Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Science Series 4: Dr Karen Barrett / Improvising & Creativity / Music Perception / Dementia & Aging

Transcript

Science Series 4: Dr Karen Barrett / Improvising & Creativity / Music Perception / Dementia & Aging · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of come together
• 0:15
  we are live doctor Karen Barrett well, Barrett welcome so thank
• 0:18
  you so much for coming on how are you I'm.
• 0:20
  Good, and I'm delighted to be here.
• 0:22
  Yes, well, this is going to be such a fun episode.
• 0:25
  I have been slowly. It's funny because as my podcast
• 0:28
  comes along, I find what I'm actually interested in based on
• 0:32
  when I talk to people, what they say that I pick up on.
• 0:35
  And then I want to dive deeper into those concepts.
• 0:38
  So I was recently recording with Doctor Lisa Gable out of
• 0:42
  Lafayette University and she's a neurologist and physiologist.
• 0:46
  And we touched on music and the brain a little bit.
• 0:49
  And, and as soon as we started touching on that, I was like, I
• 0:52
  got to, I got to learn more about this.
• 0:53
  And so, so here we are and, and I am so excited to be in your
• 0:57
  wheelhouse right here. And tell me, tell me a little
• 1:01
  bit about the kind of research that you do or the audience and
• 1:04
  a little bit about your background, if you don't mind.
• 1:06
  Yeah. So why don't I start with my
• 1:08
  background because I think it kind of explains a lot of what I
• 1:10
  do. So I grew up in a very musical
• 1:13
  household. My dad was a classical, well,
• 1:15
  not professional, but he was a classical guitarist, pretty
• 1:18
  serious. And we basically had music going
• 1:20
  all the time. So I started playing piano when
• 1:22
  I was 5, and I was really serious about it.
• 1:25
  You know, in my childhood I was doing, you know, the prep
• 1:28
  Conservatory programs and competitions and all that.
• 1:32
  And then when I got to college, I did want to do music, but my
• 1:35
  parents were like, you should probably have, you know, a
• 1:37
  backup plan. What if you break your hand or
• 1:38
  something? I was like, OK, that's smart.
• 1:40
  So I went to Wellesley College and I double majored.
• 1:43
  I did music and I did neuroscience.
• 1:46
  And at the time they were totally separate field.
• 1:48
  I was just doing my, my music and I was doing my neuroscience,
• 1:51
  but I wasn't trying to combine all of them.
• 1:53
  And then when I, you know, the only time I finally heard about
• 1:56
  the field of music and neuroscience was meet my senior
• 1:59
  year. I had to do a lab project and I
• 2:02
  decided to, you know, we had these invertebrate crayfish
• 2:05
  brains and we were looking at neurogenesis.
• 2:07
  So I said, hey, let's expose them to music.
• 2:09
  They don't have ears traditionally in the same way
• 2:12
  that we do, but they can feel vibrations and organized
• 2:15
  vibrations. So we did it and we found it.
• 2:17
  That did increase neurogenesis. But like I said, this was just a
• 2:20
  tiny little class paper, and I kind of just didn't really think
• 2:23
  too much more about it. After college, I wanted to go to
• 2:28
  really focus on my instrument because I think at Wellesley I
• 2:30
  felt very split brain, you know, trying to keep up my
• 2:33
  neuroscience but also practice and just not finding that there
• 2:36
  was enough time to do everything.
• 2:38
  So I went to Peabody Conservatory and there it was.
• 2:41
  I did my master's degrees in piano performance and musicology
• 2:44
  and was fabulous. I was getting to music 12 hours
• 2:47
  a day, really got to focus on my yeah, I got to really do my art.
• 2:50
  It felt wonderful. The only thing though, is that
• 2:53
  we were always playing at night and I'm a morning person.
• 2:57
  So this was, I was like, you know, I don't think this
• 2:59
  lifestyle is working for me. So after that I decided that I
• 3:03
  was like wanted to go back to academia and I wanted to do a
• 3:06
  PhD. And that's how I found the music
• 3:08
  cognition program at Northwestern.
• 3:10
  It was me because the cognition in theory.
• 3:12
  So we took all the usual classes you would need to teach music at
• 3:16
  a university level, so pedagogy, theory, analysis, etcetera.
• 3:20
  But I also was able to work in auditory neuroscience.
• 3:22
  So this was the first time I was really able to combine my
• 3:25
  interest in the brain and how the brain processes music.
• 3:30
  It must. Be so exciting.
• 3:31
  Yeah, it was so exciting. I like felt like it was such a
• 3:33
  privilege to get to do 2 things that I loved and kind of mesh
• 3:36
  them together. Was it considered?
• 3:39
  I'm sorry to interrupt. I just got a couple of quick
• 3:41
  questions if you don't mind is first of all, if anyone that
• 3:44
  doesn't know neurogenesis that you mentioned the word that you
• 3:46
  mentioned earlier, can you just break that down quickly?
• 3:49
  It's OK, no problem. Yeah, Neurogenesis is the birth
• 3:51
  of new neurons. So neurons are our brain cells.
• 3:54
  So neurogenesis is looking at the at the creation of new brain
• 3:58
  cells. And so does.
• 3:59
  That not usually happen naturally, Or does that need?
• 4:01
  It does so nowadays. We do know that our brain is
• 4:05
  plastic. In fact, this is a whole theme
• 4:06
  of all. My PhD dissertation work was
• 4:09
  looking at how the brain changes as a result of experience and
• 4:12
  musical training. And all of that is known as
• 4:14
  neuroplasticity. So it's the idea that your brain
• 4:16
  changes as part of learning and development, but also because of
• 4:20
  your expertise and your experience.
• 4:22
  So neurogenesis is part of it, you know, the birth of actual
• 4:25
  new neurons. But part of what also happens in
• 4:27
  neuroplasticity is that you form new connections between certain
• 4:31
  neurons, right? And you prune other things that
• 4:33
  are not used. So it's this idea that your
• 4:35
  brain is kind of changing in plastic because you're
• 4:38
  experiencing things. And that was the whole focus on
• 4:40
  my PhD dissertation was what happened?
• 4:43
  How are the brains of musicians different from non musicians?
• 4:46
  How do they hear differently? How do they think differently,
• 4:48
  you know, because they're musical experts.
• 4:50
  And so I was always really interested.
• 4:52
  I guess that is kind of a theme is this idea of like, how does
• 4:55
  the brain remodel itself? Because you've done music and I
• 4:58
  loved it, you know, But you know, that ivory tower and
• 5:01
  academia can be kind of isolating.
• 5:03
  Sometimes you're doing things in a really abstract way.
• 5:06
  And so when I finished my PHDI really wanted to do work that
• 5:10
  was more translational, meaning like actually get to do it in
• 5:13
  the real world, see how it makes a difference on patients, people
• 5:16
  living with things. So I then did a postdoc.
• 5:20
  A postdoctoral fellowship is basically a period after your
• 5:23
  PhD where you're training in new skills.
• 5:25
  And that's when I came to UCSFI was working with Doctor Charles
• 5:29
  Lim. He was the head of the Musics
• 5:31
  and Sound Perception lab at UCSF.
• 5:34
  And so when I started working with him, you know, I, you know,
• 5:37
  during my PHDI had really focused on these like small
• 5:41
  perceptual experiments. And I was learning EEG, which is
• 5:43
  when you wear the scalpel, you know, scalpel on your head,
• 5:46
  right? And you're measuring all the
• 5:48
  brain waves from your, from your brain.
• 5:50
  But when I got to UCSFI said, OK, I know how to EEG, but my
• 5:53
  new skill that I was learning was F MRI.
• 5:56
  So functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is this idea that
• 6:00
  you use a giant scanner and you can see which parts of the brain
• 6:03
  are active or deactivated while you're doing particular tasks.
• 6:08
  So that was something because I was working in Charles's lab, I
• 6:11
  basically started having new research areas.
• 6:14
  One was he the neuroscience of improvisation.
• 6:17
  And that's because Charles himself is a really, he's a
• 6:20
  cochlear implant surgeon, but also a very experienced jazz
• 6:23
  saxophonist. So he was already studying
• 6:25
  improv and I wanted to study improv with him.
• 6:28
  And then another research area that I started during my postdoc
• 6:31
  was music perception in cochlear implant users.
• 6:34
  So as I said, Charles is a cochlear implant surgeon.
• 6:38
  So these are devices that get inserted into your, let's say
• 6:41
  you're deaf and your cochlear is not functioning, which is your
• 6:45
  hearing organ. You put the cochlear implanting
• 6:47
  air in and now you can hear. Now maybe it's, it's very much
• 6:51
  maximized for speech. Like that's what the cochlear
• 6:54
  implants are really good at restoring, which is already
• 6:56
  amazing if you go from being deaf to suddenly being able to
• 6:59
  hear people talk to you. But we are cochlear implants are
• 7:03
  not as good yet is really complex sounds.
• 7:05
  So think music or think noisy restaurants or things that are
• 7:10
  just emotion. Emotion is a very rich kind of
• 7:13
  acoustic signal. So we study music perception and
• 7:17
  cochlear implant users. So those are two of my research
• 7:19
  areas, Neuroscience of improv, music perception, and cochlear
• 7:24
  implant users. And then after I finished my
• 7:27
  postdoc, I started, I became a faculty member here at UCSF.
• 7:32
  I am an assistant professor now and I have a joint appointment.
• 7:37
  So I'm in the Institute for Health and Aging, which is a
• 7:40
  research unit within the School of Nursing.
• 7:43
  And then I'm also still in the Department of Otolaryngology
• 7:45
  with Charles Lim. And so the one recent new area
• 7:49
  that I've been adding to my research area is studying the
• 7:52
  use of music for health and well-being.
