoms that are
• 13:57
  very unusual. And it's it's Alzheimer's
• 13:59
  disease. And then we had nineteen O 6
• 14:02
  when Alzheimer himself made these initial observations about
• 14:05
  what was happening. And so we took all that
• 14:08
  information, did all this modeling looked good, and then
• 14:12
  we took it to the patients and lo and behold, it didn't work.
• 14:15
  And the reason is we there were things we just fundamentally
• 14:17
  didn't know yet. And we made assumptions based on
• 14:20
  what we knew and, and what all that told us is that we need to
• 14:24
  know more. And that's how science works.
• 14:27
  So we're getting better. We're getting better, but we're
• 14:30
  not there yet. We are, we are.
• 14:32
  I mean, and you know, I've talked about this a bunch and
• 14:36
  everyone in the world is pretty much talking about it.
• 14:37
  But you know, the, the, our ability to be able to access
• 14:40
  information nowadays is going to is so dramatically different
• 14:44
  overnight. You know, I mean, I, I'll, I'll
• 14:46
  tell you that, you know, the part of the way that might go by
• 14:49
  my podcast, for example, is I use AI to help me find guests,
• 14:53
  right? But I want to talk to, you know,
• 14:54
  10 people about the brain and music or the brain, you know,
• 14:57
  the history and you know, economics, whatever.
• 15:00
  And please find accessible people that you know, have given
• 15:03
  public talks and have the emails available online, right?
• 15:06
  That, that process in of itself to find 10 people to reach out
• 15:10
  to two years ago, what took me hours and hours and hours a
• 15:15
  week, and now I am reliably finding, you know, top quality,
• 15:19
  really great guests in a matter of minutes and just the amount
• 15:23
  of efficiency of wedding out information sorting through data
• 15:27
  is just so incredible. I'm, I, I feel like we
• 15:31
  definitely I, I, you know, my, my opinion with a lot of
• 15:34
  technology today is that we're so far past where we've been
• 15:40
  cabled. We're able to implement at the
• 15:42
  moment and like all of this is like waiting for us to just like
• 15:46
  decide as a world to like pick it up and start using it, but
• 15:48
  like it's all just sitting there in front of us.
• 15:50
  Well, in my field, I'm just in my career time, you know, it's
• 15:54
  been incredibles watching how things have progressed.
• 15:56
  I mean, you mentioned information processor, just
• 15:58
  finding people or finding information.
• 16:00
  So when I was in Graduate School, I had to go to the
• 16:03
  library and we had these monthly books that were like this thick
• 16:06
  and the paper was onion skin thin.
• 16:09
  And the text was like 8 point text, right?
• 16:13
  And you had to go through and like look up subject, your area
• 16:16
  of subject and like find the papers that were recently
• 16:18
  published in your subject. And then you went to the library
• 16:20
  and you made photocopies of the articles and you brought them
• 16:23
  home and you highlighted them with a pen.
• 16:25
  Now you just type it into the computer.
• 16:26
  It likes gives you the list and it actually downloads the papers
• 16:29
  for you. And then it highlights the areas
• 16:31
  that are interesting. So it's, it's completely
• 16:33
  different. And then the technology for what
• 16:35
  we do in my lab, you know, like things that when I was in school
• 16:38
  that would take me a week to do, I can do in 30 minutes now.
• 16:41
  So we're now we're kind of where the compute in the
• 16:44
  biotechnology, we're kind of now in that spot where it's
• 16:47
  exponentially growing, kind of where the computer, it's kind of
• 16:50
  where computer industry was 20 years ago.
• 16:52
  So we're like at the point where it's like discoveries that used
• 16:55
  to take years, now we're taking months.
• 16:57
  And soon it's going to be weeks and then it's going to be days.
• 17:00
  It's, it's remarkable. It's an incredibly exciting time
• 17:03
  So long as like our funding and infrastructure actually stays in
• 17:06
  place where I think we're going to be able to make some amazing
• 17:09
  discoveries. Yeah, and I think it's part of
• 17:11
  the reason why it's being slow rolled.
• 17:12
  It's because our friendly infrastructure needs to keep up
• 17:15
  with it. I mean, whether you're in, you
• 17:18
  know, South Florida, like where I am now, or even in when I was
• 17:21
  living in Seattle 5-6 years ago, you know, I mean, I, you know,
• 17:24
  Seattle was not prepared. The infrastructure was not
• 17:26
  prepared for the amount of people that were living there.
• 17:28
  And I know this from driving around and local parking and,
• 17:31
  you know, these two way streets that have absolutely no business
• 17:34
  being two way streets there. And, you know, and, and like, on
• 17:37
  one hand, you know, it's, it definitely adds the charm.
• 17:40
  It's fun that the city is packed.
• 17:41
  It's fun that people are always on foot.
• 17:43
  But you can see that the, you know, we, it could have used
• 17:45
  some slow rolling before Microsoft and Boeing and
• 17:48
  Starbucks and everyone, you know, and everyone just popped
• 17:50
  up overnight, not overnight, but seemingly overnight.
• 17:53
  And, and yeah, that's really amazing.
• 17:57
  So now that we understand a little bit about Parkinson's and
• 18:00
  Alzheimer's and Ms., first of all, is Ms. or all these
• 18:04
  diseases rather, are they purely genetic or can they be caused by
• 18:09
  environmental factors? That's a really good question.
• 18:13
  So it depends. They're all different.
• 18:16
  And the answer for that is different for each of those
• 18:18
  diseases and for any neurological disease or any
• 18:20
  disease in general. So genetics plays a part at so
• 18:25
  many different levels, right? So there's just the sequence of
• 18:29
  your genes, right? The little four letter code, and
• 18:33
  some people have subtle changes in that for a little letter code
• 18:36
  that makes genes more or less efficient in what they do.
• 18:40
  And so for Ms. for example, there's some data now suggesting
• 18:44
  that people with MS. have a genetic liability to get Ms. And
• 18:49
  by liability, I mean they have a subtle change in some genes in
• 18:53
  their immune system in particular probably maybe some
• 18:57
  subtle changes in genes and the cells in their nervous system
• 19:00
  that if something else happens, they're going to get Ms. whereas
• 19:05
  if other people had that something else happened, it
• 19:07
  wouldn't make a difference. So more.
• 19:09
  Trigger happy? What's that?
• 19:12
  So more trigger happy. More trigger happy.
• 19:14
  Yeah. So, OK, so the trigger actually
• 19:16
  then for people who have that genetic liability, there's been
• 19:20
  a lot of different suggestions of what that might be.
• 19:22
  But one of the leading suggestions right now is a virus
• 19:26
  called Epstein Barr Virus. Now why do I know?
• 19:30
  Why do I know that name? I'll tell ya.
• 19:32
  So for, for one thing, Epstein Barr virus, 100% of humans at
• 19:37
  some point in their life where we're going to get infected with
• 19:39
  Epstein Barr virus, right? For the vast majority of us,
• 19:42
  it's a cold. For a small number of us, it's
• 19:46
  mono mononucleosis, the kissing. Disease, right?
• 19:50
  So, so and so why do some people get mononucleosis and some
• 19:54
  people get a cold? Well, it's again, genetics
• 19:58
  probably. It may be just the state of your
• 20:00
  immune system at the time that you got infected.
• 20:02
  It may be the age you got infected.
• 20:05
  All these things together may impact that.
• 20:07
  Now for it turns out for an even smaller number of us, there are
• 20:12
  certain cancers that are related to Epstein Barr virus infection
• 20:16
  and Ms. So, so if you have that specific genetic liability and
• 20:22
  it may be more than one gene, it may be multiple genes.
• 20:25
  That are altered and then you get this Epstein Barr virus
• 20:28
  infection at some specific point in your life that means you're
• 20:32
  being triggered to get Ms. So that's Ms. right.
• 20:35
  That's a very kind. And the reason Ms. is not I mean
• 20:38
  about a million people in the US get Ms. but that's not a really
• 20:44
  common disease. But it's it's pretty common.
• 20:46
  But it's it's still you have to have these multiple things
• 20:48
  happen to get it. So it's not as common as other
• 20:50
  things. In the case of Alzheimer's,
• 20:54
  there's a small proportion of people with Alzheimer's who have
• 20:57
  an actual mutation in a gene or, or or a different couple couple
• 21:01
  of genes. And those people tend to have
• 21:03
  this very aggressive early onset form of Alzheimer's.
• 21:06
  So that's that's different than the Alzheimer's that people get
• 21:10
  starting in their 70s and 80s or 60s even is that.
• 21:14
  What Robin Williams had, because I know that he, he got a fairly
• 21:17
  young age, I think, right, I mean.
• 21:19
  So Robin Williams actually had a, what we think we think was a
• 21:24
  combination of Parkinson's and something called Lewy body
• 21:27
  disease, is my understanding. That's that's a little different
• 21:31
  again. And Lewy body disease is
• 21:33
  something that often goes hand in hand with Parkinson's,
• 21:35
  interestingly, and we don't entirely understand why, but for
• 21:40
  these Alzheimer's patients, yeah.
• 21:41
  So there's a small percentage of them get early onset Alzheimer's
• 21:44
  and that seems to be a genetic disease almost purely that's
• 21:47
  genetic, although there's other factors there too.
• 21:51
  For the majority of us though, as I mentioned, it's a
• 21:53
  combination of having maybe hypertension your whole life and
• 21:57
  or diabetes and then having a little bit of genes that are
• 22:02
  predisposing you towards this. Now you put all that together
• 22:05
  and you get someone who's got what we call dementia, and that
• 22:09
  could be Alzheimer's or other kinds of dementia.
• 22:11
  So, so that's a combination of lifestyle things or things that
• 22:15
  have happened to you, plus some genetic liability.
• 22:18
  And then for Parkinson's, again, there's actually a couple of
• 22:20
  cases of Parkinson's that are linked to a specific gene
• 22:23
  mutation. Those are rare.
• 22:25
  Those are rare, but there's some data to that.
• 22:29
  Things that happened to you and things that you're exposed to
• 22:32
  can trigger that. There's a study that suggests
• 22:34
  that if you've had multiple concussions and plus you're
• 22:37
  exposed to a certain pesticides that were common, for example,
• 22:43
  in the 60s and 70s, my my brother had Parkinson's disease
• 22:49
  and the body disease and he was an athlete.
• 22:52
  So he got lots of concussions. And that was back in the days
• 22:55
  where it's like you got hit in the head and your coach said, I
• 22:57
  got your bell rung, go back out there.
• 23:00
  So nobody recovered from the concussion back then and he was
• 23:04
  having his face rubbed in in these chemicals that were in the
• 23:08
  grass to keep the grass and the weeds away.
• 23:10
  Oh man. Right.
• 23:11
  That combination is is suspected to really contribute to
• 23:16
  Parkinson's and people who don't have the genetic Parkinson's
• 23:19
  form. So there's a lot of different
• 23:20
  reasons you can get Parkinson's, it turns out.
• 23:23
  Are there any studies about, I guess, athletes having a higher
• 23:26
  rate of Parkinson's because of that?
• 23:29
  There are some studies that suggest that that especially
• 23:32
  people, like I said, have had multiple concussions and that's
• 23:34
  also true for certain dementias. So I mean, you think about it
• 23:38
  makes sense. You're, you're causing a lot of
• 23:40
  stress to the cells in your brain.