• 7:54
  So that's what I studied now too, is I've added looking at
• 7:57
  music and health. So I guess widely you could say
• 8:00
  that, you know, my research falls in these three pots, the
• 8:03
  neuroscience of creativity and improv, music perception and
• 8:06
  cochlear implant users and hard of hearing individuals and then
• 8:10
  music for health and aging. So it's been kind of a long
• 8:13
  journey, but it it, I don't make sense, I guess, given they all
• 8:17
  do, you know? It feels as you're explaining
• 8:20
  it, it feels all very intuitive. And what, what I noticed also,
• 8:25
  you know, similarly again with Doctor Gable was that she
• 8:29
  mentioned, you know, we, she and I mentioned we're talking about
• 8:32
  the fact that she didn't quite know where her research
• 8:36
  initially was going to lead her. And she said there was something
• 8:39
  really beautiful about not searching for having an angle in
• 8:43
  mind and then trying to get there, but starting with what
• 8:46
  you're excited and passionate about and then seeing where that
• 8:50
  where your nose and your senses and your intuition takes you.
• 8:52
  Yeah. And I think that's absolutely
• 8:54
  what happened to me. You know, I get contacted by a
• 8:56
  lot of people who want to do careers in music and science or
• 8:59
  blending the arts and humanities with the sciences.
• 9:02
  And they're like, do you know, did you, you know, your career
• 9:04
  was going to be like this? I'm like, no, not at all.
• 9:06
  Like on paper it looks very neat.
• 9:09
  Like I lined everything up. But the reality was every day I
• 9:12
  was just saying, well, what do I enjoy doing?
• 9:14
  You know, And it's like, I found the stuff that I love doing.
• 9:17
  I mean, part of why I was drawn to doing music in the brain
• 9:20
  research is that I was spending my weekends reading these books
• 9:24
  by, Oliver Said. Hey everyone real quick if
• 9:26
  you're enjoying the show, click subscribe and rate the show. 5
• 9:29
  stars helps a ton. Thanks so much.
• 9:32
  You know, Musicophilia or this is your brain on music or
• 9:35
  anything. So I was like, well, if I'm
• 9:36
  doing this for my fun anyways, why don't I study it, you know,
• 9:39
  And so I think I've always just been someone who, you know, I
• 9:43
  don't really know where my research career will be.
• 9:45
  I think I'm still trying to figure that out.
• 9:46
  But you know, it's fun. It's fun as long as I I always
• 9:50
  have this unifying love of music and how it affects our health
• 9:54
  and our brain so. Yeah, yeah.
• 9:55
  And I think it's super, super important.
• 9:57
  And again, I think that there's a real value in being, I, I
• 10:01
  talked about this in different contexts, but there's a real
• 10:04
  value in my opinion in play. And this actually probably goes
• 10:08
  directly in with your team with, with play and experimentation to
• 10:11
  see where we go. And it feels, it feels to me and
• 10:15
  part of the reason why I'm actually why I, why I, I don't
• 10:18
  typically fit into any kind of formal box.
• 10:20
  And I have a little bit of a push back towards typical
• 10:23
  academia or, or anything like or, or even any kind of typical
• 10:27
  bureaucracy or corporate democracy or anything like that
• 10:29
  I have a very hard time with. But I just like to kind of sense
• 10:32
  out and sniff out where I'm going.
• 10:33
  I have no problem with the work. I just like to have that kind of
• 10:36
  play in spirit of adventure while I go along.
• 10:39
  Absolutely. And as a creativity researcher,
• 10:42
  I fully support that. I think play is way more
• 10:45
  important than we realize. I mean, we play with our kids
• 10:47
  all the time, but adults really need play too, and I think play
• 10:51
  is a huge component of being creative, so I think it's great.
• 10:54
  Yeah, and this is actually going to take me.
• 10:56
  So I wonder where we you can actually choose which kind of
• 11:00
  path we're going to go down. I was going to ask you based on
• 11:03
  we work with Doctor Charles about improv versus classical
• 11:09
  playing because you mentioned that your father and you, you
• 11:11
  know, your background and your music that you played was
• 11:13
  classical. And I, and from my
• 11:15
  understanding, and please correct me if I don't, if I'm
• 11:17
  wrong, classical music tends to be very structured, I believe.
• 11:23
  And then obviously jazz music and improv, improvisational
• 11:28
  music, you know, like this, like the ones that are so active in
• 11:33
  San Francisco historically especially, has really, really
• 11:38
  focused a lot more on being unstructured.
• 11:40
  So yeah. So we can either kind of discuss
• 11:43
  that or I was actually going to ask you about the difference
• 11:45
  between the cochlear implants and their and processing music
• 11:49
  as opposed to speech and why that would be.
• 11:53
  Let's go to the F MRI one because I think that's that
• 11:56
  covered that that links really well with our idea of play and
• 11:58
  so yeah so this idea, you're right, I think classical music,
• 12:02
  at least the way we learn it now and Conservatory.
• 12:04
  So when you go to music school, it is very structured and
• 12:08
  hierarchical. It's creative in that you are
• 12:10
  trying to play really expressively, but it's still
• 12:13
  within constraints, right? Like Beethoven wrote the score,
• 12:16
  you have the notes, you are supposed to interpret it.
• 12:19
  But it's creativity within risk constraints.
• 12:21
  And I think that's really different from jazz, for
• 12:24
  example, an improv, because then you're doing something we call
• 12:27
  generative creativity, right? You have just pulling new notes
• 12:30
  out. This hasn't been pre written.
• 12:32
  You write it, you know, you're trying to spin something on the
• 12:34
  spot. And I think something that
• 12:36
  really fascinated me about improv when I first started
• 12:39
  researching it as a postdoc was that I'm not very good at
• 12:43
  improv. So no, in the in the past,
• 12:47
  actually in classical music, there used to be a ton of
• 12:50
  improv. So back in the time of Mozart,
• 12:52
  he would have improvised the entire cadenza.
• 12:55
  Every time he had a concerto, he would have taken material from
• 12:58
  the concerto and then just, you know, spring something together
• 13:01
  that's like 2 to 3 minutes. Or, you know, if you're a
• 13:03
  vocalist, you just suddenly make up all the trills and the
• 13:06
  ornamentations. There used to be be a ton of
• 13:08
  improv, but I will say our way of learning music now, classical
• 13:12
  music now is very structured. And so I, I find for me, I'm not
• 13:16
  very good at it. And I think I was really
• 13:18
  fascinated because to me, improv always looked like this really
• 13:22
  magical thing. Like, how are they pulling those
• 13:24
  notes out of thin air? And how did they not make
• 13:26
  mistakes? And, you know, and I think
• 13:29
  that's what fascinated me about it in the first place.
• 13:32
  And so to study, you know, creativity in the F MRI scanner,
• 13:37
  right? So there's what we do as
• 13:38
  artists, but then we have to think about how to make this
• 13:40
  rigorous as a scientist, right? So in one of Charles's original
• 13:44
  studies, this is the Lemon Bron 2008 + 1 paper.
• 13:48
  Basically, he created a paradigm where you were either going to
• 13:50
  play a control. So the control was he wrote this
• 13:54
  12 bar Blues piece, he called it magnetism.
• 13:57
  And so he either had jazz experts play that piece that he
• 14:00
  had written, they memorized it and played it before they went
• 14:03
  into the into the scanner, or for the experimental condition,
• 14:06
  they improvised based on it. So they still use that 12 bar
• 14:09
  Blues architecture, but now they could do whatever they want with
• 14:11
  it. They had to keep the same tempo,
• 14:13
  the same general framework, but they could improvise.
• 14:16
  So if you think about it, the, the control condition is kind of
• 14:20
  like what I as a classical musician would do, right?
• 14:22
  Play a piece from memory, interpret it the way I want, but
• 14:25
  we're contrasting it against an experimental condition where
• 14:28
  they're generating new material. So really then the two
• 14:31
  difference, the difference between these two conditions is
• 14:34
  what what happens in the brain when you are generating new
• 14:38
  musical material right from scratch.
• 14:40
  So what you do as an fMRI, you know when you're doing these
• 14:44
  fMRI studies is you put your jazz musician in the scanner and
• 14:48
  you can imagine a scanner is like basically a big magnet,
• 14:51
  like a tube. So what they had to do is they
• 14:53
  created this special keyboard. It's a non ferromagnetic custom
• 14:57
  made keyboard that's safe to go into the scanner.
• 15:00
  And then basically all the musicians lie down and they hold
• 15:04
  the keyboard on their lap. And then as they go in the
• 15:07
  scanner, we have what we call it the face quick, but it's the
• 15:10
  Darth Vader mask basically. And there's a little mirror on
• 15:13
  it and they can see their hands. So while they're in the scanner,
• 15:16
  you know, they have to stay really, really still.
• 15:19
  So you get a good picture of the brain, but they can just use
• 15:21
  their their hands. So they're playing with the
• 15:23
  right hand. They're either playing that 12
• 15:25
  bar Blues when when prompted, or they're improvising on that,
• 15:28
  that 12 bar Blues. And what Charles's original
• 15:31
  study found is that if you take the you you to isolate what
• 15:35
  activity is specific to improvisation, it's really
• 15:38
  interesting. There's like a distinct both
• 15:39
  neural activation and deactivation in the brain that's
• 15:42
  associated with improv. So essentially what they find is
• 15:45
  when you look at the structures in the brain, we see an
• 15:48
  activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, which is kind
• 15:52
  of here in the front of the head.
• 15:53
  And that's an area that's usually very goal oriented and
• 15:56
  task oriented that parts gets activated, which makes sense.
• 15:59
  You're trying to like do something right in the in the
• 16:01
  scanner. But at the same time, we also
• 16:04
  saw deactivation of a plate part of the brain called the
• 16:07
  dorsolatto prefrontal cortex. And this dorsolateral prefrontal
• 16:11
  cortex deactivates when you, when you're trying to, you know,
• 16:15
  turn off the judgment area of your brain when you're trying to
• 16:18
  just get in the in flow states, you know, when you're, you're
• 16:21
  kind of, so it's, it's like improv is this kind of goal
• 16:24
  oriented task, but with this defocused kind of form of
• 16:27
  attention, right? And so because we had this very
• 16:30
  distinct pattern, right, activation of the medial
• 16:33
  prefrontal cortex and deactivation with dorsolateral
• 16:35
  prefrontal cortex, Charles said not only are these the neural
• 16:38
  substrates of improv, but also maybe about flow, right?
• 16:42
  Because when an artist is in the zone, especially a really
• 16:45
  experienced jazz musician improvising on something simple
• 16:48
  like a 12 bar Blues, they're hitting flow.
• 16:50
  And so that was one of his first groundbreaking papers.
• 16:54
  And ever since then, his lab, and by extension me, because I
• 16:58
  work with him, I've as I've been with him since I was a postdoc
• 17:01
  and now as a faculty member now, we've continued to study the
• 17:05
  neural correlates of improvisation.
• 17:06
  So we looked at, OK, those were jazz experts, but what happens
• 17:10
  if we do have kids who don't play piano?
• 17:12
  What happens when they're being created or what happens to older
• 17:15
  adults when they do it? Or what about, you know, if
• 17:18
  you're improvising in different artistic domains?
• 17:21
  Does music look different from comedic improvisers versus,
• 17:24
  like, an artist who's trying to generate something?
• 17:26
  Right. So that's what our lab studies.
• 17:29
  Wow, so, so you actually go beyond the realm of just music
• 17:33
  and you actually look at the flow and improv and everything.
• 17:36
  We're trying to, at least certainly the field that studies
• 17:39
  the neuroscience of generative creativity or improv, it's the
• 17:43
  most we know the most in the music domain.
• 17:46
  And I think that's because music kind of lends itself easily to
• 17:49
  the scanner, right? You can like put a little
• 17:51
  instrument in music has these discrete parameters that you can
• 17:55
  isolate whether it's rhythm or tempo or so people study music a
• 17:59
  lot. But I think what what our lab is
• 18:01
  recently doing, Charles and I have had funding from the
• 18:04
  National Endowment for the Arts to start A to fund our research
• 18:07
  lab for the last 10 years. And our big project is like, OK,
• 18:10
  that's great, but what happened? What are the neural and
• 18:13
  cognitive correlates of doing improv in different art forms?
• 18:16
  So we're still studying musicians, but we're studying
• 18:19
  them as case studies. So we're like, OK, you know,
• 18:22
  most of data and science is about averaging a bunch of
• 18:24
  brains together and seeing what's common.
• 18:26
  But, you know, you don't go to a concert hoping for like, an
• 18:30
  average concert, right? The people like Esperanza
• 18:32
  Spalding are Hiromi are these great musicians are unique in
• 18:37
  their voices and likely in their brains, too.
• 18:39
  So we're studying a bunch of these musicians as case studies,
• 18:42
  meaning we look at each musician as their own artistic outliner.
• 18:45
  And we like create things that are very much tailored to them
• 18:48
  and see what's really unique about their brain.
• 18:51
  But then at the same time, we're also being, OK, well, can we
• 18:53
  design some improv tasks that in the scanner that look at comedic
• 18:57
  improvisation? So think professional
• 18:59
  improvisers from SNL or Second City, which was the training
• 19:04
  school for SNL. So we worked with Second City in
• 19:06
  Chicago. You know, so we're like what
• 19:08
  happens in amazing, amazing improvisers like Tina Fey or,
• 19:11
  you know, these people who are just generating stuff on the
• 19:13
  spot. And then also we're looking at
• 19:15
  visual artists. You know, visual artists don't
• 19:17
  improv per SE, but like if you think about it, they do sketch
• 19:21
  and just create things generatively.
• 19:22
  And so we're looking at, well, how is that different versus
• 19:25
  copying them? Like if you give you like, you
• 19:27
  know, of still life, you know, and they're just copying what
• 19:30
  they see versus trying to be creative.
• 19:32
  So that in general has been our large 10 year project for the
• 19:35
  last, you know, like I said, for the last decade we've been
• 19:37
  working on trying to understand different domains, not just
• 19:40
  music. That's amazing.
• 19:42
  That's really amazing. What I would imagine the way
• 19:44
  that I kind of, while you're explaining all this, the way
• 19:46
  that I kind of imagine this is you have almost a playground is
• 19:51
  the way I look at it. And and then you can choose to
• 19:54
  either play a game and have organized structure, or you can
• 19:57
  kind of say, Hey, run around and figure something out and allow
• 19:59
  the emergent activities within this playground happen.
• 20:02
  Now, generally rules within the playground like you can't beat
• 20:05
  kids up. You can't, you know, you can't
• 20:07
  take kids lunch or whatever it is.
• 20:08
  And there are rules that you got to stick to, but that doesn't
• 20:11
  mean that doesn't by any means. Restrict your creative
• 20:16
  abilities. Yeah, absolutely.
• 20:18
  I think that's the hardest thing.
• 20:19
  For the longest time, no one wanted to study artistic
• 20:22
  creativity in the scanner until Charles started doing it
• 20:24
  because, well, on some of it's hard, right?
• 20:27
  Scientists are trying to use rigor and reproducibility and it
• 20:30
  just feels like, well, that's not what creativity is like.
• 20:33
  But I think one of the beauties of the way Charles designed his
• 20:36
  experiment is that, yeah, you're right, you get to be creative.
• 20:39
  There's still constraints, but you can still be creative.
• 20:42
  And you also make a good point too, which is that something we
• 20:45
  started looking at is improvisation paradise with
• 20:48
  different degrees of constraints.
• 20:50
  So if we give you a very, you know, let's just take the
• 20:52
  comedic improvisers we could have, you have a very
• 20:54
  constrained improv task where all you're saying is like words
• 20:58
  versus like completely doing a monologue or a solilokey, right?
• 21:01
  So it's like, that's a spectrum of creativity, right?
• 21:04
  And so with our comedian, we created several paradigms to
• 21:07
  kind of look at what is it like to go from something that's
• 21:09
  narrowly creative versus really creative, right?
• 21:13
  And so, yeah, it's taken a lot of creativity, honestly, from
• 21:16
  Charles and I to come up with these paradigms.
• 21:19
  But that's partially why I love it, you know, because I think
• 21:22
  both of us are artists and musicians and and, you know,
• 21:27
  scientists. He's a surgeon and APHD.
• 21:29
  But so we're polymats and we like both parts using both parts
• 21:32
  of these, the sides of ourselves.
• 21:34
  And so I love having to use creativity and be like, OK, I
• 21:38
  can make this rigorous for science, but I can still study
• 21:41
  the arts and creativity, right? In a way that's that's fun.
• 21:44
  That's like going to make a difference, so.
• 21:47
  Can I ask, just out of curiosity, what your definition
• 21:51
  of creativity is? Yeah.
• 21:53
  So when I say creativity, at least in the in the, you know,
• 21:55
  context of my work, I basically mean improvisation.
• 21:58
  And I specifically mean improv as a form of like generative
• 22:01
  creativity. So meaning that you generate
• 22:03
  material on the spot spontaneously without having
• 22:06
  mapped it out, which as we said, is kind of like a different
• 22:09
  creativity than like playing classical music where you again
• 22:12
  have constraints. You know exactly what you're
• 22:13
  going to play, but you get to play with the tempo or the
• 22:16
  expression or, you know, things like that.
• 22:18
  So when I say creativity, I mean artistic creativity.
• 22:21
  I mean improvisation. I mean generative creativity.
• 22:25
  Cool, cool. Yeah, because the way that I
• 22:27
  always thought of it and the way that I like to think of it is
• 22:29
  kind of A and again, you mentioned this sort of towards
• 22:33
  the beginning of the interview already, but it's a lot to do
• 22:36
  with our associations. And because all of us have our
• 22:39
  own very subjective experiences, what makes our creativity so
• 22:43
  much fun is that there's no two people with the same
• 22:46
  experiences, no two people in genetics.
• 22:48
  And So what they would if you if I asked you what do you
• 22:52
  associate with B.B. King?
• 22:54
  You and I will have very different answers.
• 22:57
  My only association with him might be this, do this duets
• 23:00
  album that he has and I'm associating him with with other
• 23:03
  artists. And you could associate him as,
• 23:05
  as a, as a Blues, you know, a performer by himself and and
• 23:08
  what you get. There are totally different
• 23:10
  universes, even though we're talking about the same subject.
• 23:12
  Yeah. And I think that's actually the
• 23:14
  beauty of the arts, right? That it is very, you know, we we
• 23:17
  talk about music and music exists in a culture, right?
• 23:20
  And exists in a context. So that's me wearing my my
• 23:22
  historical musicology hat. That music has a context and
• 23:26
  culture and no artist creates in a vacuum.
• 23:28
  They were influenced by so many different things.
• 23:31
  And so it's, it's interesting trying to blend these things,
• 23:34
  you know, in the, in musicology and in the arts.
• 23:36
  We understand that arts have a context, but at the same time, I
• 23:39
  think sometimes our science is all about trying to find what is
• 23:42
  common to a bunch of things, what is replicable, rigorous.
• 23:46
  And so I think we, we, we found a good way to navigate both,
• 23:50
  right? We do the group size, what that
• 23:52
  we call cohort studies. When you take a bunch of people
• 23:55
  and you average all the results together, We do that because
• 23:58
  that is what we need for science, right?
• 24:00
  Reprint, you know, rigor, reproducibility, but then we're
• 24:03
  also doing these case series because as Charles and I talked
• 24:06
  about and like as an artist, you would never say like Renee
• 24:09
  Fleming is the same as Coltrane, right?
• 24:11
  Like we're all artists, we're both all they're all equally
• 24:14
  talented, but they do really different things.
• 24:17
  So why would you average them together, right?
• 24:19
  And so that's why we do these case studies because I'm like,
• 24:22
  you know, and Esperanza Spalding is different from her Romy.
• 24:25
  They're both top of their game and jazz right now, but their
• 24:29
  braids probably have these unique things that make them
• 24:32
  them as well as like, you know, when they create, you have their
• 24:35
  unique voice, right? Everyone brings their, their
• 24:37
  experiences to their performance.
• 24:39
  So This is why we advocated for using a case study approach too.
• 24:43
  Now, of course, the, the hard part about it from a science
• 24:45
  perspective, they're like, well, if it's only an N = 1, right?
• 24:48
  If you only have one case study, you can't, you can't generalize
• 24:52
  to the rest of the people, right?
• 24:53
  Like Esperanza Spalding isn't like the rest.