• 23:41
  And so as you get older, the normal stresses of aging now
• 23:44
  we're going to be amplified a whole bunch, right, right.
• 23:48
  So. Right, right.
• 23:49
  And what about what people call preventive maintenance?
• 23:53
  You know, in other words, what can we do to keep our cells
• 23:58
  healthy? Now, I know the way that you
• 23:59
  describe that Parkinson's and Ms. in particular seem to work
• 24:03
  is that it's almost beyond our control as far as, you know,
• 24:06
  what we do, right? These are things that are
• 24:08
  happening on a, on a molecular level or cellular level that,
• 24:11
  that, that we can't really control as far as we know.
• 24:16
  What is? Is there anything to do to to
• 24:19
  lower your chances of this or to slow the progression of it or
• 24:23
  what? What?
• 24:24
  How does that work? So probably not to stop the
• 24:27
  disease from happening in the 1st place, but there are things
• 24:30
  that seem to really help with regards to progression, like you
• 24:33
  say, like making sure it doesn't get worse or, or, or progresses
• 24:37
  very slowly, but also maybe starts much later in life.
• 24:41
  And so there's this whole idea that of reserve, you know, if
• 24:45
  you have more cells to kill off, it'll take longer than for it to
• 24:49
  affect you personally. And so that's, and that's where
• 24:53
  my interest in kind of music comes in actually.
• 24:55
  So, you know, so I think there is this kind of, there's a study
• 25:00
  that was done brilliant idea. It's like the question was, how
• 25:04
  do we get a population of human beings together where we can
• 25:08
  rule out as many variables as possible to understand normal
• 25:11
  aging, right, as well as abnormal aging.
• 25:14
  And so somebody had a brilliant idea to use nuns.
• 25:19
  So this is called the nun study. And the idea was they found a
• 25:25
  convent where they had a huge number of sisters.
• 25:28
  One of the cool things about this convent was they all had to
• 25:30
  write essays about why they wanted to be a nun to get into
• 25:33
  the convent. So this was when they were in
• 25:35
  their 19, you know, late teens, early 20s, most of them.
• 25:38
  And you can learn a lot about a person from a writing sample.
• 25:42
  And so they had that and then they followed these sisters
• 25:45
  until they died. And what came out of the study
• 25:48
  was there were there were sisters in this convent who
• 25:52
  lived to be in their 90s and hundreds and were sharpest
• 25:55
  tacks. And then there were sisters who
• 25:57
  even at, you know, in their 40s and early 50s started showing
• 26:00
  signs of decline mentally. And there were a couple of
• 26:04
  things that sorted out who got what.
• 26:07
  One of them was the writing sample.
• 26:09
  So the sisters who were kind of more flourished in their
• 26:12
  writing, kind of more descriptive, more expressive.
• 26:15
  They tended to do better than the sisters who just said, I
• 26:18
  want to be a nun, you know, because the nuns are cool, you
• 26:20
  know, or something like that. I'm, I'm obviously
• 26:23
  oversimplifying dramatically there, but that's part of the
• 26:26
  idea. The other thing though that
• 26:28
  really was interesting was the nuns who did well were actually
• 26:33
  throughout their lives constantly trying to enrich
• 26:35
  themselves. They were trying to do like
• 26:37
  learning to play the piano at age 70 and then going off and
• 26:40
  giving piano lessons. The nuns that weren't doing
• 26:43
  well, they were kind of couch potato nuns, right?
• 26:45
  They were coming into this convent and they were taking on
• 26:50
  some menial task and sticking without their whole lives.
• 26:53
  And so the ones that were challenging themselves, you can
• 26:55
  see that they had different brain structure.
• 26:59
  So although they had all that plaque and tangle and everything
• 27:01
  else, the rest of it was pretty well.
• 27:03
  So the plaques and tangles made less of a difference for them as
• 27:06
  they aged than the ones who just weren't developing and keeping
• 27:10
  their brain healthy. And so I think that really says
• 27:13
  a lot. I mean, the brains kind of A use
• 27:14
  it or lose it organ and everything.
• 27:18
  Well, everything is but yeah. But I mean, the brain, you got
• 27:21
  to keep doing things. Otherwise it's just going to,
• 27:23
  you're going to have less to lose as you get older.
• 27:26
  And I think that is really telling.
• 27:28
  So when I started working my music stuff, I it's amazing.
• 27:30
  Musicians have all these cool things in their brain, like more
• 27:34
  myelin, for example, evidence that they're actually maybe
• 27:38
  making new neurons throughout life because they're really
• 27:41
  intense. They're practicing their
• 27:42
  instruments or learning new instruments.
• 27:44
  Neurogenesis, right? Neurogenesis, I learned
• 27:47
  recently. That's right.
• 27:48
  Yeah. So it may be driving
• 27:50
  neurogenesis, myelination and more synapses, more connections
• 27:54
  between neurons. And so that's the other thing
• 27:56
  that you lose in in dementia is the connections.
• 27:59
  And you know, these trains of connections, as they start to
• 28:01
  fall apart, your personality falls apart too.
• 28:05
  So if you can have more of those going into a situation where a
• 28:08
  disease is causing that loss, you have more to lose and more
• 28:11
  time. Yeah, and so, so interesting.
• 28:13
  So cool. So, so freaking cool.
• 28:16
  This makes you know this also makes you think of and I thought
• 28:20
  the portrayal was incredible. I showed this to all my high
• 28:22
  school students inside out and inside Out too did such a great
• 28:26
  job, especially in the second one of introducing the notion
• 28:28
  that as our as our brains develop and become more
• 28:31
  complicated and our emotional states vary with it, you know,
• 28:35
  and there's direct relationship between our, you know, the
• 28:37
  development and progression of our brain.
• 28:39
  But then it would also stand to reason.
• 28:41
  And I told my, you know, I say this every time I talk about
• 28:43
  this, I would watch 100 movies of inside out, just of different
• 28:49
  phases of different people's lives, you know, just to just to
• 28:52
  watch that same, you know, concept in action in different
• 28:54
  applications. But one of them has to, you
• 28:56
  know, in and I talked actually to, I'm forgetting his name, Bob
• 29:02
  Levinson out of Berkeley. He's and yeah, he's, he was, he
• 29:06
  was super wonderful, super informative and fun and sweet.
• 29:10
  And one thing that we were talking about was the
• 29:13
  personality, I guess, loss of emotions as you age, because I
• 29:16
  was talking about my grandfather and how recently he's had short
• 29:19
  term memory loss, probably borderline dementia, but you
• 29:22
  know, they're not going to talk about it in that sense.
• 29:25
  And I've noticed that his, you know, his range of ability to
• 29:29
  express different emotions has been significantly limited.
• 29:34
  And I'm sure no coincidence, you know, we aged 5, you know, five
• 29:38
  years every year after you retired, you know, every time,
• 29:40
  you know, he was a doctor, he was a gastroenterologist that
• 29:43
  was a very active Miami Beach. And then, you know, the second
• 29:46
  that he stopped seeing patients and the second he stopped
• 29:48
  running around and making house calls and keeping up with
• 29:50
  people, you know, the decline, the decline began almost
• 29:53
  immediately. Well, that and that makes total
• 29:56
  sense, right? If you think about it, I mean,
• 29:57
  our brains are who we are, right?
• 30:00
  Our memories are who we are. So all the things that we've
• 30:03
  experienced throughout our lives shape our personalities.
• 30:06
  They shape everything they are that we are about us.
• 30:08
  And as those start to fade away, other aspects of our personality
• 30:13
  change as a result of that. And, and that becomes, you know,
• 30:17
  really hard over time, especially for family members
• 30:20
  who are trying to connect with these people who suddenly aren't
• 30:22
  who they used to be. And those social interactions
• 30:27
  are incredibly important. You mentioned your, your, your
• 30:29
  grandfather was constantly in touch with people.
• 30:32
  And, and when we lose those social interactions, that
• 30:36
  actually is another way that our, you know, keeping our brain
• 30:38
  active when we, we're talking to people that's gone.
• 30:40
  Those, those, those stimuli go away and, and it becomes harder
• 30:45
  and harder over time to kind of replace that.
• 30:48
  I think there's been a number of studies done comparing people in
• 30:51
  the US to people and for example, different parts of Asia
• 30:54
  where families tend to stick together more, right?
• 30:58
  So even though you may retire from your work, you still have
• 31:00
  these intense social connections with your community and people
• 31:03
  in your family, and they tend to do better as a result of that.
• 31:07
  I think there's good data for that now.
• 31:10
  So I think that's such an important aspect of it.
• 31:13
  And then with music, you know, the same thing.
• 31:15
  Music brings you together. Music's amazing too, because as
• 31:17
  we age, one of the things, the last things that goes is music.
• 31:20
  It turns out, even though there are people who cannot speak and
• 31:23
  yet they can still sing songs that they know from their past
• 31:26
  and musicians who can sit down at at their instrument and play
• 31:29
  their instrument perfectly even though they can barely say a
• 31:31
  word. So that's amazing to me too.
• 31:35
  I have personal experience seeing this.
• 31:38
  I've never seen anything like this before.
• 31:42
  So a girl I dated, her mother had a variation.
• 31:46
  It was a very, very murky diagnosis of Parkinson's because
• 31:51
  it didn't really match up exactly.
• 31:53
  But it was the closest that I think the doctor, the doctor's
• 31:56
  able to provide. And but a lot of the she didn't
• 32:00
  get as much of the tremors as much as she would freeze up and
• 32:02
  lock up and music. And you turn on music and you
• 32:07
  turn on James Taylor or you turn on, you know, some old show tune
• 32:10
  that, you know, hello, Dolly, That we, you know, that that she
• 32:13
  used to listen to her, she plays the accordion and like, and you
• 32:16
  would see minute to minute someone that could not move,
• 32:19
  could not like, you know, just stuck where she was to literally
• 32:22
  skipping around the house. I mean, and I saw his known
• 32:25
  eyes. I couldn't.
• 32:25
  And I and I and I, and I mean, we definitely do not have not I
• 32:30
  guess scratched the surface as to what music is capable of
• 32:33
  impacting us, but it's, it's, I'm, I'm very hopeful for the
• 32:36
  future of that. Well, and music therapy is now
• 32:39
  being recognized more and more as a viable and actual thing
• 32:42
  that some insurance companies are actually starting to cover.
• 32:46
  My favorite, my favorite example was Congresswoman Gabrielle
• 32:50
  Giffords, Mark Kelly's wife. OK, so she, you know, she went
• 32:54
  to a campaign to that years ago in Arizona and got shot in the
• 32:57
  head. I have some crazy person.
• 33:00
  And so she wound up doing this incredible multi year
• 33:05
  rehabilitation and she couldn't speak for for a long time after
• 33:11
  being shot. And so one of the things they're
• 33:14
  having her do was music therapy where she was she she she
• 33:17
  couldn't speak, but she could hum and sing a little bit.
• 33:20
  And over time she kept pushing herself and pushing herself to
• 33:22
  use music and she could sing phrases instead of saying them.
• 33:27
  And then after doing that for a long time, they're really
• 33:29
  pushing herself with the music. You may have heard her speak.
• 33:33
  She's she's giving talks in front of audience.
• 33:34
  Look it up. I'll look it up again.