• 24:55
  I'm like, understandable. And that is a fair, fair
• 24:58
  critique. Of course we can't generalize
• 25:00
  Esperanza's brain into somebody else's, but maybe there's
• 25:03
  something we can learn like the more of these case studies we
• 25:06
  do, maybe there is then we can there's maybe patterns that come
• 25:09
  out or there's things that we learn just from looking at
• 25:12
  somebody's unique brain, right? It's just like, yeah, but when
• 25:15
  people studied Beethoven's brain, I'm pretty sure they
• 25:17
  analyzed Beethoven's brain, Einstein's brain, all these
• 25:20
  greats throughout history. There probably are things that
• 25:23
  make them very unique. And then there's probably things
• 25:25
  that are pretty common to high achieving scientists, artists,
• 25:29
  etcetera too. So I think it's a it's, it's
• 25:31
  we're always mirroring both. And to be fair, the whole field
• 25:35
  of neuroscience of creativity is relatively young.
• 25:39
  I mean, Doctor Lamb Charles says that when he started this, there
• 25:42
  was not a lot of people doing it.
• 25:43
  And now we have an entire academic society, the Society
• 25:47
  for the Neuroscience of Creativity, that does work in
• 25:50
  this field. So it's changed a lot, just even
• 25:52
  in like 25 years. So it's really exciting.
• 25:55
  It's really exciting because, because, because we could see
• 25:58
  that there are benefits and I want to talk to you about some
• 26:00
  of them and one of the benefits potentially.
• 26:02
  And again with creativity and, and this is an observation that
• 26:05
  I've had and I wonder what you think about it.
• 26:07
  I've noticed that a lot of the great improv improvisers or the
• 26:11
  improv, Oh my gosh, players or bands all tend to be extremely
• 26:18
  steeped in a lot of different types of musical backgrounds.
• 26:22
  And so whether you're talking about The Allman Brothers or
• 26:24
  you're talking about the Grateful Dead, you're talking
• 26:26
  about Billy Strings, you're talking about even Ella
• 26:28
  Fitzgerald. And again, we, I think we talked
• 26:30
  to you about in Doctor Dan Levitan's book about her, her
• 26:35
  scatting, I believe, or maybe I don't remember if I talked to
• 26:38
  you about that. But then you know that there's
• 26:39
  something about the like what you said, the, the, the vocals,
• 26:43
  the words as opposed to just playing where you can kind of
• 26:46
  riff based on your, on your experiences.
• 26:49
  It it almost seems that in order to be able to be a great
• 26:53
  improviser, you got to be able to have a big pool of data to
• 26:56
  draw from. Yes.
• 26:58
  And in fact, that's actually here.
• 26:59
  I'm going to pause one second because I hear my husband
• 27:01
  starting to play cello. So I'm going to just.
• 27:05
  There you go. Yeah, thank you.
• 27:06
  So yeah your to your point about that a lot of the great
• 27:09
  improvisers have a lot of knowledge of different genres or
• 27:12
  if you I think that's absolutely true.
• 27:14
  So there have been theorists who have put forth these frameworks
• 27:18
  for improvisation and for example, pressing.
• 27:21
  Pressing is someone who theorized like how do people
• 27:25
  improvise? Like what is the process?
• 27:26
  And what he basically says in, and I'm summarizing, it's
• 27:30
  basically that if you're really experienced improviser, you have
• 27:33
  all these licks and schemas in your head, right?
• 27:36
  You've played all the scales, you know the scheme, you know
• 27:38
  the licks, you know what to do. And so then when you get very
• 27:42
  good at it and you've practiced all those that knowledge and
• 27:45
  it's at your fingertips or your mouth or whatever it is, then
• 27:47
  when you sit down to just create, you're not playing for
• 27:50
  nothing. You're just concatenating and
• 27:52
  bringing things together in really unique ways on the spot.
• 27:55
  But it's not that you're actually pulling from thin air.
• 27:57
  You're actually pulling from a lot of knowledge.
• 27:59
  So you know, and that's something like, for example,
• 28:01
  Zakir Hussein, who's the greatest Dublin master that ever
• 28:05
  lived. He just passed away in December.
• 28:07
  But one of the things that was really great about him is not
• 28:09
  only is he fantastic at Dubla, which is Hindustani classical
• 28:13
  percussion improvisation, but he was genre bending, right?
• 28:16
  He would work with jazz musicians or you know, and I
• 28:19
  love that. I love, I love artists who
• 28:20
  really kind of go outside their normal routine and can work with
• 28:25
  all sorts of different artists and create something really new.
• 28:27
  I know yo-yo Ma as a classical musician does that too, right?
• 28:30
  So I think This is why we love the idea of looking at each
• 28:34
  artist. Each artist has their own unique
• 28:36
  way of things and recombining things.
• 28:38
  And I think this is where the case study approach has a lot of
• 28:42
  benefit, even if it means we can't generalize to the whole
• 28:44
  population. Definitely, definitely,
• 28:46
  definitely. And I'm also, and I also wonder
• 28:48
  if you were to tell someone, hey, if you want, if you want a
• 28:51
  healthier brain or a little bit more of a if you want to
• 28:54
  experience a more neurogeneration or more
• 28:57
  neuroplasticity would expose themselves to more and different
• 29:01
  types of either music or just in general different types of
• 29:05
  information be a necessary requirement in order to do so.
• 29:10
  Yeah, absolutely. So that was definitely the focus
• 29:12
  of my PhD is like I would say as a researcher that if you want to
• 29:16
  increase neuroplasticity, right, you should learn new skills, do
• 29:21
  things that are complex and multimodal.
• 29:23
  So when I say that the reason music is very powerful as a tool
• 29:27
  for neurogenesis, for neuroplasticity, is because
• 29:30
  music involves so many different activities and processes and
• 29:33
  domestics, right? There's pattern recognition and
• 29:36
  emotional processing and sound matching and moving your body
• 29:40
  and moving your fingers and matching to space and your
• 29:42
  memory. And so because of that, I often
• 29:45
  say that that's why music is biologically powerful.
• 29:48
  So let's say you were, and you know, a lot of the research
• 29:50
  shows if you play music, if you try it as a new skill, it does
• 29:55
  do great things for the brain. And this is particularly
• 29:58
  important because if you think about it from the opposite
• 30:00
  spectrum, by the time we get old, right, when we're older,
• 30:04
  there are neurodegenerative disorders, right?
• 30:06
  There's Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
• 30:08
  That's from the death of neurons, right?
• 30:09
  So if you can do things like music, which almost will serve
• 30:13
  as a prophylactic kind of thing where you're increasing
• 30:16
  neurogenesis, right? That helps combat this kind of
• 30:18
  cognitive decline that's going to happen with age for all of
• 30:21
  us. So I for a long time, I've
• 30:23
  always told everyone do music, you know, like even listening to
• 30:27
  music is good, listening to new things is good, but actually
• 30:29
  doing it to like that procedure, cubedral memory of trying to do
• 30:33
  something is really important. And if you're not into music,
• 30:36
  there are other things you can do, right?
• 30:37
  That's why people recommend things like learning new
• 30:39
  languages or crossword puzzles or doing a new learning a new
• 30:43
  art form, right. But I do think music is as a, as
• 30:45
  a researcher studies music, I think music is particularly
• 30:49
  powerful because it is so multimodal is draws from sound
• 30:52
  and pattern recognition and emotion and, and everything
• 30:55
  language. And so it's all, it's very
• 30:57
  powerful when packaged together. I love that.
• 30:59
  I really do Okay, I want to talk about perception a little bit.
• 31:02
  I'm really excited about perception because.
• 31:05
  And I have a, I guess I have maybe one example that I've
• 31:08
  given before the podcast, but I've.
• 31:10
  So I for many years, I was a Bruce Springsteen nut.
• 31:17
  Yeah, many of us. And I found really, really,
• 31:19
  really that he had, as far as I'm concerned, save my life in
• 31:22
  emotional way, emotional ways throughout the years and the
• 31:25
  biggest risks and the times that I've really had to step up to
• 31:28
  the plate. Most of my life I was I was
• 31:32
  helped along by his lyrics and his music.
• 31:35
  And then I tried showing his to my high school students and I
• 31:40
  found that they weren't as crazy about it as I was.
• 31:43
  And so I, so I tried an experiment, my own self
• 31:48
  experiment as a high school teacher, where I played the song
• 31:52
  Badlands from then the Springsteen song Badlands every
• 31:55
  day for four days. It's a, it's a, it's a school
• 31:58
  week. And I asked them to point out
• 32:00
  what they noticed about the song the first day and then the
• 32:02
  second day, the third day and the fourth day.
• 32:04
  And as music became more familiar to their ear and as
• 32:07
  they became to and as the song wasn't so strange because they,
• 32:10
  you know, they're not hearing this new rock tone, rhythm,
• 32:14
  whatever it is, for the first time, they started to notice
• 32:17
  drum fills and guitar riffs and specific lyrics that jump out at
• 32:21
  them. And the way that I like to set
• 32:23
  the way that the metaphor that I walked away from with is almost
• 32:26
  like when you meet someone for the first time, you judge them
• 32:28
  initially based on the most external aspects of them.
• 32:31
  And then as you get to talk to them.
• 32:32
  Oh, you like music too? I like music too.
• 32:34
  You like psychology. I like psychology.
• 32:36
  You have a family. I have a family All of a sudden
• 32:38
  you, even though I would have, you know, I would have judged
• 32:41
  one way, as I got to know you a little bit more, my perception
• 32:44
  evolves and my and I'm able to notice more nuance.
• 32:47
  I feel like that's the way that we actually go ahead about
• 32:50
  processing things like music as well.
• 32:53
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 32:54
  Yeah, absolutely. So I wish I could remember
• 32:56
  exactly who the author of this paper is, but there was AAI
• 33:00
  think I want music theorist or musicologist who talked about,
• 33:03
  you know, if you're reading a detective story, you get
• 33:07
  something on the first reading, then the second reading and the
• 33:09
  third reading, right? So if you were reading a
• 33:11
  detective story, right, the first reading, you're just like,
• 33:13
  OK, I want to know who did it, You know, like, OK, does this
• 33:16
  all make sense? Right.
• 33:17
  But then you can still go back and read a mystery novel again,
• 33:21
  because then we're like, oh, were there clues all along?
• 33:23
  Like should I have seen something?
• 33:25
  And then then 30, I picked up all these details I didn't
• 33:28
  notice the first time, right? Which is kind of like analogous
• 33:30
  to your saying that like when we see each other, there's only the
• 33:33
  surface things before you get to deeper, deeper meaning and deep
• 33:36
  in common underground. So we so someone in I'll have to
• 33:39
  find the paper for you later. But someone also said it's
• 33:42
  analogous to music listenings where you have a first hearing,
• 33:45
  a second hearing and a third hearing.
• 33:47
  So maybe on the first hearing, you're just getting very surface
• 33:50
  things like how long is the piece?
• 33:52
  What's the general feel, things like that.
• 33:54
  But by second hearing, you're starting to know where is it
• 33:56
  going? What are the details?
• 33:58
  What do the lyrics really mean? And you know, and then by the
• 34:01
  third hearing, you're getting all those smaller details like
• 34:03
  where is their silence? Where are their drum fills?
• 34:05
  Where does it like pick up and if the chorus sounds really
• 34:08
  different, right? And I think with any what
• 34:11
  beautiful art, whether that's writing music, whatever, you
• 34:14
  gain a lot from multiple hearings and I think or multiple
• 34:18
  listenings, hearings, readings, etcetera.
• 34:20
  I think definitely with music, and that's something I think is
• 34:23
  very hard for a lot of people who need to classical music.
• 34:26
  It has a complexity, you know, like the first time you hear it,
• 34:29
  you're not going to grab everything.
• 34:30
  There's too many chords that go so it's 1/2 hour piece.
• 34:33
  How can you take that all in the first time that you can, right?
• 34:37
  But if you keep keep with it and you keep listening to it, you
• 34:39
  will start discovering new things.
• 34:41
  And there is cognitive science work that shows that familiarity
• 34:45
  increases liking. The more familiar you are with
• 34:47
  something, the more you like it. Now there is at the same time,
• 34:51
  that's with a caveat. So there was this person who
• 34:54
  designed something called the Burline curve and they said
• 34:57
  really where you have your peak interest and something is when
• 35:00
  it's optimum complexity. So if it's too simple, you don't
• 35:04
  like it because it's boring. If it's too hard, you can't
• 35:06
  understand it, right? The optimum place where you're
• 35:08
  really starting to get it is when it's like the medium, the
• 35:11
  optimum complexity. And I think I tie that a lot to
• 35:13
  these listenings to write the first at the first time, it's
• 35:16
  too hard to understand everything.
• 35:18
  And then if it were too simple, you would just get bored
• 35:20
  eventually. But like, good music or good art
• 35:22
  is worth a second try where you really are starting to bring in
• 35:24
  all those complexities. So basically that phenomenon
• 35:27
  that you notice with your high school students is pretty much
• 35:30
  backed up by cognitive science as well.
• 35:32
  Here we go. I'm happy to hear that.
• 35:37
  I'm happy to hear that. I'm not.
• 35:40
  That's so great. That's so great.
• 35:42
  Well, yeah. And I noticed that too, by the
• 35:43
  way, because I was listening to. So I was listening to a Billy
• 35:45
  Strings song yesterday while I was jogging.
• 35:47
  And obviously one of the benefits of listening to some
• 35:49
  great live performers as opposed to studio variations is that
• 35:53
  they tend to be a little, especially if you're a fun
• 35:55
  jammer, quote UN quote. And you're and you don't then
• 35:58
  then even though you might recognize the bare bones of the
• 36:00
  song or the structure of the song, there's something fun
• 36:03
  about the, the new, the, the, the newness and the novelty to
• 36:06
  the jam. Yeah.
• 36:07
  And I'm listening to a song and it's called While I'm Waiting
• 36:10
  Here and, and I was thinking, I just, I know I was thinking I'm
• 36:14
  jogging like I love this song. It just is something about the
• 36:16
  song that really hits. And I realized it kind of sounds
• 36:19
  like a lot of songs that I know, but it's just being done really,
• 36:22
  really like well with the cool flair that I like.
• 36:25
  And I and I was, and I was like, oh, maybe that's why it's, you
• 36:28
  know, that's why it's hitting particularly well for me.
• 36:30
  Whereas if there's a song whose title I don't recognize and
• 36:34
  source I don't recognize, and if the name sounds a little weird
• 36:37
  for what I would imagine the song, a song titled to be
• 36:40
  called, I'm far, far more hesitant.
• 36:43
  Even if I love the artist and even if I already know that I
• 36:45
  like the artist, I'm hesitant to jump into it.
• 36:48
  And I, and, and, and I don't and I don't, I, I one of the bigger
• 36:52
  struggles that I have actually, even though I like to be open
• 36:54
  minded, is that I'm, I am very quick to judge books by a cover,
• 36:58
  by their covers. And and it's really hard for me
• 36:59
  to get over. I mean, that's also pretty
• 37:01
  normal, right? So there has been work in music
• 37:04
  cognition about music preferences, right?
• 37:06
  And music preferences are not only shaped by biological things
• 37:10
  like your temperament, your psych, you know, that you're
• 37:12
  your natural temperament force things, but also by like, you
• 37:15
  know, your culture and your experience, your lived
• 37:18
  experience and things like that, right?
• 37:19
  And you know, something that we often talk about too is how do
• 37:23
  we define creativity, right? A lot of the really creative
• 37:26
  things that we deem creative are not so completely novel that you
• 37:30
  can't even recognize them, right?
• 37:32
  Like, you know, I think there's this idea that creative things
• 37:35
  are things that are useful and novel and like recombine
• 37:40
  familiar elements. I mean, I always think about
• 37:42
  this, like when Harry Potter came on the scene.
• 37:44
  I, I think it's hugely creative back from when we were young,
• 37:46
  right in the 90s and stuff. But it, it does use tropes,
• 37:49
  right? Like Harry Palmiter uses, you
• 37:51
  know, the boarding school, the British boarding school, magic
• 37:54
  things. But the way that she recombined
• 37:56
  them was so unique for the time, right?
• 37:58
  And so a lot of what we think is create creative is also
• 38:02
  sometimes just about recombining them in a really cool
• 38:05
  juxtaposition that we hadn't seen.
• 38:06
  I mean, that I think goes back to what we're saying with jazz
• 38:09
  and improv, right. They're not pulling it from out
• 38:12
  of thin air, even though it seems to imagine playground.
• 38:15
  Yeah, there's still a playground.
• 38:16
  There's still some structure. They're still playing schemas
• 38:18
  and licks and things like that. Like if you were going to take I
• 38:21
  like. So one of the things I love is
• 38:22
  Coltrane's my my Favorite Things from Sound of Music.
• 38:27
  Well, you start with a lick, right?
• 38:28
  The, you know, my favorite things, and then he improvises
• 38:30
  on it. But like if he improvised so far
• 38:33
  that it broke down and you couldn't even hear that was my
• 38:35
  favorite things anymore. Probably not as enjoyable,
• 38:38
  right. The reason it's enjoyable is it
• 38:39
  has that familiarity. Like it still sounds like my
• 38:43
  favorite things, but done so well, you know, so I, I, I think
• 38:47
  that's completely normal. Like your experience, not only
• 38:50
  is there interaction with, you know, like I said that your
• 38:52
  biological and your psychological temperament, but
• 38:54
  then there's also this idea that like it's familiar enough, but
• 38:59
  novel enough that it's both creating of an interest.
• 39:01
  I. Have to check that out.
• 39:02
  I have to check that out. I might.
• 39:03
  One of my favorite examples of that is Duke Ellington
• 39:06
  Nutcracker. Yeah, Oh my God, it's so much.
• 39:10
  It's so cool, yeah. And then you're like, and you're
• 39:14
  like, yeah. What would Kaikowski think?
• 39:17
  But he'd probably love it, yeah. Totally.
• 39:19
  And what I, what I've done is and what I, what I like to do is
• 39:22
  I do creative writing assignments in my class where
• 39:24
  I'll just play all, you know, instrumental music and I have
• 39:27
  the class write what pops into their mind, what associations
• 39:31
  and imagery pops into their mind.
• 39:32
  And, and what's fun is to do comparative, I'll play the nut
• 39:36
  Nutcracker and then I'll play Duke Ellington's The Nutcracker.
• 39:39
  I just see, like, does this take you to the same place?
• 39:42
  Where does this take you to and how and how does it how does it
• 39:44
  differ? What aspects of music causes the
• 39:47
  change? And I try to actually get them
• 39:48
  to identify. Is it the fact that it's a brass
• 39:50
  section that changes things? Is the fact that it's a horn
• 39:53
  section that creates a new world in your head as opposed to just
• 39:56
  a soft piano? So it's really cool, the
• 39:59
  cochlear implants and the trouble in perception with music
• 40:03
  as opposed to speech. Yeah, let's talk about that.
• 40:06
  Yeah. So if you think about speech
• 40:08
  versus music, music is actually one of the richest acoustic
• 40:12
  stimuli we ever hear as humans. So what I mean by that is music
• 40:16
  offer goes through a much wider pitch range than speech.
• 40:21
  Speech is in a much more narrow. We also have wider dynamics,
• 40:24
  right, like much more sound, you know, soft and loud.
• 40:28
  We have a lot more different tambers.
• 40:30
  You know, in speech, we have female male voices and there's
• 40:32
  different tambers. But then think about how many
• 40:34
  instruments there are, right? And so that's it's, it's
• 40:37
  basically music is much more acoustically rich than speech if
• 40:41
  you just look at them as stimuli.
• 40:42
  And for that reason, you know, cochlear implants are amazing
• 40:46
  devices, right? And that they help people Now
• 40:48
  here again. But what happens is the cochlear
• 40:50
  implant has like 12 electrodes in this little implant device
• 40:55
  that's supposed to stimulate the thousands of hair cells that you
• 40:58
  would normally have, right? If in the human ear.
• 41:00
  And there's no way 12 to 24 electrodes could simulate, like,
• 41:05
  be as pristine as thousands and thousands of hair cells.
• 41:08
  And so that's why there's a technological limitation for why
• 41:10
  cochlear implants can't pick up all the richness of things like
• 41:14
  music and speech. And so really right now, what
• 41:16
  the research field is trying to figure out is, OK, well, what
• 41:19
  does music sound like to a cochlear implant user?