• 33:36
  What's her name? Gabrielle Giffords, she's a
• 33:40
  congresswoman from Arizona and Mark Kelly or her husband, who
• 33:44
  is the astronaut and and he's a senator now, you know, cared for
• 33:48
  her. And it's an amazing story, you
• 33:50
  know, but, but so one of the. So that to me tells me that,
• 33:55
  yeah, music therapy is real. You see it with Parkinson's
• 33:59
  patients. Actually.
• 34:00
  You mentioned movement. There's a lot of therapies where
• 34:03
  they're getting partners at Parkinson's patients to work
• 34:06
  with them to do dance lessons to music.
• 34:08
  The music has a rhythm to it, and the rhythm actually helps
• 34:11
  them coordinate their movement and it makes them feel less
• 34:15
  agitated and more in control, which just dramatically improves
• 34:18
  the quality of their lives. And then for Alzheimer's
• 34:21
  patients, yeah, I mean, you can sit them down in front of these,
• 34:23
  you know, can sing music from them, from their past.
• 34:26
  I have a great story about that, actually.
• 34:29
  So years ago, I was asked to do a a interview on a radio show.
• 34:34
  And the other guest was a woman named Naomi Lavelette.
• 34:38
  And she is a classically trained pianist and has now gone off and
• 34:43
  made records. And she writes music now.
• 34:45
  And, And somebody, a family friend of hers had a dad who he
• 34:52
  was a pianist and he used to make up all these songs.
• 34:54
  He had a huge number of songs that he wrote, but he never
• 34:57
  wrote them down and he never recorded them.
• 34:59
  And all of a sudden he was at the piano and he's was
• 35:01
  forgetting whole phrases of music that he had composed.
• 35:05
  And it turns out he had early onset Alzheimer's.
• 35:09
  And so she would sit with him at the piano and find the music,
• 35:16
  the project, saving his music. And she wrote it down and she
• 35:20
  recorded it. And then I got to meet him years
• 35:25
  ago before he was really debilitated.
• 35:29
  And we started talking about how music is like threads.
• 35:34
  We had, he had this description of music is like threads that
• 35:36
  bring people together in all sorts of different ways.
• 35:39
  It's these strands that bring people together.
• 35:41
  And I thought that was really beautiful.
• 35:43
  And about a couple months ago, I don't know if you know, Dolly
• 35:47
  Parton has basically made arrangements of her music for
• 35:50
  symphonies. No, I did not.
• 35:53
  It's awesome. And so we went to the, we went
• 35:56
  to the Symphony and it's a great show.
• 35:59
  And she, you know, so the Symphony Orchestra is playing
• 36:02
  her music and they've got some musicians and vocalists singing
• 36:05
  and it's it's an amazing show. I mean, even if you don't like
• 36:08
  Dolly Parton's music, it's amazing.
• 36:10
  And then there's videos of her talking about the inspiration
• 36:13
  for the songs in between. And you learn a lot about her
• 36:16
  and and her life. She talks about threads, how
• 36:20
  music is like threads that bring people together.
• 36:23
  And I turned to my wife that night and I said, that's what
• 36:25
  Steve told me. This, this composer.
• 36:28
  And the very next morning, I get a call from Naomi saying, hey,
• 36:32
  Steve's on his deathbed. He's he's at end stage.
• 36:36
  Would you want to come down and see him?
• 36:38
  And I said, of course, yeah. Because I got to know the family
• 36:40
  over the years, and she came into his room and would start
• 36:45
  playing music. And here's a guy who's literally
• 36:48
  immobile on his bed. She's playing the music on her
• 36:51
  guitar and he's tapping away. He's just moving away.
• 36:55
  And so that just tells you that. And I'm sure it helped him with
• 36:58
  his agitation and made him feel better.
• 37:00
  And you know it, It's so powerful.
• 37:03
  And I think the fact that more and more people are starting to
• 37:05
  recognize this is, is good because music is so important to
• 37:08
  humanity. It's it's, it's important to who
• 37:10
  we are as human beings. Yeah, yeah, I, I've been
• 37:15
  advocating for, I mean, probably over a year now on the show for
• 37:20
  people to go to as much as many live music events as possible.
• 37:24
  Even if even if you don't play, you know, even if you don't know
• 37:27
  it, you know, find a local bar, find a pub, find a brewery.
• 37:30
  If you go to there, there there is something that is
• 37:33
  particularly cool about a relative.
• 37:36
  Like I would say, like the problem is I don't even know if
• 37:40
  it's amount of people relative. It's people to space, right?
• 37:42
  So, I mean, if you're in a in a little jazz club and there's 50
• 37:44
  people there, that's awesome. I've, I've been to Blues bars in
• 37:47
  Chicago with my dad and yeah. And it's 2:00 in the morning and
• 37:51
  we walk out after hearing this band play, you know, for three
• 37:53
  hours and, and we walk out and we just feel like different
• 37:57
  human beings. And we're like, we just had this
• 37:59
  incredible shared experience and we, and also the, and with
• 38:02
  there's this unspoken bond between the people that
• 38:06
  experience that together. When you, when you find out that
• 38:08
  someone else is a deadhead and you find out someone else like
• 38:10
  Fish or Springsteen or Billy Strings or, or any, or, you
• 38:13
  know, or Bill or Billy Joel or Fleetwood Mac or anything that
• 38:16
  you like. And like, all of a sudden
• 38:18
  there's a kind of sense of camaraderie that goes like
• 38:20
  there's something that that that's unspoken and deep that
• 38:23
  you guys both share and relate to that is really, really
• 38:26
  powerful. Well, that and that's an
• 38:28
  important point. So in our book, you know, we,
• 38:30
  we, we actually send out surveys to people, a lot of professional
• 38:34
  musicians, but also just a lot of people who like music, asking
• 38:37
  them about experiences. What do you think their brains
• 38:40
  doing when they're composing, when they're performing, when
• 38:42
  they're practicing, when they're listening?
• 38:45
  And in the listening section, so many people talked about times
• 38:47
  when they were just depressed or something was happening in their
• 38:51
  lives and then going out and hearing and experiencing a live
• 38:54
  music. And that or it's sometimes even
• 38:56
  though they're just listening on the radio and how the music kind
• 38:58
  of brought them back and helped them get out of it's deep
• 39:01
  depression or addiction even. And and it was, it was just
• 39:04
  amazing hearing these stories. But that comes back to why, Why
• 39:08
  do we even have music? Why is music so important to
• 39:11
  humans? And there's all this data now
• 39:13
  that like performing music in particular together in a groups
• 39:19
  has this amazing neurochemistry behind it.
• 39:22
  That doesn't happen when you're just by yourself.
• 39:24
  So if you think about a chorus singing together, one of the
• 39:28
  things that happens when you're singing with a group is there's
• 39:32
  two neurochemicals get turned on dopamine, which is a reward
• 39:35
  signal, and endorphins. Endorphins are really cool
• 39:39
  because they actually make you not care about pain.
• 39:41
  But when you put that dopamine and that endorphin together, it
• 39:44
  actually gives you a sense of acceptance within a community.
• 39:48
  So you think about humans, we, we need to live in groups, we
• 39:53
  need to live in communities. And what music does is it brings
• 39:57
  us together and it makes us given that sense of belonging.
• 40:00
  Like you said, if I, if I like the dead, which I do and I find
• 40:04
  out the dead, we have a lot to talk about and we're like in
• 40:07
  this community, right? But I think think about going to
• 40:10
  synagogue and chanting. I was going to.
• 40:12
  I was literally about to bring that up.
• 40:13
  It's such a fundamental part of religious life too.
• 40:16
  It is for sure, And churches and everything else you know, I mean
• 40:19
  music. Is the best music.
• 40:21
  It's it's all the great. Things you together.
• 40:23
  Town and everything Blues came from, I mean, it's some of the
• 40:25
  best music in the world came from churches.
• 40:28
  But it but it brings people together who have similar
• 40:30
  beliefs and similar, you know. Values.
• 40:33
  Yeah, looks out of the life and, and, and values and, and it
• 40:35
  gives you that sense of community and humans need to
• 40:38
  have that. We're we're not good at going
• 40:40
  solo. And and so I think, I think
• 40:43
  that's an important part of the evolution of music.
• 40:45
  It it it actually helped us evolve as a species and survive
• 40:49
  because it it enforced that sense of community and
• 40:52
  belonging. Yeah, I have AI.
• 40:54
  Do I have a very strong sense of optimism and hope actually for
• 40:58
  this, for this upcoming generation, because I think that
• 41:01
  they saw the pain. You know, I was born in 95.
• 41:06
  I grew up just about the time like I I would grew up the the
• 41:10
  year that I was going through puberty and dealing with fear of
• 41:13
  girls and everything like that was the exact time I got a
• 41:15
  phone. I was able to start texting a
• 41:17
  girl instead of talking to her face, you know, and oh, man,
• 41:20
  yeah, exactly, you know, and then.
• 41:22
  And that's, that's a whole different conversation, man.
• 41:24
  It's a whole other world, but but I think that the generation
• 41:28
  below me saw the damage that it did and I and they're rejecting
• 41:33
  that. And I think that, you know, it's
• 41:35
  been coming. It's becoming popular to go to
• 41:37
  the movie theaters again, to go to live shows again.
• 41:39
  It's popular to put your phones down or to take social media
• 41:42
  fast or breaks that people take. Because I think that there's a
• 41:45
  recognition like, listen, I, I I've been saying this for 10
• 41:47
  years with this is a test Bunny generation of social media,
• 41:51
  right? So, you know, we're like, we're
• 41:53
  letting it go. We're going to let everyone use
• 41:55
  it and we're going to just figure out whether it's good or
• 41:57
  bad and good luck with the rest of it, you know?
• 41:58
  And I think that that that that people are picking up real
• 42:01
  quickly that this is not something that is attainable and
• 42:04
  that we do need these relationships and connections
• 42:06
  and embodied experiences for sure.
• 42:08
  Absolutely. And, and that the phone's just
• 42:10
  not going to replace that. And the way that it tries to
• 42:12
  replace it I think is incredibly damaging.
• 42:16
  And so I, I think it's, you're absolutely right.
• 42:18
  You're absolutely. Right.
• 42:19
  I wonder if there's a relationship between you between
• 42:22
  especially like scrolling and the type of the type of phone
• 42:24
  use that people use and the and and the brain degeneration.
• 42:29
  Do you know if there's any research on that?
• 42:32
  So there's growing, there's some growing studies about it.
• 42:34
  And I mean, there is some really interesting data that just came
• 42:37
  out about AI use. So people who are using AI to do
• 42:42
  the work that they used to do with their own brains.
• 42:45
  I, I think there's some, some real evidence that you're,
• 42:47
  you're, you're actually giving up neurons for that or giving up
• 42:52
  circuits at least, right? Because, because these people
• 42:55
  are showing signs that it's not helping them in terms of normal
• 42:58
  brain processing. And it makes sense, right?
• 43:00
  You're, you're basically giving up what your brain should be
• 43:04
  doing to something else. And it's, it's becoming making
• 43:08
  your brain that couch potato brain again.
• 43:12
  Exactly, exactly right. So, so I think, I think we were
• 43:16
  going to be like you said, I think there's a test buddy
• 43:19
  generation for social media and now we're the test buddy
• 43:21
  generation for AI and we'll see how that how far that goes.
• 43:26
  That we learned from social media, from AI, because they're
• 43:28
  making a lot of very similar promises.
• 43:30
  You know, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg running around saying
• 43:32
  that you're not going to need to hang out with friends ever
• 43:34
  again. And Sam Altman running around
• 43:36
  saying that, you know, you never have to work ever again.
• 43:38
  Like no one says that that's the yardstick that we're going for.
• 43:41
  I don't know who decided that, you know that that's what the
• 43:44
  way we're supposed to measure success or failure.
• 43:46
  Yeah. So if you're never and, and and
• 43:47
  bigger questions too, like if you're never going to work
• 43:49
  again, well, how are you going to make money?
• 43:52
  How's the average? Average, I'm not as worried
• 43:54
  about money as I am about meaning.
• 43:57
  I think, I think that we're at a point with a combination of
• 44:00
  energy and compute and robotics that I mean, especially at the
• 44:05
  rate that they grow like you and I were talking about earlier,
• 44:07
  like such an exponential rate. I I don't think capital is going
• 44:10
  to be as much of a problem in the future as much as meaning
• 44:13
  and purpose. It depends.
• 44:16
  I think if you if you're an ultimate capitalist, you know
• 44:20
  the goal, the goal is to get as rich as possible, but that that
• 44:23
  capitalism always has winners and losers.
• 44:25
  Mm hmm. So and then I.
• 44:26
  Think we'll be post, I think we'll be we will impose
• 44:28
  capitalism pretty soon is why that you're already kind of
• 44:31
  there. I think we I have to because,
• 44:34
  because you know, I just think about in the old days, you know,
• 44:38
  if there is some new technology that came along that basically
• 44:41
  meant a whole bunch of people suddenly became unemployed.
• 44:43
  My favorite story about that, by the way, is telephone operators
• 44:46
  #1 Employment Opportunity for women in the United States.
• 44:50
  Telephone operators and and the cool story about that is kind of
• 44:53
  funny story is that there was some town where there was a
• 44:56
  telephone operator and her husband owned a Brickyard.
• 45:00
  I think it was a Brickyard. And whenever she got the calls
• 45:04
  for another Brickyard, she would send it over to her husband's
• 45:07
  business, right. And the other Brickyard found
• 45:09
  out about that turned out to be a very guy who was turned out to
• 45:11
  be very inventive and an inventor and figured out how to
• 45:13
  do the automatic switching and went overnight.
• 45:16
  Overnight, all of those women lost their jobs, you know, all
• 45:19
  across the country. And So what did they do?
• 45:22
  So they found other positions because things were changing and
• 45:25
  there were other jobs and there was other ways to get employed.
• 45:28
  But I think the end result of AI is there will be no jobs, right?
• 45:35
  And so for some people, that's great.
• 45:37
  But for an awful lot of people, what are they going to do?
• 45:40
  And how are we going to, how are we going to feed them, you know?
• 45:42
  So, yeah, So I do wonder about that.
• 45:45
  And I think that I'm coming back to the brain, you know, I think,
• 45:49
  yeah, again, if you're, if you're just instead of thinking
• 45:52
  about something and like you said, working with other people
• 45:55
  to come up with ideas and working at a group and now
• 45:59
  you're just plugging it into AI and all of your interactions now
• 46:02
  are over the computer instead of other people.
• 46:03
  I think that's incredibly unhealthy for our brains and and
• 46:06
  for our ability to stay happy and and everything else in our
• 46:09
  lives and fulfilled. One of the things that I found
• 46:12
  amazing. I know you've been if you've
• 46:15
  been following the whole Artemis 2 journey.
• 46:20
  The astronaut Coke was her name is her name.
• 46:23
  She's she's she's incredible. I heard something her talking
• 46:27
  about when they were going up and coming further and further
• 46:30
  away from the Earth and just realizing that the four of them
• 46:33
  in this tiny little space were a crew that depended on each other
• 46:36
  to survive, right? I mean, everything they did,
• 46:39
  everything had to work exactly right.
• 46:41
  And they all completely relied on each other.
• 46:44
  And, and, and then she's looking at the Earth and she's seeing
• 46:47
  this Earth surrounded by blackness and realizing that the
• 46:51
  Earth is a, is a lifeboat, right?
• 46:54
  It's, it's and, and, and then she says, you know, I look back
• 46:57
  and then she says that's the crew.
• 46:59
  Everybody on that planet is a crew.
• 47:01
  And if we don't work together, we're not going to survive.
• 47:05
  And I think that's absolutely true.
• 47:06
  Even on the one to one basis, our brains want that social
• 47:10
  interaction. They need it.
• 47:13
  And we need to be able to work together.
• 47:15
  And, and maybe that means more, we just need more choirs so we
• 47:18
  can all sing together. But I always joke.
• 47:21
  I always joke. Wouldn't it be great if we get
• 47:23
  Congress to sing? But can you?
• 47:26
  Imagine. Yeah.
• 47:28
  Or Aaron Rodgers. He says he wants anyone in
• 47:30
  public office to take ayahuasca first or something like that,
• 47:33
  you know? But yeah.
• 47:37
  And that's Yeah. And you know, what do you, what
• 47:40
  do you think? Are you aware of the Apple TV
• 47:42
  show Plebeis? Yeah.
• 47:44
  I I watched it, I love it. What do you think of that
• 47:46
  context? What do you think of concept I
• 47:47
  mean? I mean, it's, it's crazy, right?
• 47:49
  Because it's like, I mean, it takes the work life balance
• 47:52
  question to a whole new level, right?
• 47:56
  That's severance. Oh, I'm sorry, That's severance,
• 47:59
  Yeah. Where?
• 48:01
  We have the group, the group. Things except for.
• 48:04
  The people who, Yeah, yeah, except for the people who really
• 48:07
  want to stay individuals for reasons that they don't
• 48:10
  understand. I can't wait for Season 2 to
• 48:12
  come out. But yeah, I mean, so again,
• 48:16
  coming back to social things, I mean, that's that's kind of the
• 48:21
  extreme version of that, right? Yeah, I think that's that's
• 48:24
  that's. Utopia.
• 48:26
  I think a variation is utopia. I don't know if it is because
• 48:30
  again, I think we also find a lot of fulfillment in our own
• 48:32
  individuality. Yeah.
• 48:34
  All right. Yeah, it's, it's almost, it's
• 48:37
  almost like the the the extreme version of communism, right.
• 48:41
  So you, when you lose that, I mean, that also gives you a loss
• 48:45
  of control over things that gives you a loss of I mean,
• 48:48
  obviously if you're in that particular situation that you
• 48:50
  don't care about that anymore because you've been programmed
• 48:52
  not to care about that. But the reality is as human
• 48:55
  beings, that's not how we are. We we want to have an.
• 48:57
  Autonomy. We want to, we want to know that
• 49:00
  we're part of something. We want to know that we're part
• 49:02
  of that and that makes our brains happy.
• 49:04
  But we also want to know that we are also individuals and that we
• 49:07
  have that sense of who we are as people.
• 49:09
  And so I think those are both very important things to hold on
• 49:12
  to. Sure, sure.
• 49:14
  I watched a really interesting debate that I started showing my
• 49:18
  high school students this week with Tucker Carlson this week.
• 49:22
  And there was ACEO of some gene editing company.
• 49:25
  And the company allows you in a similar way to IVF, the way that
• 49:31
  you can kind of select a, you know, particular traits, you can
• 49:34
  select traits like height or you could, you could actually
• 49:40
  remove, you know, I guess remove the take a embryo that is not
• 49:46
  going that doesn't have the genetic tendency towards, you
• 49:50
  know, schizophrenia or cancer or dementia or Alzheimer's.
• 49:54
  Is a lot of this research going to be obsolete if all this is
• 49:59
  just kind of edited out, or are we going to still have to
• 50:01
  experience this? We're a long ways away from it.
• 50:04
  First of all, like I said, there are things that happen during
• 50:07
  the course of our lives that impact these diseases, right?
• 50:09
  So even if you have a genetic resistance to something or or
• 50:13
  not a genetic liability, there's still a chance you're going to
• 50:16
  get it. But more importantly, you know,
• 50:19
  the thing with gene editing is there's a, you know, there's,
• 50:24
  there's a response to everything you do.
• 50:26
  And a system is complicated. As a human body, you take out,
• 50:30
  you take out an alter 1 gene. How does that affect everything
• 50:33
  downstream of that gene or around that gene, right?
• 50:36
  So we don't really fully know. So I mean, on the one hand, gene
• 50:39
  editing. Alter the gene.
• 50:40
  The argument was to select a gene that wasn't that embryo,
• 50:44
  that was not dis, that was not just what sorry, that was not
• 50:47
  that didn't carry it. So it's not to take it, even
• 50:50
  change it, but it's to say you have a selection of 10 embryos
• 50:53
  and you know this embryo is going to be XY and Z and this
• 50:56
  one's going to be XY and Z, but to the real specifics.
• 50:59
  We, we kind of do that already in IVF.
• 51:02
  You know, we look for embryos that are more viable, more, you
• 51:05
  know, healthy, working viable. So the, the biggest problem and
• 51:08
  the biggest challenge for IVF is, you know, it takes a lot of
• 51:11
  tries, a lot of embryos before you get one that's healthy and
• 51:14
  right. So we're already doing that to a
• 51:17
  degree, and we are at the point where we can sample a single
• 51:20
  cell from an embryo and not disrupt the embryo and do all
• 51:24
  that genetic screening already. And so it's expensive, but you
• 51:29
  can do it. So and if you're spending 30 or
• 51:32
  $40,000 a shot to do IVF, you want to have the embryo that's
• 51:37
  going to be the one that's going to be OK.
• 51:39
  So that makes total sense. So I think we're kind of already
• 51:42
  doing it. We can do it more in a more
• 51:45
  sophisticated way, obviously, and really get down to the nitty
• 51:47
  gritty. And of course, you know, there's
• 51:51
  always ethical concerns about, you know, wanting to make all of
• 51:54
  our embryos blonde haired, blue eyed babies.
• 51:59
  And so that's another question that we as a society need to
• 52:01
  grapple with. But correcting disease genes or
• 52:04
  selecting against those? Now some people will tell you
• 52:09
  and believe and understandably that IVF is generating life,
• 52:14
  right? So every single one of those
• 52:16
  embryos is a potential life or potential human being.
• 52:21
  Somebody can say it. And some might say those
• 52:23
  blastocysts, which are just a small collection of cells, they
• 52:26
  don't have anything yet. Just it's just a pile of cells
• 52:29
  is still a human being, Right. Yeah.
• 52:31
  So ethically speaking, is it hard to, like, pick one and let
• 52:34
  the others go? It's a hard.
• 52:35
  Question that's also interesting, right.
• 52:38
  And do you think it's not really a justification to say that
• 52:41
  those that those wouldn't have made it anyway and that every
• 52:44
  time they could only you can only procreate?
• 52:46
  You know, I guess you always right.
• 52:49
  That doesn't sound like a good enough moral justification to
• 52:51
  me. If that's if that's your
• 52:52
  beliefs, there are. People, there are people in my
• 52:55
  life who have various genetic diseases and I, I love them and
• 52:58
  they've made amazing contributions to the lives of
• 53:01
  the people around them. And it's like, would you take
• 53:03
  that away? So those are huge ethical
• 53:06
  questions that we need to grapple with.