• 41:22
  And, you know, and it, it really varies, you know, for kids who
• 41:25
  get cochlear implants, let's say you had a deaf child and they
• 41:27
  get implanted early. They adapt very well, again, not
• 41:30
  surprisingly, because they have very plastic brains, right?
• 41:33
  They're developing. So the brain's already going
• 41:35
  undergoing a lot of structure. It's not hard to get used to,
• 41:39
  you know, to remodel itself and get used to listening to a
• 41:41
  cochlear implant. But let's say you're an older
• 41:43
  person getting a cochlear implant.
• 41:44
  Well, it is going to be harder to train your brain to hear now
• 41:48
  with this device instead of, you know, your ears.
• 41:50
  And so we are trying to look at what how do music, how do
• 41:54
  cochlear implant users hear music?
• 41:56
  And how is that different from something like a hearing aid?
• 41:59
  You know, so the cochlear implant actually replaces all
• 42:01
  those thousands of hair cells in your cochlea, right?
• 42:04
  A hearing aid is different. It just amplifies.
• 42:06
  It's like an acoustic signal just amplifies what you might
• 42:09
  not hear very well. And then that's really different
• 42:11
  from someone who's deaf. So I've learned recently that
• 42:14
  how the deaf experience music is also very unique.
• 42:17
  So people are like, well, deaf individuals can't hear music.
• 42:19
  Maybe they don't hear music. They don't perceive music the
• 42:22
  way you and I would, but they definitely hear music.
• 42:25
  And the reason what they would do it is they can feel the
• 42:27
  vibrations. For example, I've seen a lot of
• 42:29
  deaf individuals hold like balloons or things like that on
• 42:32
  there and they can feel the vibrations.
• 42:33
  Particularly if you go to a show like Stomp or, you know, taiko
• 42:36
  drumming, something that has really good rhythm, they can
• 42:39
  feel that. But I've also learned from my
• 42:41
  colleague Annabelle Monahan that the deaf community, you know,
• 42:44
  will sign music. And what they do is they sign
• 42:47
  the music very differently for music versus something like
• 42:50
  poetry or language, like their expression in using sign
• 42:52
  language. So really this idea of music in
• 42:55
  the hard of hearing is really fascinating because it's not
• 42:59
  that they don't hear music, they don't hear it the way we do,
• 43:02
  basically. Cool, that's amazing.
• 43:04
  I I while you're speaking, I was curious when you were describing
• 43:12
  the issue with the cochlear implant that the fact that you
• 43:14
  know, it's using 1212 electrode electrodes is that.
• 43:18
  Yeah, 12, like 12 to 24 electrodes that are trying to
• 43:20
  replace the thousands of hair cells that you would normally
• 43:23
  have. But the but but kids seem to be
• 43:27
  able to adapt faster. Would that indicate that there's
• 43:29
  more than just the, the, the, the cochlear that there's more,
• 43:35
  there's more to the way that we perceive music than just that.
• 43:39
  It's also about our, our brains ability to translate that.
• 43:42
  And so if you're a kid, you might be more likely to be able
• 43:44
  to do more with less. And when you're adult or getting
• 43:48
  older, your brain already has learned at that point to not use
• 43:52
  that part of your brain your. Body, yeah, think about it this
• 43:55
  way, you know so if you think about hearing as a peripheral
• 43:57
  thing so it's not just that the the cochlear implant, there's a
• 44:00
  signal your brain, your cortex has to interpret these signals,
• 44:03
  right. And in many ways, you know, a
• 44:05
  lot of kids will often be very happy with their cochlear
• 44:09
  implants have high device satisfaction because they don't
• 44:13
  really have anything to compare it to, right?
• 44:14
  If they never heard music, quote UN quote, normally music still
• 44:18
  sounds great in a code, right but but then pretend you are an
• 44:22
  adult and you were a musician for example and then you lost
• 44:26
  your hearing because you suddenly had an illness or
• 44:28
  something and you have to get a cochlear implant.
• 44:30
  Well, then you have all this lived experience too, right?
• 44:32
  Trying to compare what music sounds like now with your
• 44:36
  cochlear implant versus what it used to sound like, right?
• 44:38
  And that's like any sort of prosthetic device.
• 44:41
  If you were used to having your arms and your legs, and now you
• 44:43
  have to adjust to a device, you're gonna be comparing it to
• 44:46
  what it used to feel like, right?
• 44:48
  And so that's the music. Expression different among among
• 44:51
  those kids is do they learn. What we find is that the kids, a
• 44:56
  lot of the research shows that kids have better music
• 44:59
  perception than adult cochlear implant users.
• 45:01
  So like not only are they better able to hear music with their
• 45:05
  devices, but you can train them too.
• 45:08
  So let's say I use musical training as like a targeted like
• 45:11
  intervention to see if I can increase your music person.
• 45:13
  Like, OK, you're, you're bad at hearing melody.
• 45:15
  Let me give you lots of melodies to listen to and then test and
• 45:18
  see how you do. Kids do way better.
• 45:20
  They've had much bigger experiment like effects of
• 45:23
  learning from these music interventions compared to
• 45:26
  adults. And so we do think there is this
• 45:28
  kind of plasticity, just like, you know, how kids can learn
• 45:31
  languages very easily when they're young.
• 45:33
  This is like critical period for us to learn language well, and
• 45:36
  it's harder when you're an adult.
• 45:37
  Not that you can't learn a new language, but it's a lot more
• 45:40
  effort, that sort of thing. That's kind of the same thing
• 45:43
  that we're seeing. Kids can just adapt so easily
• 45:45
  compared to those of us who would have to adapt later and
• 45:48
  work harder for the same same results.
• 45:50
  That's so interesting. It's really cool.
• 45:52
  So what? So if I'm understanding
• 45:54
  correctly, adults seem to struggle.
• 45:58
  There are people, you know, people that have already got had
• 46:01
  associations and and and memories and expectations have a
• 46:05
  harder time using the cochlear implants because they already
• 46:10
  have a perception of what things should be and the are not
• 46:13
  creating that and won't have such an issue.
• 46:17
  And so they are not as dependent on.
• 46:20
  So it sounds like the implants are more of a bridge than they
• 46:24
  are actual means to actually hear processor.
• 46:28
  Yeah. And I feel, feel like we
• 46:31
  haven't, you know, Charles and I have talked about this like if
• 46:34
  we had to lose any sense hearing, you know, sight,
• 46:37
  whatever. I mean, even though I'm a
• 46:39
  musician, I would still want to lose hearing simply because
• 46:42
  we've gotten the farthest in terms of perfect sensory
• 46:45
  restoration, Right. So the cochlear implants are
• 46:48
  remarkable devices. They really like change your,
• 46:51
  your life in terms of being able to not hear and then suddenly
• 46:53
  you can hear. But where we are is it's not
• 46:56
  perfect yet, right? And so there are things you can
• 46:59
  do, right? So there are technical logical
• 47:01
  limitations, but cochlear implant manufacturers are
• 47:03
  constantly playing with, well, can we change the programming?
• 47:06
  How do we update the processor? Can we do other things that will
• 47:09
  improve it? And you know, then there's
• 47:10
  researchers like me who are like, well, if we put you
• 47:12
  through training, can we change things?
• 47:14
  But then there's also what we call other determinants of
• 47:17
  health. So something that my lab now
• 47:19
  studies with Doctor Nicole Jim, she and I run a lab together in
• 47:22
  otolaryngology is we're looking specifically at this early
• 47:25
  auditory rehabilitation period. So what are you like right
• 47:28
  before you go in for your surgery and you get your implant
• 47:31
  versus one month, three months, six months, right?
• 47:33
  And there's actually a lot of variability.
• 47:35
  So some people, let's just say even adults, some people do
• 47:38
  great with their device. They're like, they work very
• 47:41
  hard. They do they go to every single
• 47:44
  follow up appointment, you know, they spend time listening to
• 47:47
  sound, watching subtitles, really working and trying to get
• 47:49
  used to their their cochlear implant.
• 47:52
  But then there's others who don't do as well.
• 47:54
  Maybe this could be a case too. You hear it, it doesn't sound
• 47:57
  good to you. So you feel like, oh, was this
• 47:59
  worth me going through this painful surgery?
• 48:01
  Now I'm upset with this device. I don't want to use it, so I
• 48:03
  take it off and I don't use it. Well, if you don't use it,
• 48:06
  you're never going to get better at it, right.
• 48:07
  So this is something that I often counsel people is like,
• 48:10
  yes, it's a huge transition to go through the surgery, but it's
• 48:14
  like music, you know, when we sit down and play as musicians,
• 48:17
  we don't sound perfect right off the bat.
• 48:19
  We sound like beginners every time we learn a new piece.
• 48:22
  Practice makes perfect. You have to practice to get
• 48:24
  better. Same thing with your cochlear
• 48:26
  implant. You're going to have to practice
• 48:28
  using it to get better at it. So if you get frustrated right
• 48:31
  off the bat and take it off and don't use it, well, you're never
• 48:34
  going to get better, right? And so we're really starting to
• 48:36
  learn about like, how can we counsel patients to better set
• 48:40
  up expectations? And normally that maybe we will
• 48:43
  have predictors of like we'll, we'll maybe we'll have
• 48:45
  eventually like these kind of like, you know how when you take
• 48:47
  your kid to the doctor and they have growth curves.
• 48:50
  So you can be like, OK, your kid is on track to be 6 foot 2 and
• 48:54
  then a percentile, right? We don't have any sort of those
• 48:57
  kind of developmental curves for cochlear implant users.
• 48:59
  We can't say like, OK, you're on track to be a really good
• 49:02
  performer or you're on track and you're not doing as well as you
• 49:04
  should be at this, this rehabilitation, Mark, we need to
• 49:07
  intervene and do better, right? So that's the kind of work that
• 49:09
  our lab is doing now. Like imagine if we could have
• 49:12
  that analogous, you know, growth curve and we could tell
• 49:15
  patients, OK, I can see you're not doing as well as you need to
• 49:18
  right now at the one month mark. Let's intervene now so that
• 49:20
  you'll do better at the three or six months.
• 49:22
  And then or someone's doing really I'd be like, you're doing
• 49:24
  great. You know, I think you're
• 49:25
  starting to hit the limit of what we can expect right now
• 49:27
  with the cochlear implant, right?