• 53:09
  Or, or someone I, you know, I and you know, the person that I,
• 53:12
  I dated, you know, one of the questions that, that, that was a
• 53:15
  conversation that my parents had to sit me down for is like,
• 53:18
  listen, if you want to, you know, marry this person, move on
• 53:20
  with this, with this, with this, with this girl, then you have to
• 53:24
  consider the family genetic tendencies and like whether it's
• 53:28
  her or whether it's going to be your kids, God forbid, or, or
• 53:30
  anything like that, Like this is something to think about.
• 53:32
  And you know, it's not pleasant. It's really, really not
• 53:36
  pleasant. It you know, it takes a fun la
• 53:38
  de da reality and and and makes it very real very quickly.
• 53:41
  Well, the, and so one of the other areas of research in my
• 53:45
  day job is a, is a group of conditions that are kind of
• 53:49
  collectively known as neurofibromatosis.
• 53:51
  It's actually 3 or 4 different diseases or five even.
• 53:55
  And these patients develop horrible multiple peripheral
• 53:58
  nerve tumors and they have all sorts of other problems as well
• 54:02
  and. Different nerve tumors called
• 54:04
  pain, right? Some do, some do.
• 54:07
  Yeah. And in fact, one of the one of
• 54:09
  the forms of this disease, the main problem that these people
• 54:12
  have is, is pain, like intractable pain that there's no
• 54:15
  treatment for, which is one of the things my lab is working on
• 54:17
  actually. How do you tackle that?
• 54:20
  Well, so it's a very different kind of pain than any other kind
• 54:23
  of pain you've ever seen. And so we've we've been studying
• 54:27
  the mutations that are linked to this disease and realizing that
• 54:31
  those mutations directly cause the cells to cause nearby nerve
• 54:35
  cells to be hyper responsive to pain signals.
• 54:38
  And so, so right now we're trying to.
• 54:40
  You know, without, is there inflammation there?
• 54:43
  Is some there is some inflammation, but you don't need
• 54:46
  to have inflammation to have this pain sensitivity.
• 54:48
  That's the thing that was. So surprising.
• 54:50
  That's crazy. And so your body wouldn't notice
• 54:52
  and relief because there's no inflammation.
• 54:55
  Right. So the question is how do you
• 54:57
  turn that off? And so we've we've identified
• 54:59
  some proteins that we think are driving this and it turns out
• 55:02
  there was already drugs available attacking those
• 55:05
  proteins for completely reasons. And so we're trying, we're
• 55:08
  trying those drugs. A colleague of mine is running a
• 55:10
  clinical trial to try to see if that will relieve the pain in
• 55:13
  these patients. But what's you know, so but
• 55:16
  these are people who know they have a genetic disorder, but
• 55:19
  also want to have families. Yeah.
• 55:21
  So for for them, it's, you know, how do I screen for that?
• 55:25
  And for them, it's no question. I don't want an embryo that has
• 55:29
  these mutations. I want the embryo that doesn't
• 55:31
  have those mutations. And so I.
• 55:32
  Don't know if this is AI, don't know if this is a thing outside
• 55:37
  of the I grew up in. I am Orthodox Jewish.
• 55:39
  I grew up in the Orthodox Jewish world and when I was in high
• 55:41
  school we went through. I went through.
• 55:42
  I grew up in a Conservative synagogue, so.
• 55:45
  There you go, beautiful. And and I did something called J
• 55:49
  screen. I don't know if you've heard of
• 55:50
  it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 55:52
  Is that, is that something that everyone does?
• 55:54
  Because I did it in high school and everyone was like, listen,
• 55:56
  you should do this because it's important to know that whoever
• 55:59
  you you know, you you should know your genetic tendencies
• 56:02
  before you date and get married so that you have an idea as to
• 56:05
  like whether you should even begin a relationship or not
• 56:07
  even, you know, I mean, I know a story of someone that, you know,
• 56:10
  got a miss the doctor misdiagnosed.
• 56:12
  They both were carriers for Tay Sachs and, you know, and their
• 56:14
  first kid ended up dying. Unfortunately, you know, it's
• 56:16
  just terrible story. You know you want to.
• 56:19
  You want to prevent that. You know, I, I, I remember
• 56:22
  having that conversation with my parents.
• 56:24
  It's like, you know, as a Jewish family, you know, we have to
• 56:28
  worry about Tay Sachs disease. And I'm like, what Tay Sachs
• 56:31
  disease? And now of course I know what it
• 56:32
  is, but I don't know anybody who was going out before they dated
• 56:37
  and doing the genetic screen. I imagine that is in our future,
• 56:40
  to be honest. I'm sure certain people are
• 56:42
  like, I'm not going to even date you unless I know you're, you've
• 56:45
  got a pretty clean genetic background.
• 56:47
  Sure. And The thing is it's a risk,
• 56:50
  but it doesn't necessarily mean anything's going to happen,
• 56:52
  right. So that's that's the other
• 56:54
  thing, you know, if it's usually these rotations are on one copy
• 56:58
  of your gene, not both copies. So your chances of passing out
• 57:02
  on your children are small, are smaller.
• 57:06
  But yeah, it's it's it's an interesting question.
• 57:09
  And again, that's one of those things that's like, where are we
• 57:11
  going with this? And now, you know, even the, the
• 57:14
  23andMe and these other companies that do genetic
• 57:17
  testing for you, they have that information.
• 57:20
  Sure, Yeah, yeah. And so there's like databases.
• 57:23
  It's like, okay, you know, I'm going to, Efron's going to go
• 57:29
  date my daughter. Let's look at the genetic
• 57:32
  information up before you have that first date.
• 57:34
  Because if things go get hot and heavy, I don't want anything.
• 57:36
  Out of that, I've done that. So my, my, my, my brother is in
• 57:40
  the ultra orthodox world. And there's a, there's another
• 57:42
  program they called Dorya Sharim.
• 57:45
  And it's, I don't even remember what.
• 57:47
  I don't even know what it means. It's translated to something
• 57:49
  about straight generations or healthy generations and didn't
• 57:52
  even tell you whether you're prone or not.
• 57:54
  What you do is you and your and the girl you're dating send in
• 57:58
  your, the, your, your report to someone.
• 58:00
  They tell you whether or not you're a match, yes or no.
• 58:02
  Like they don't tell you your whole list of potential.
• 58:05
  Do they just say there's nothing to worry about, you're good to
• 58:07
  go. And so that way you don't
• 58:08
  necessarily know your genetic history.
• 58:10
  You don't have to, but you know that you're, that you and your
• 58:13
  what and your partner are not going to be carriers for the
• 58:16
  same things, which I think is also an interesting method.
• 58:19
  But that happens before you go, you know, probably after the
• 58:21
  second or third date. If you, if you want to continue
• 58:24
  going out with my son, my daughter, we got to find out,
• 58:26
  you know what the story is over here.
• 58:29
  That's really. Interesting.
• 58:30
  Yeah, so tell me. So let's talk about your night
• 58:32
  job now, because it sounds like you're, you know, your day job
• 58:35
  keeps it keeps you pretty busy. And you, you know, you, we
• 58:38
  discussed some of the music, but why don't you elaborate a little
• 58:42
  bit on what, on what you, what you've been doing?
• 58:45
  So this all started because I was playing piano at A at a
• 58:48
  party for our department. It was like our 20th anniversary
• 58:51
  or something. And this person comes up to me
• 58:54
  and, and, and says, I didn't know you played piano.
• 58:56
  I go, yeah, I've been in bands my whole life.
• 58:58
  And we started talking. It turns out she is the person
• 59:01
  who gathers people from the public together every year and
• 59:04
  they have these these talks and and she said, well, would you
• 59:09
  want to do one of these on music and the brain?
• 59:12
  So that sounds like fun. And she goes well, and I'd like
• 59:14
  you to play piano somehow during the talk as well.
• 59:16
  Could you do that? I goes, sure, that sounds like
• 59:18
  fun. So I spent like 6 months reading
• 59:20
  all the papers so I could get my hands on about music and the
• 59:22
  brain. And what really struck me was
• 59:24
  the fact that some of these studies were completely relevant
• 59:28
  to what I was doing in my lab. So the idea that practicing
• 59:31
  music may actually drive more myelin formation, the idea that
• 59:35
  practicing music may actually Dr. Neurogenesis and the
• 59:38
  formation of new sets, synapses. And so I, you know, sadly, you
• 59:43
  know, that was one of these fields where about 1/3 of the
• 59:45
  papers were just crap. I mean, they were just like, you
• 59:49
  know, sample sizes of two, no controls, all these things.
• 59:52
  And so it's like, OK, I threw that out and then I took the
• 59:55
  best papers and I kind of piloted how it related to my
• 59:58
  work. Found some good jokes to tell.
• 1:00:01
  I I Did you ever see the 2000 year old man with Mel Brooks and
• 1:00:04
  Carl Reiner? I did not.
• 1:00:07
  Look it up. It's hysterical.
• 1:00:09
  So basically Mel Brooks, famous actor and and director and
• 1:00:12
  writer, plays the 2000 year old man.
• 1:00:16
  And Carl Reiner plays the interviewer and he's like asking
• 1:00:20
  him questions where things came from.
• 1:00:22
  And so at one point, Carl Reiner says, well, where did music come
• 1:00:25
  from? And Mel Brooks's character says,
• 1:00:28
  oh, music. It came out of fear.
• 1:00:31
  He goes, fear, what are you talking about?
• 1:00:32
  He goes, yeah, one day I was out walking and a lion started
• 1:00:35
  eating my foot off. So I called out, a lion is
• 1:00:39
  eating my foot off. Somebody call a cop, right?
• 1:00:44
  And then people heard that and came from all around and they
• 1:00:47
  liked it so much they started singing along.
• 1:00:49
  And that's how music started, right?
• 1:00:52
  So I put that in there and I put some music in.
• 1:00:54
  I get people to sing the end of Hey Jude in three different keys
• 1:00:58
  just to show how the brain just transposes music without any
• 1:01:01
  musical practice or experience. And it's, it's fun, right?
• 1:01:05
  And so I gave the talk and people come up to me after the
• 1:01:08
  talk and say, how much do you charge for this talk?
• 1:01:11
  And I said charge. And so because I thought this
• 1:01:16
  was going to be a one off as a favorite of my friends.
• 1:01:18
  And so that turned into probably I've probably given this talk
• 1:01:22
  600 times in six different countries.
• 1:01:26
  And what's that been every it's been a kind of fun adventure.
• 1:01:30
  My my wife thinks we should do it on cruise ships.
• 1:01:32
  You know, I think you should do. Then she gets to go, then she
• 1:01:35
  gets to on cruises, right? So, but it's been amazing and
• 1:01:39
  I've learned so much about connecting with the public,
• 1:01:42
  about science communication. And so that turned into other
• 1:01:46
  talks on other subjects. I did one about the neuroscience
• 1:01:49
  of love, love and pleasure, which is great because you can
• 1:01:52
  talk about, you know, why eating a piece of chocolate that makes
• 1:01:56
  your brain light up when you fall in love, all the different
• 1:01:58
  stages in love. And how about the neurochemistry
• 1:02:00
  changes when you're first meeting somebody, then you get
• 1:02:03
  infatuated with them and then you decide, or am I committed or
• 1:02:05
  am I going to start all over again and all the changes that
• 1:02:08
  happened there. But I also get to talk about
• 1:02:10
  things like when pleasure goes wrong, like depression, this is
• 1:02:14
  could be talked about and addiction.
• 1:02:16
  So I mean, it was a, it was really a powerful thing to do.
• 1:02:19
  And then I've done a bunch of other subjects too, but the
• 1:02:21
  music in the brain one is always the most popular.
• 1:02:24
  And then somebody I know in the publishing world said you should
• 1:02:27
  write a book about this. And my first response was, there
• 1:02:30
  are so many books about music and the brain.
• 1:02:33
  This is Your Brain on Music by Dan Levitan is.
• 1:02:35
  An amazing brand. I heard there was this record.
• 1:02:38
  The second one was also very good.
• 1:02:40
  He's great, you know, and I'm, I'm.
• 1:02:42
  Trying to get him on his secretary pushed me off a little
• 1:02:44
  bit, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get him at some point.
• 1:02:47
  Keep working on it because he's actually really great to
• 1:02:49
  interview. I've heard to him a couple times
• 1:02:51
  and I've seen he he was here live in Portland.
• 1:02:53
  I got to hear him talk not too long ago, but so then then I the
• 1:03:00
  funny story. I play racquetball at the J, the
• 1:03:04
  Jewish Community Center, and it's at 6:00 in the morning
• 1:03:08
  because we both have jobs by my Rocket Ball partner and I.
• 1:03:12
  And it was 1 morning after I'd given one of these talks here in
• 1:03:14
  Portland. And he said, hey, how'd your
• 1:03:17
  talk go? And I started telling him about
• 1:03:19
  it. And there was this guy kind of
• 1:03:21
  in our locker room that was kind of there.
• 1:03:23
  I said hi to him. I didn't know who he was, but I
• 1:03:25
  just said hi to him and he said hi to me.
• 1:03:27
  And he stops us. He says, did you say you were
• 1:03:29
  given a talk about music in the brain?
• 1:03:31
  I said, yeah, he goes, I've seen your talk twice.
• 1:03:33
  I just didn't recognize you without any clothes on, right.
• 1:03:36
  So, so, so then, so then we start talking and it turns out
• 1:03:41
  he's a music professor and a professional jazz musician and
• 1:03:43
  all these and we became friends over the years.
• 1:03:47
  And to the annoyance of my racquetball partners, we had
• 1:03:50
  these long conversations like, come on, we got to get going.
• 1:03:53
  And then he he told me after about 5 or 6 years that he was
• 1:03:56
  about to retire. And this was just a year or so
• 1:03:59
  before COVID. And I said, you know, I got this
• 1:04:03
  idea. I said, you know, listen,
• 1:04:04
  Dennis, Dennis, his name's Dennis Plies.
• 1:04:07
  I said I would you be interested in writing a book with me about
• 1:04:12
  the neuroscience of music, where I could talk about the
• 1:04:15
  neuroscience and you could talk about pedagogy, learning and
• 1:04:18
  everything and what it's like. To be a musician.
• 1:04:20
  And put it together. And then maybe we could, like,
• 1:04:23
  send out a survey to professional musicians and add
• 1:04:25
  to that and put this whole conversation together and all
• 1:04:27
  these different things. And he said yes.
• 1:04:30
  And so it was moving at the speed of evolution because we're
• 1:04:33
  both busy people. And then COVID it.
• 1:04:37
  Suddenly we had all this time to write.
• 1:04:40
  So I thank COVID for letting me finish this book.
• 1:04:43
  And it was published by Columbia University Press, which was
• 1:04:46
  awesome. They've been great.
• 1:04:47
  The audio version just came out. We just had the Mandarin version
• 1:04:50
  come out in China, in China. And they changed the cover.
• 1:04:55
  It's funny that it looks like something from the 1950s beatnik
• 1:04:57
  movement, but that's cool. I like that.
• 1:05:00
  It's been an amazing adventure. So I got to like just recently
• 1:05:02
  got invited to do my talk with the Detroit Symphony in Detroit,
• 1:05:06
  which was amazing. And you went and I've done.
• 1:05:09
  What's that? You're going or you went.
• 1:05:11
  I already did it. I did it back.
• 1:05:12
  To you nice, nice, nice, amazing and by.
• 1:05:14
  The way Detroit, it's really nice now.
• 1:05:16
  I loved it. I I.
• 1:05:17
  Was there. I was there two or three years,
• 1:05:20
  two years ago when my buddies got married there.
• 1:05:22
  I had a great time. I had a great.
• 1:05:24
  Time that's a great city so we had a we had a really good time
• 1:05:28
  and it was really fun working with the Symphony there and and
• 1:05:30
  these jazz musicians there too. I asked these, I asked musicians
• 1:05:34
  to join me on stage, but I do this and I always ask them to do
• 1:05:36
  crazy things and they always buy into it and it's so much fun and
• 1:05:39
  we have a great time. But so that's how that all got
• 1:05:42
  started. And so to me, it's been an
• 1:05:44
  amazing adventure because I, like I said, I I'm finding
• 1:05:47
  things that I do in my lab life that overlap with the science
• 1:05:50
  behind the music, even though I'm not personally doing the
• 1:05:53
  science, I'm reviewing it for other people and then
• 1:05:55
  transmitting it. And for me, that's just been a
• 1:05:58
  great adventure. Yeah, one thing I was talking to
• 1:06:01
  Karen Barrett about who I just recorded with three or 4
• 1:06:05
  episodes ago, was that she was saying how her research followed
• 1:06:10
  her curiosity and trail of interest rather than having an
• 1:06:13
  end goal in mind and just trying, you know, with tunnel
• 1:06:16
  vision to get there. And, and we're talking about how
• 1:06:18
  some of the most fun and fulfilling and creative work and
• 1:06:21
  some of the most, you know, progressive work, you know, that
• 1:06:24
  really, really pushes the boundaries come from come from
• 1:06:27
  this place. And, and you know, and then, you
• 1:06:29
  know, and people I love how you describe as like a day job and a
• 1:06:32
  night job, but they all flow into one another.
• 1:06:34
  And, you know, and ultimately, you know, again, I ended up
• 1:06:36
  reaching out to you because of your night, you know, because of
• 1:06:38
  your night job. And you work on music too.
• 1:06:40
  So you know, the fact that the fact that people I, I, I, you
• 1:06:44
  know, people feel like they have a job that they're married to
• 1:06:49
  and that, you know, they don't have time for themselves.
• 1:06:52
  And I think that we need to, you know, we're having, I'm sure
• 1:06:57
  we're having, but we, you know, what we can really use.
• 1:07:00
  And you know, this would be the glass half full perspective of
• 1:07:03
  AI, you know, doing a lot of work.
• 1:07:05
  Is that for a lot of people of the question of what would you
• 1:07:08
  be able to do? Because all of a sudden very
• 1:07:10
  real. And the question is, isn't what,
• 1:07:12
  what, what you know, whether or not you could do it.
• 1:07:13
  The question is, do you have the courage to be able to do it?
• 1:07:16
  Or are you going to be able to chase this?
• 1:07:17
  Or, you know, is this, are you, are you comfortable?
• 1:07:19
  Is this inconvenient? You know, like, do you feel, you
• 1:07:21
  know, I don't really feel like getting up in front of a bunch
• 1:07:23
  of people or I don't really feel like taking that chance at open
• 1:07:25
  mic and, and playing all woody and clunky and, you know,
• 1:07:28
  feeling embarrassed in front of everyone And like, so I'm not
• 1:07:31
  going to do that. But I but, you know, I think
• 1:07:34
  that there's going to be so much potential for, there's going to
• 1:07:36
  be, I hope, an exploration, an explosion of just humanity as is
• 1:07:40
  really, really what I'm hoping for.
• 1:07:41
  Yeah, because I mean, I'm the kind of person who loves to be
• 1:07:45
  just really busy all the time. And, and one of the nice things
• 1:07:48
  about being these two different lives that I've got right now,
• 1:07:52
  it's I'm learning. Both of those are informing each
• 1:07:54
  other. I'm a much better public speaker
• 1:07:56
  now because I decided to take a chance and do something a little
• 1:07:59
  wacky. And I'm, and so that also
• 1:08:03
  translates into how I give talks at scientific conferences, for
• 1:08:05
  example, on my, on the science I do in my lab.
• 1:08:08
  And then vice versa, that my interests in my lab are driving.
• 1:08:11
  Well, what's, how's that? How's music affecting that?
• 1:08:13
  And then I can dig through the literature and find things where
• 1:08:16
  that that over wraps. But having said that, I, not
• 1:08:19
  everybody is insane as I am. And so having like you said,
• 1:08:23
  these tools like AI, I, I think it's going to be helpful for
• 1:08:27
  you. It could be freeing.
• 1:08:27
  It could be freeing. It could be freeing totally.
• 1:08:31
  I'll tell. You the only thing I've used the
• 1:08:32
  AI for lately is this public talk I give on the history of
• 1:08:36
  Alzheimer's work. So I used one of the one of the
• 1:08:40
  platforms to make some images. And how was that?
• 1:08:44
  How do you find that? My so my idea was to have a road
• 1:08:47
  called the amyloid plaque road, right?
• 1:08:50
  OK. And then have a turn off and
• 1:08:52
  have the car miss it and they take a left and then take this
• 1:08:56
  left turn. And I and I asked it to just
• 1:08:58
  have the car hit a brick wall. So it drew this really bizarre
• 1:09:02
  brick wall right in the middle of the road, nothing else around
• 1:09:05
  it. Right.
• 1:09:06
  I was, I, I was about to like tell it to do it again and like
• 1:09:09
  make it like a, a parking space where it actually, but no, I
• 1:09:12
  thought, this is weird enough. I just relieve it because the
• 1:09:15
  whole point is we went down that path of research and which felt
• 1:09:20
  right for so long that we didn't feel like we needed to take that
• 1:09:22
  turn off. And then we hit the brick wall
• 1:09:24
  and that's exactly what it did. And so then I had and then I had
• 1:09:27
  the car go back and find that turn off again.
• 1:09:30
  And then I added a road said said blood vessel changes and
• 1:09:34
  diabetes and all these other things.
• 1:09:35
  And then they converged to the cure, right.
• 1:09:39
  So that to me, that was an incredibly effective way for me
• 1:09:42
  because if I had to draw, that would have taken me hours.
• 1:09:45
  Sure. And and it's it was an
• 1:09:47
  incredible time saving tool. It's the only thing.
• 1:09:51
  No, it's because I love it. And I call the talk the long and
• 1:09:53
  winding Rd. So that's also my.
• 1:09:55
  Lovely beetle. Also another good one.
• 1:09:56
  So sure, sure, sure. Coming from coming together,
• 1:09:58
  absolutely I get. That, yeah, but.
• 1:10:02
  I think I yeah, the other thing I'm really passionate about is
• 1:10:05
  education and alternative forms of education, because I think
• 1:10:08
  that I think that we're at a point where we could really kind
• 1:10:12
  of customize and personalize an enormous amount of education
• 1:10:15
  based on someone's preferences. And I know for myself, I, you
• 1:10:19
  know, I was always, I always loved the sound of the piano,
• 1:10:23
  but. And I started playing guitar at
• 1:10:27
  25. I'm 30 now.
• 1:10:28
  So I started, I started taking lessons at 25, about three years
• 1:10:32
  and two or three years. And, but I always loved the
• 1:10:37
  piano, you know, and, and, and I sat down the other day and my
• 1:10:40
  brother has a keyboard and I was visiting home for Passover and I
• 1:10:43
  asked Chad GBT for just basic scale practices and finger
• 1:10:48
  exercises to just get comfort on the piano.