• 49:28
  These are all things that would help be help patients,
• 49:31
  especially if you think it's a huge decision to get a cochlear
• 49:36
  implant. In fact, there's still a divide.
• 49:37
  There are, you know, the deaf, deaf community who don't ever
• 49:40
  want to use cochlear implants that just want to remain sign
• 49:43
  language only, which is, you know, totally.
• 49:45
  But then there's the people who get cochlear implants.
• 49:47
  So there's even like a culture difference between these two
• 49:49
  groups. And so our lab is is trying to
• 49:52
  start navigating some of these issues.
• 49:54
  I would be, I'd be really curious and if you haven't done
• 49:57
  it, I would be curious to look into this, if what the
• 50:01
  difference as far as adjusting would be to cochlear impact,
• 50:07
  cochlear patients who have a history of playing music as
• 50:10
  opposed to those who. Don't.
• 50:12
  Yeah. And unfortunately, there haven't
• 50:14
  been enough yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 50:17
  That's a problem with a small pool like this, right?
• 50:19
  Emerging science. Yeah, it's a small subject pool.
• 50:21
  I think the first cochlear implant was done at UCSF and I
• 50:25
  want to say it wasn't even that long ago, like 1950s, sixties,
• 50:29
  something like that. I have to look it up.
• 50:30
  It's not it hasn't been a new technology.
• 50:33
  It was, but one of the first ones was done here on the West
• 50:35
  Coast. And so, so far, we don't even
• 50:37
  have enough data yet. I I realized that I mean, it's.
• 50:41
  Really good. Because I mean, the way that
• 50:42
  you're describing, it almost sounds like you have to kind of
• 50:44
  prep your brain for. And if and if your brain is
• 50:47
  already plastic from playing different types of music, or
• 50:49
  playing different types of instruments, or doing things
• 50:51
  along the way, then it might be quicker to adapt to such a YEAH
• 50:55
  transition. Yeah.
• 50:56
  And you know something I have. So I've given a whole keynote to
• 50:59
  the Hearing Loss Association of America because we were giving
• 51:03
  this expert panel in 2023. It's called The Joy of Music.
• 51:06
  And it was for all these individuals with hearing loss
• 51:09
  and as part of the expert panel, these these people with hearing
• 51:12
  less could come up and ask specific questions, right?
• 51:14
  So I would get questions like I used to be in a choir.
• 51:17
  I used to be in a a band before I got the surgery or my hearing
• 51:21
  aid. And now everything sounds awful.
• 51:23
  What should I do? And I was like, well, you know,
• 51:25
  you kind of have to go back and practice.
• 51:27
  You know, one thing I recommend is practice the way we would
• 51:29
  have as beginner, you know, isolate, you know, practice by
• 51:32
  yourself first. Don't go straight back to the
• 51:34
  group. That's a really complex acoustic
• 51:35
  situation. Just practice by yourself.
• 51:37
  Use tools right Metro gnomes recording yourself teachers
• 51:42
  right to help you get as you adjust.
• 51:43
  You can't just expect that you will be at the top of your game
• 51:46
  right away. And, you know, I think people
• 51:49
  think that musicians are, are just naturally good and
• 51:53
  naturally talented at music. No, the fact is we work really
• 51:56
  hard. Musicians spend like for me,
• 51:58
  when I was a performer, I spent a lot of, I never relied on my
• 52:01
  own ears actually. Like, because for example, when
• 52:04
  I'm playing up at the piano, what I hear is really different
• 52:07
  from what they hear at the back of the concert hall, right?
• 52:10
  Because of reverb and, and acoustics.
• 52:12
  And so I always had teachers or recorders to help me.
• 52:16
  We didn't rely on these. And I spent a lot of time like
• 52:19
  with really complex pieces. No, you have to sit there
• 52:21
  spending a lot of time isolating the lyrics, isolating the sound,
• 52:24
  right hand only, left hand only, rhythm only, melody only, right.
• 52:29
  Like we spend a lot of time taking a very complex thing and
• 52:33
  putting it together. And so basically at this hearing
• 52:36
  loss Association of America talk, I was like, OK, maybe we
• 52:40
  can learn from the kind of practice techniques that
• 52:42
  musicians use to get used to using our cochlear implant, You
• 52:46
  know, And you know, it's not perfect, but it's like, I don't
• 52:49
  think people just like I used to think in prov was like this
• 52:52
  magical thing that just comes out of nowhere.
• 52:54
  People think when I sit down at the piano, that's this magical
• 52:56
  thing. It's not though, it's hard work,
• 52:58
  right? It's hours and hours and years
• 53:00
  and years of hard work. And I'm sure you've read about
• 53:02
  it, right? This the old adage that 10,000
• 53:05
  hours to become an expert, right?
• 53:06
  Like it's lots of practice. It's not it doesn't come
• 53:09
  naturally. And then even an experienced
• 53:12
  pianist like me, when I learn a new piece and back to being a
• 53:14
  beginner again, right? It's like, all right, I have to
• 53:17
  go super slow and I'm going to go one note at a time.
• 53:20
  I'm going to listen to the I don't know what I'm doing.
• 53:22
  I have to start all over again, right?
• 53:24
  And I think that's actually humbling, but good to remember
• 53:27
  right, that that's just the experience of doing art.
• 53:30
  We also. Yeah, and then eventually you
• 53:32
  come to cherish that process. And I know that, you know that
• 53:36
  I've, I've started to, in the last bunch of years, I've had a
• 53:39
  lot of firsts to my life, you know, getting married, first
• 53:42
  time having a kid, first, first, first guitar lesson, first open
• 53:46
  mic. And every single time I do all
• 53:48
  these First things, first podcast, I, you know, I, I, I
• 53:52
  have an enormous sense of fear, but I've come to, I've come to
• 53:56
  appreciate the process and, and I've found that people are so
• 54:00
  forgiving and, and saying it's good that you're starting this
• 54:04
  from the beginning. And it, and, you know, and it's
• 54:05
  really something that's more commendable than it is that
• 54:08
  everyone expects you to be a expert at anything you do the
• 54:11
  first time you pick it up. And it's, you know, so I think
• 54:13
  that's something in general that if people in, if anyone
• 54:16
  listening and people in general want to grow and want to advance
• 54:20
  to embrace the this starting something beginning and be OK
• 54:23
  with with being a beginner and then, you know, get better.
• 54:26
  Absolutely. You know, that's something that
• 54:27
  I hear all the time, right? As someone who researches the
• 54:30
  arts and music and the brain and they're, and I very much
• 54:33
  advocate everyone should do the arts and play every day, right?
• 54:36
  And they're like, but I suck at the arts.
• 54:38
  I have no talent whatsoever. I'm like, it's not about talent,
• 54:41
  it's about doing it anyway. So like for me, I mean, OK, I'm,
• 54:45
  I'm, I'm a musical expert, but when I sit down and like
• 54:49
  drawing, I draw like a musician. I mean, I don't, it doesn't come
• 54:52
  out good. I'm back to coloring because I'm
• 54:55
  learn trying to learn color theory and shading and things
• 54:57
  like that. And that's good for me, right?
• 54:59
  Like, I, I mean, how boring would life be if we were only
• 55:02
  doing the things we're good at? I personally think it's good for
• 55:05
  our ourselves and our brains to try new things that are scary.
• 55:09
  But everyone, no one, it's, it's kind of a false belief to think
• 55:12
  that you would be good at something the first time you,
• 55:14
  you do it right. And I know that that's like a, a
• 55:16
  culture of that's very like goal oriented.
• 55:20
  But if you look at the arts as a process, the process is being
• 55:23
  uncomfortable and trying new things.
• 55:24
  And it is good for your brain because.
• 55:26
  Yeah, the first time I learn a new language, I'm going to
• 55:28
  struggle. But that struggle is part of why
• 55:31
  it helps my brain, you know? So the struggle is inherent to
• 55:34
  it. And that's, there's the beauty
• 55:36
  of the struggle that is actually good for you.
• 55:38
  You know, I mean, not so hard that you feel really
• 55:40
  demotivated. But I guess I would encourage
• 55:42
  anyone who's listening that it's always OK to try and make
• 55:46
  mistakes. And you know, here's the thing
• 55:48
  too. That's something I learned from
• 55:49
  improv. I was, you know, I, as I told
• 55:52
  you, I'm a classical pianist, and so I'm not used to
• 55:54
  improvising. But every now and then Charles
• 55:55
  would be like, come on, just come play with me.
• 55:57
  And I was like, I don't like it. What if I make a mistake, you
• 56:00
  know? And he'd be like, so make a
• 56:02
  mistake and then do it again and then do it again and then do it
• 56:05
  again. And it's no longer a mistake,
• 56:07
  right? And that's something my husband
• 56:08
  also echoes, right? The idea of improv is it just
• 56:10
  kind of take it as it comes. There are no mistakes.
• 56:13
  You did it. You did it again.
• 56:15
  Just do it again deliberately until it gives you your next
• 56:17
  idea, right? And I think that's a very
• 56:19
  beautiful philosophy, right, that there are no mistakes.
• 56:22
  You just try and you try again. And you know, I think, and maybe
• 56:25
  this is a nice leading to my my study with the kids is like, you
• 56:29
  know, we watch kids who are really creative.
• 56:32
  I don't know about your kids. My kids love doing like it
• 56:34
  doesn't matter that he doesn't know how to bake or be an
• 56:37
  architect or guard and he's going to do it anyways.
• 56:39
  And he finds it fun, right? And we noticed that kids are
• 56:42
  just kind of very creative in a way that's different from
• 56:44
  adults, right? Like obviously adult has lived
• 56:46
  experiences and voice and domain knowledge, right?
• 56:49
  Like if you're at Esperanza Spalding, you've been doing
• 56:52
  music for a long time. So you obviously are drawing on
• 56:54
  that where as a kid who's like, well, I'm just going to go bang
• 56:57
  on the piano. They don't have that, but
• 56:58
  they're still like willing to try and be creative, right?
• 57:01
  So in one one of our studies that just came out last year in
• 57:04
  Scientific Reports, we were like, well, yeah, we really want
• 57:07
  to know what happens when kids are being musically creative,
• 57:09
  right? So we took these elementary age
• 57:11
  kids, 7 to 9 year olds and we had them do this paradigm where
• 57:15
  they either played a scale for the control.