• 1:10:50
  And I felt this incredible rush, like almost like a weight
• 1:10:55
  falling off my shoulders while I'm playing.
• 1:10:56
  And I felt like, I was like, I, I, I, I, I felt tangibly moved
• 1:11:03
  just from practicing and playing.
• 1:11:04
  And I, I only, I put a timer on for 10 minutes because that's
• 1:11:06
  all, you know, I thought was, OK, I'm going to have to get
• 1:11:08
  myself to, like, do this. An hour went by and, you know,
• 1:11:11
  it felt like a blink. Oh, yeah.
• 1:11:14
  What? What is that?
• 1:11:16
  Yeah. Well, and so that's another
• 1:11:18
  thing that I love about these, these studies on on the effects
• 1:11:21
  of music and also personal stories that people have come up
• 1:11:24
  to me with after I've given these talks.
• 1:11:26
  Sure. Is that you're, you're doing
• 1:11:28
  something very focused that involves fine and gross motor
• 1:11:33
  movements. It involves sensory, you know,
• 1:11:36
  feeling things because think about what your brain is doing
• 1:11:38
  when you're practicing an instrument.
• 1:11:39
  All right, so let's say you're reading music.
• 1:11:42
  All right, so let's say you've got music coming off of an iPad
• 1:11:45
  or a phone or, or a page. So those photons have to go into
• 1:11:49
  your eyes, go to the back of your eyes where your retina is.
• 1:11:52
  That's where all the cells that you know, take in the light go.
• 1:11:55
  That information has to go to the very back of your brain
• 1:11:58
  recognized as stuff. And then the rest of your brain
• 1:12:00
  like figures out what it all means.
• 1:12:03
  And then it transmits that information to parts of your
• 1:12:05
  brain that plan what you're going to do with your hands.
• 1:12:08
  And then that plan is put into a program of motion and that's
• 1:12:12
  sent down your spinal cord all the way to the ends of your
• 1:12:14
  fingertips. And then you finally hit the the
• 1:12:17
  note or notes with your hands. And then your hands are
• 1:12:20
  transmitting information back up to your brain all the time up to
• 1:12:23
  your spinal cord, back up to your brain to say, OK, he did it
• 1:12:25
  or he did it wrong, right. And then you're, and then
• 1:12:28
  there's this part of your brain that's emotionally responding to
• 1:12:31
  what hearing your, your ears are processing information to let
• 1:12:34
  you hear what you've just played and your brains processing it.
• 1:12:36
  And then you may also have an emotional response like, I love
• 1:12:38
  this song or I hate this song, right?
• 1:12:40
  All these things are happening in picoseconds, right?
• 1:12:45
  And so, so when you're doing that, what you're doing is
• 1:12:48
  you're challenging your brain in ways that just other activities
• 1:12:50
  don't do as nearly as much. And I think it's incredibly
• 1:12:54
  stimulating. And it actually, you know, I've
• 1:12:57
  talked to so many people who great story.
• 1:13:01
  I, I, I was giving one of my talks that afterwards this woman
• 1:13:04
  and her husband came up to me and, and said, Hey, this is the
• 1:13:07
  second time we've seen your talk.
• 1:13:08
  We saw the first time was about six years ago.
• 1:13:10
  And I said, that's, that's thanks for coming back.
• 1:13:13
  She says, well, we want to tell you about what your first talk
• 1:13:17
  did for us because turns out she had been a professional
• 1:13:20
  violinist and she got in a car accident and suddenly her motion
• 1:13:25
  was incredibly restricted. And her doctor told her, you
• 1:13:28
  know, give up the piano. I mean, give up the violin,
• 1:13:31
  It's, it's over. And she got incredibly
• 1:13:34
  depressed, right? And then they came and saw me
• 1:13:36
  talk about plasticity and how the brain, you know, just
• 1:13:39
  practicing drives all these changes.
• 1:13:42
  So her husband says, listen, OK, maybe you're not going to play
• 1:13:44
  the Brahms Violin Concerto anymore, but maybe you could
• 1:13:47
  play bluegrass, right? So she picked up her violin.
• 1:13:51
  And her husband shared with me. It was painful because I had to
• 1:13:55
  listen to that sounding like a cat being tortured to death.
• 1:13:59
  But she pushed herself to play it again.
• 1:14:02
  And now she's in a blue. And now she's in a bluegrass
• 1:14:04
  band and she's and she's incredibly happy, right?
• 1:14:08
  It changed her life. And I think that's the power
• 1:14:11
  that musical practice and musical accomplishment has.
• 1:14:14
  When you get to the point where it's so motivating to try
• 1:14:17
  something and get to the point where you succeed and then you
• 1:14:20
  go to the next thing and you succeed again.
• 1:14:21
  And then you build on that and build on that.
• 1:14:24
  And you know, I think that's an incredibly powerful thing for
• 1:14:26
  our brains. And it's actually physically
• 1:14:29
  changing our brains and and benefiting them.
• 1:14:31
  Coming back to that question to preserve right when you do these
• 1:14:34
  things and challenge your brain on your life, not only can it
• 1:14:37
  make you feel better, but it actually gives your brain more
• 1:14:39
  resilience over time. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:43
  Tell me about some of the bands that you played in.
• 1:14:44
  It's some of the music you play. So the first.
• 1:14:48
  I'm more into that. I'm interested in that too.
• 1:14:50
  So the the first band I played in was called Star Jammer.
• 1:14:54
  Nice. Wait, and where'd you grow up?
• 1:14:56
  You grow up in OR in Oregon. No, I grew up in La Jolla, CA
• 1:14:59
  mostly. I actually I was born in the Bay
• 1:15:01
  Area. We moved to upstate New York.
• 1:15:04
  We were in Westchester County for a while.
• 1:15:07
  My my dad worked for IBM so he was an Armoc.
• 1:15:10
  And I was in Rockland. I grew up in Rockland.
• 1:15:12
  There you go, there you go. And then he got an opportunity
• 1:15:15
  to move out to LA. And then in LA we finally moved
• 1:15:18
  to San Diego when I was, you know, about 7 or 8 years old.
• 1:15:21
  And so mostly San Diego. So I my mornings were spent
• 1:15:26
  surfing. Nice.
• 1:15:28
  I played some baseball. I did everything you can do in
• 1:15:30
  San Diego in the sun all the time, riding my bike around.
• 1:15:34
  But yeah, my first real band was Star Jammer and we all had long
• 1:15:38
  feathered hair and everything else.
• 1:15:40
  And, and then I was in a new age, a new way, not a new age
• 1:15:43
  new wave band called The Pedestrians.
• 1:15:47
  That was actually really fun. When I was in college, I used to
• 1:15:51
  play. So it was rock, rock, new wave,
• 1:15:55
  that kind of stuff. You know, this is back in the
• 1:15:59
  days when Quadrophenia first came out.
• 1:16:01
  So we loved The Who and we loved that kind of music as well.
• 1:16:05
  When I was in college, I hooked up with a bunch of people who
• 1:16:08
  like to play Blues. So we, we, I suppose, doing a
• 1:16:11
  lot of Blues and a little bit of jazz.
• 1:16:14
  And then actually, it's funny, when I was in Germany, I lived
• 1:16:16
  in Germany for 3 1/2 years for my postdoctoral training.
• 1:16:20
  And we we formed a band and it was me on on keyboards, a, a, a
• 1:16:25
  Dutch guy on saxophone, an English guy on on bass, and then
• 1:16:32
  a Austrian guy on guitar. So not one of us were Germans.
• 1:16:36
  Nice. So we called ourselves foreigner
• 1:16:39
  in Germany. Wow that's that's a cool sound
• 1:16:42
  though. The piano, guitar, sax and and
• 1:16:44
  bass. It was awesome.
• 1:16:47
  And we did a lot of covers, of course, and we made a lot of
• 1:16:50
  really funny songs about the institute at parties and
• 1:16:52
  everything else. And that was, you know, that was
• 1:16:54
  really fun. And then over the years I've
• 1:16:57
  done these and now I play the piano and this, this talks I
• 1:16:59
  give. So I, I and I play everything
• 1:17:01
  from classical to jazz to, to pop stuff and get people singing
• 1:17:06
  and everything else. So it's been all It's a lot of
• 1:17:07
  fun. There's something about the
• 1:17:10
  piano, you know? I'm a Springsteen nut.
• 1:17:12
  I'm a Dylan nut. I'm a Grateful Dead nut.
• 1:17:15
  I'm a Van Morrison nut. You and I have very similar
• 1:17:18
  playlists. Yeah, I bet we do.
• 1:17:20
  I bet we do. And and the my favorite songs
• 1:17:26
  that these that these folk have written in for example, Thunder
• 1:17:29
  Rd. or like a Rolling Stone. These are written on the piano
• 1:17:35
  and then converted over to guitar.
• 1:17:36
  Why do you think I feel like the piano is a better instrument for
• 1:17:43
  songwriting than a guitar might be?
• 1:17:47
  Yeah. And I think, and that's because
• 1:17:49
  think about what you're doing when you're playing a piano.
• 1:17:52
  It's it's probably, it's pretty challenging, right?
• 1:17:54
  Because you've got these hands that are opposites of each
• 1:17:56
  other. Our thumbs are both on the same
• 1:17:58
  side, right? And our keys are on the opposite
• 1:18:00
  sides. And so, you know, usually when
• 1:18:02
  you're playing piano, especially with modern music, you're kind
• 1:18:05
  of replicating a bass line with your left hand and you're
• 1:18:08
  playing the melody with your right hand.
• 1:18:10
  And so it's really easy to kind of put those together for a song
• 1:18:14
  that you're going to now put onto a band or or even an
• 1:18:19
  orchestra, right? You can say here's the bass,
• 1:18:22
  here's the rhythm, here's the melody or whatever it is.
• 1:18:24
  Yeah, I mean, Beethoven often composed at the piano, right,
• 1:18:29
  even when he was going deaf, because he knew that he could
• 1:18:31
  get this kind of one set of sounds on his left side and the
• 1:18:35
  other sets of sounds on the right side.
• 1:18:36
  So. So it's it's it's a great
• 1:18:39
  instrument for composing because you've got both of that
• 1:18:41
  happening. You know, with a guitar, you're
• 1:18:43
  limited to the one line, right? The bass line or the OR or
• 1:18:47
  melody stricken, the chords are struck taking away.
• 1:18:51
  But that's hard to do on on a on a on a both both this things
• 1:18:55
  sing together that kind of instrument or you get a violin
• 1:18:58
  or anything else. So.
• 1:19:00
  So you think it's just a matter so, so it's a matter of access
• 1:19:02
  and a matter of having your entire, I guess the structure of
• 1:19:06
  a song laid out in front of you with the piano that makes it
• 1:19:08
  that makes it easier to to navigate.
• 1:19:11
  Right. And of course, you can sing at
• 1:19:12
  the same time, right? So you could be playing bass
• 1:19:14
  line chords or accompanying the melody and then singing the
• 1:19:17
  melody. And so that makes it a really
• 1:19:19
  easy to compose at the piano. If I mean George Gershwin,
• 1:19:22
  another great example, right? He often composed at the piano
• 1:19:26
  and then his brother Ira would try to find lyrics that match
• 1:19:29
  the music, which was always kind of funny when you read their
• 1:19:32
  dummy lyrics that they would put in and then they put it all
• 1:19:35
  together. But but that was for that was
• 1:19:37
  orchestral music, right? That was stuff that was meant to
• 1:19:39
  be for a large number of instruments that would be added
• 1:19:43
  later once they kind of figured it all out on something like a
• 1:19:45
  piano. Cool, awesome.
• 1:19:47
  And the last question and then I'll thank you for your time.
• 1:19:50
  There's been so much fun. Can you tell me a little bit a
• 1:19:54
  couple of fun facts about the, the neuroscience of love for,
• 1:19:58
  for I think that I think it's a really cool and interesting
• 1:20:00
  topic. And maybe maybe some fun facts
• 1:20:03
  that we could talk about in a couple of minutes.
• 1:20:06
  So, you know, if you think about love, there's three major
• 1:20:09
  phases. There's the the first, the
• 1:20:12
  meeting phase where you kind of see somebody across a room and
• 1:20:15
  your eyes lock. And that's situation, right?
• 1:20:19
  No, that comes next. So, so it's so the first meeting
• 1:20:23
  phase is where you just see someone and, and there is this,
• 1:20:26
  this thing that happens, your eyes lock on that person.
• 1:20:29
  And it involves circuitry in a part of our brain that's right
• 1:20:31
  here. They're called the orbital
• 1:20:32
  frontal cortex. And what's happening is if you
• 1:20:36
  actually, if it's going to work, couple things have to be
• 1:20:38
  happening. 1, you have to both look at each other and stare
• 1:20:41
  under their eye, other eyes even from across the room.
• 1:20:45
  And then if both of you happen to be kind of in the same phase
• 1:20:49
  hormonally? Interesting, I think you both
• 1:20:52
  happen to be smiling if you're both like in a social mindset or
• 1:20:54
  whatever like that. Well, not just that.
• 1:20:56
  Like for women? You know.
• 1:21:00
  Physical hormonal stages, right so where are you in your cycle?
• 1:21:04
  There are start parts of the cycle where you're going to be
• 1:21:06
  more attracted to one kind of person, but maybe you'll be
• 1:21:09
  attracted to somebody else visually attracted if you're in
• 1:21:12
  a different part of your cycle. And it turns out men, it turns
• 1:21:15
  out men also have fluctuations in their hormones that will like
• 1:21:18
  drive preferences for people with like more feminine versus
• 1:21:21
  more masculine features, which is really interesting.
• 1:21:25
  So all that has to be all right. And so then you have so that's,
• 1:21:29
  so that's the first phase, right?
• 1:21:30
  Just kind of meet and getting like, oh, this is, this is this
• 1:21:33
  person's interesting. I want to go out with them.
• 1:21:35
  So then you've had a few dates and now you're at that
• 1:21:37
  infatuation phase that you mentioned.
• 1:21:39
  And that is involving a whole different set of
• 1:21:41
  neurotransmitters. And it's almost like a disease
• 1:21:45
  because you're thinking about this person all the time, to the
• 1:21:48
  point where you're talking about them to your friends and your
• 1:21:51
  friends just wish you had shut up already about this person,
• 1:21:55
  almost. School, whatever it is.
• 1:21:58
  And it's also becoming almost intrusive because you're like at
• 1:22:01
  work trying to get work done. It's like, I wonder what she's
• 1:22:03
  doing right now, you know, and she's probably the, she's
• 1:22:06
  probably the same way, hopefully.
• 1:22:09
  And there's other issues that happen when they're not In Sync
• 1:22:12
  that way that change the neurochemistry of that.
• 1:22:15
  So if that all works out and you go through that infatuation
• 1:22:17
  phase and all these things are happening and it's actually
• 1:22:21
  interesting. It's interesting.
• 1:22:22
  The next phase is commitment. So there's all this really
• 1:22:26
  interesting data suggesting that certain genes make people more
• 1:22:30
  likely to become committed in relationships.
• 1:22:33
  And if you don't have those genes or if you have a change in
• 1:22:35
  those genes, you're really, it's really hard for you to get
• 1:22:37
  committed and you wind up going back on that roller coaster all
• 1:22:41
  over again. And so this was actually
• 1:22:43
  demonstrated really fascinating work in these little rodents
• 1:22:47
  called Prairie bowls. So rodents are not generally
• 1:22:52
  monogamous. They, they fool around a lot,
• 1:22:55
  right? That's why there's so many of
• 1:22:56
  them. And so there's these animals
• 1:23:00
  called they're voles. They're these very cute animals.
• 1:23:03
  And there's one type of Ole, not all voles, one type of Ole
• 1:23:06
  called the Prairie vole. And it turns out that they kind
• 1:23:09
  of bond for life and the males even help rear the the
• 1:23:12
  offspring. And they found out there's this
• 1:23:15
  one particular gene in in these voles that seems to dictate that
• 1:23:20
  behavior. And then they looked at men who
• 1:23:23
  were in relationships that were like steady relationships versus
• 1:23:26
  men that just could never make a commitment.
• 1:23:29
  And it turns out they had that mutation in that gene that for
• 1:23:34
  people while they were calling it the divorce gene.
• 1:23:37
  And which is not accurate, but there's more to that.
• 1:23:41
  But but it's remarkable. So it's like it really brings
• 1:23:44
  back questions about how our genes dictate our behavior and
• 1:23:47
  our personalities more than we probably think they do.
• 1:23:50
  So some of me. Genetically genetically disposed
• 1:23:53
  to non to being committed or not committed Non committal non
• 1:23:57
  committal rather. Yeah, that's kind of amazing and
• 1:24:00
  kind of disturbing. So, so, so then it's like, you
• 1:24:05
  know, once you get to that committed phase, there's all
• 1:24:07
  these other genes that come into place that, you know, I've been
• 1:24:10
  with my wife for 30 years now or over 30 years.
• 1:24:12
  And, and I just feel really at ease when we're together and,
• 1:24:17
  you know, Despite that, but there are some people who never
• 1:24:19
  get there, right? They never had that sense of
• 1:24:22
  ease with the person that they're with.
• 1:24:24
  And so that's, that's turns out our genes kind of dictate that
• 1:24:27
  to a degree. So, so it's just a fascinating
• 1:24:30
  area and and you know, when you think about pleasure and how
• 1:24:34
  that relates to love, I mean, it's a lot of the same thing.
• 1:24:37
  It's like this feeling of reward, dopamine comes back into
• 1:24:40
  the picture again, reward system when you're, when you feel like
• 1:24:43
  you're with this person and it's like just a rewarding
• 1:24:45
  experience. So it's a lot of the same
• 1:24:48
  chemistry. And I always related to like
• 1:24:50
  compare that to eating a piece of chocolate, right?
• 1:24:53
  You get to a point where you've had too much chocolate.
• 1:24:56
  It doesn't mean you stop liking chocolate.
• 1:24:58
  You just need to stop eating the chocolate for a little while.
• 1:25:00
  And then later on you can have some more chocolate until you
• 1:25:03
  get sick. So, but yeah, it's, it's, it's
• 1:25:07
  it, it's an amazing area of research.
• 1:25:09
  And I love, I love getting, of course, I always give that talk
• 1:25:12
  on Valentine's Day because that's, you know.
• 1:25:15
  Of course, of course. That's super cool.
• 1:25:17
  Wow, so much fun, so much time to think about.
• 1:25:20
  Also, there's so many different layers.
• 1:25:22
  And you talk to 100 people and I'll tell you not even 100
• 1:25:24
  people, but you know, I mean, there's also the psychological
• 1:25:27
  aspect of it of kind of like the familiarity versus not.
• 1:25:30
  And then they're growing into, you know, a different sense of
• 1:25:33
  relationship. And then there's the I've heard
• 1:25:36
  that smell has a lot to do with attraction.
• 1:25:38
  And enormous. Amount.
• 1:25:39
  Yeah. So that's.
• 1:25:40
  So that's the other thing. And that's.
• 1:25:41
  And that's partly hormonally driven, interestingly.
• 1:25:43
  So depend on where you are in the cycle, certain smells are
• 1:25:46
  going to be more attractive than others.
• 1:25:48
  And taste. And it turns out it tastes too.
• 1:25:50
  When you kiss somebody, turns out, you know, kissing is not
• 1:25:53
  something humans have done all along.
• 1:25:55
  It's it's something they figured out later.
• 1:25:57
  But when you kiss somebody, you're you're sampling the taste
• 1:26:00
  of their saliva and there's molecules in the saliva that
• 1:26:03
  actually may dictate you came back to the question of
• 1:26:06
  compatibility, right? Like, yeah, to make sure you
• 1:26:09
  don't have taste socks. So it turns out that you're
• 1:26:11
  actually tasting immune competence.
• 1:26:13
  Wow. And and so recognize.
• 1:26:16
  That right, Yeah, unless we, unless we or like subconsciously
• 1:26:20
  do. You do subconsciously because
• 1:26:22
  it's a bitter taste when you're not compatible.
• 1:26:25
  Wow, so. So, so it's, it's really
• 1:26:27
  remarkable. And then there's this really
• 1:26:29
  funny thing that was going on for a while several years ago
• 1:26:32
  where that's coming back to smell, right?
• 1:26:35
  They would actually have people spend their day like sweating
• 1:26:37
  into these shirts. And then you would take your
• 1:26:40
  shirt off and put it into a bag with just a number on it.
• 1:26:42
  And then somebody would come and smell the shirt.
• 1:26:45
  And if they had that, if they, if it smelled sweet to them,
• 1:26:48
  you're more compatible, right? So cool.
• 1:26:51
  That's amazing. They should make a Netflix
• 1:26:54
  dating show based on this. You should pitch this to
• 1:26:56
  Netflix. That's what you should do.
• 1:26:57
  That would be your next big after after the you know, you
• 1:27:00
  did the book, you're doing all this talking.
• 1:27:01
  You do it. You're doing the scores, you're
• 1:27:02
  doing the research. I think that a Netflix show
• 1:27:05
  based on the neurochemistry of love and mixing with mixed above
• 1:27:10
  with love is blind. Would be.
• 1:27:12
  There you go. There you go.
• 1:27:14
  There you go. Wow.
• 1:27:15
  OK, If we find that in Netflix in a couple of years, then we
• 1:27:17
  know where they came up with that idea.
• 1:27:20
  I'll give you credit. Doctor, Doctor Larry Sherman,
• 1:27:23
  this is so much fun. Thank you so much for such an
• 1:27:26
  awesome and informative and entertaining conversation.
• 1:27:30
  And I hope to stay in touch and I hope to be able to do this
• 1:27:32
  again down the line. And I'm sure that a lot's going
• 1:27:34
  to change and there's going to be a lot of exciting things to
• 1:27:36
  talk about, so. Got you.
• 1:27:37
  That was really fun. I really enjoyed it.
• 1:27:39
  Thanks. So.
• 1:27:40
  Much. Yeah, of course, of course.
• 1:27:41
  Take care. Have a great day.
• 1:27:42
  Thanks for the time you too.