• 57:18
  So they they play the five black note keys of the keyboard just
• 57:21
  da da, da da da da da da, da, da da.
• 57:25
  Like very wrote over and over again, or we had them improvised
• 57:28
  melodies, like play them now in whatever order you want and
• 57:31
  you're improvising. And we made it sound really cool
• 57:33
  because we gave them a backtrack that went with all it.
• 57:36
  So as long as they're playing the black note keys, they always
• 57:38
  sound good. It's like impossible to make a
• 57:40
  mistake. It then sounds really musical.
• 57:42
  There's like a whole backtrack to it.
• 57:44
  So the only difference is, you know, play same tempo, same
• 57:46
  speed, everything, but either you're playing a scale or you're
• 57:49
  making up, moving your fingers and making up melodies.
• 57:52
  You know, you just put those in whatever order.
• 57:54
  And what we found is that kids improvisation and is again, a
• 57:58
  really cool distinct activity for kids that you have, you
• 58:02
  know, it doesn't look the same as when the control condition.
• 58:05
  And really when you're improvising for them, it's a lot
• 58:07
  about deactivating parts of their brain.
• 58:09
  So kids would deactivate these structures known as like the
• 58:12
  singular cortex, the angular gyres, precanious.
• 58:15
  And all of those structures are sensory hubs that are actually
• 58:19
  implicated in adult creativity. So it's like when we look at
• 58:22
  kids and they're being creative, they're using some of the same
• 58:24
  structures that you would later as adults.
• 58:27
  So it's almost like you have the roots, the beginning roots of
• 58:29
  this like neuro creativity network, right?
• 58:32
  But what was also really cool is that improvising, we found that
• 58:36
  there was more connections between reward areas of the
• 58:39
  brain when they were improvising compared to not doing like the
• 58:43
  scale. Now, I will caveat that, say it
• 58:45
  wasn't all positive. So for example, we found that
• 58:48
  the amygdala deactivates during improv.
• 58:50
  Well, that's good. The amygdala often deactivates
• 58:52
  for good things like, you know, when the fight or flight is
• 58:54
  over, we're good, right? But then we also saw that like
• 58:57
  the nucleus accumbens and some other areas deactivated, which
• 59:00
  is not necessarily a positive valence thing.
• 59:03
  So it's almost like reward structures are used for improv,
• 59:06
  but it has kind of a mixed emotional content.
• 59:09
  It's not just positive, it's positive and negative.
• 59:11
  And so I thought about that for a while.
• 59:13
  I'm like, why would there be mixed?
• 59:15
  Why isn't just purely rewarding? Well, for one, I was sticking
• 59:18
  kids in a scanner. That's kind of an odd thing.
• 59:20
  You know, putting kids in a scanner was probably a little
• 59:24
  scary to them. They we have their parents
• 59:25
  nearby, but it's a strange thing.
• 59:27
  But then I also thought about him, like maybe it shouldn't be
• 59:29
  purely positive. I mean, music for many of us,
• 59:32
  like we listen to music that's sad, right?
• 59:34
  I often music the music that's sad or angry or negative, right?
• 59:38
  And the idea is that music is a safe place to process all those
• 59:41
  emotions, right. So maybe the whole point isn't
• 59:43
  that it should just be all positive reward.
• 59:45
  It could be positive and negative reward, right?
• 59:47
  But either way, we really liked this experience because it kind
• 59:50
  of gets to as we were talking about the beginner mind, like
• 59:52
  what's happening when you're a true beginner, right?
• 59:55
  Because many of these kids had never even seen a keyboard
• 59:57
  before. I sat down and be like, OK,
• 59:59
  curve your fingers, put your hands here.
• 1:00:01
  Now we're going to have you do this in the scanner, you know,
• 1:00:04
  and it was amazing. They weren't scared.
• 1:00:05
  They did it right. So whenever someone tells me,
• 1:00:08
  you know, we, we were kind of catchling like the neural
• 1:00:11
  correlates of the, the beginner mind.
• 1:00:12
  And I, I don't know if you've ever heard this term, but the
• 1:00:14
  beginner's mind is something that comes from meditation,
• 1:00:17
  right? So in meditation, they are
• 1:00:19
  saying like, you know, the expert has, is kind of
• 1:00:21
  solidified in their way of thinking.
• 1:00:22
  But in the beginner's mind, it's very open to experience.
• 1:00:26
  It's very plastic. It's.
• 1:00:27
  Very like whatever happens happens, you're not set in your
• 1:00:30
  ways, right? And so I kind of think of this
• 1:00:32
  as like this was a beautiful illustration of the beginner
• 1:00:34
  minds. You know, kids creativity does
• 1:00:36
  have that raw, raw kind of quality to it.
• 1:00:39
  It's very different from adult creativity, but they're still
• 1:00:42
  able to be a creative. And you know, if, if being
• 1:00:45
  creative, like improvising is rewarding, well, maybe that's
• 1:00:48
  why kids are so drawn to be creative, right?
• 1:00:50
  They they don't have a lived experience.
• 1:00:52
  They aren't comparing it to anything.
• 1:00:53
  So they might as well do it, right?
• 1:00:54
  They might as well be creative, right.
• 1:00:56
  So that was a study that we did last year.
• 1:00:59
  Now, of course, there's a huge difference between like
• 1:01:01
  untrained kids who have never played piano and jazz experts,
• 1:01:04
  right? So that kind of shows you
• 1:01:06
  already in our field how there's a lot of like points to fill in
• 1:01:09
  in between. But it was really cool because I
• 1:01:11
  think that study was, at least to my knowledge, the first like
• 1:01:14
  neuroimaging experiment to look at creativity, so.
• 1:01:18
  It's really, I wanted to just ask one question just on that
• 1:01:20
  whole, the whole idea was when you mentioned that it was not
• 1:01:25
  all positive responses. Yeah, I want to be clear.
• 1:01:30
  Does that mean that they didn't only feel good things or does
• 1:01:34
  that mean that not only good things are happening to the
• 1:01:36
  brain? I'm not.
• 1:01:37
  I just wanted. To Yeah, So what I mean more
• 1:01:39
  it's a little bit more specific than that, right.
• 1:01:41
  So whenever we talk about reward, we talk about valence,
• 1:01:44
  valence being positive or negative, right.
• 1:01:47
  So what we saw specifically is that the amygdala deactivates
• 1:01:51
  and that when the amygdala deactivates, if you look at all
• 1:01:53
  the literature that's associated with positive valence, that's a
• 1:01:56
  that's a positive thing. And when it's.
• 1:01:58
  Activated, we're fearful. We tend to be like fearful or
• 1:02:00
  cautious. Yeah, yeah, your amygdala is
• 1:02:01
  really, really active if you're running away from a lion, for
• 1:02:04
  example. And so we I think there was
• 1:02:06
  remember the movie, I don't know if you saw free solo that this
• 1:02:10
  guy that he was on Netflix, Alex something he climbed like the
• 1:02:13
  high. He's a he's a climber.
• 1:02:15
  And and and they found and they stuck him in one of those
• 1:02:18
  scanners and they found that his amygda.
• 1:02:20
  I don't think it was not not working, but it was not working
• 1:02:23
  to the full capacity. And so he's he had a, you know,
• 1:02:25
  he had a very muted sense. Yeah, very philosophical sense
• 1:02:29
  of like if I die, I die be had a very muted sense of this kind of
• 1:02:33
  internal fight or flight instinct.
• 1:02:35
  That he said and you know, that same kind of result has been
• 1:02:38
  seen with expert in like expert meditators.
• 1:02:41
  So there was a study, I think of Buddhist monks, I'll have to
• 1:02:44
  look this up. But there was a study of monks
• 1:02:45
  who are expert meditators and they noticed when they meditate
• 1:02:49
  in the scanner, they can literally calm down their dad.
• 1:02:52
  Like they have the ability to like just kind of, and the,
• 1:02:55
  these are like deep structures in the brain that are kind of
• 1:02:58
  like, like I said, it's kind of a primal thing when the amygdala
• 1:03:01
  activated because he's like, you're scared, you can't, you
• 1:03:03
  know, but these people can with their thoughts actually bring it
• 1:03:07
  down. And so when I say these reward
• 1:03:09
  areas, So what we saw was amygdala caudate and nucleus
• 1:03:12
  accumbens, Those are all reward areas of the brain, but only the
• 1:03:16
  amygdala deactivating is considered positive.
• 1:03:18
  When the caudate and the nucleus accumbens deactivate, that's
• 1:03:21
  actually a little bit negative. So so.
• 1:03:22
  What happens then? What's the consequence of that
• 1:03:25
  emotion? I guess it was an emotional
• 1:03:27
  thing or what? What's the context?
• 1:03:28
  Yeah, it's usually an emotional thing.
• 1:03:30
  So for example, the caudate deactivates when you miss a
• 1:03:32
  reward. So like, let's say you were
• 1:03:34
  doing a prediction thing and you were like trying to get a reward
• 1:03:37
  or a treat or something, it would deactivate and then the
• 1:03:40
  nucleus. Yeah.
• 1:03:40
  And the nucleus accumbens, it deactivates when you're trying
• 1:03:43
  to avoid harm or when you just don't feel a lot musically or
• 1:03:46
  when you're depressed, Right. So this is what I mean is like
• 1:03:49
  the caudate and the nucleus accumbens deactivating is not
• 1:03:52
  necessarily a good thing. Only the nygdala deactivate is a
• 1:03:55
  positive valence. So this makes me feel like, OK,
• 1:03:58
  it's mixed. There's some positives that come
• 1:04:00
  negative. And I was like, but that's
• 1:04:02
  really interesting. I mean, First off, it is a
• 1:04:04
  really complex task, right? You're trying to do this like
• 1:04:07
  cognitive motoric thing and the scanner is really loud and I'm
• 1:04:10
  my mom's out there and I'm trying to, maybe it's just too
• 1:04:13
  hard. It's not natural, right?
• 1:04:14
  It's not like a little kid being with mommy and daddy.
• 1:04:16
  It's not purely positive, right? But then like I said, I think
• 1:04:19
  there's this also this idea that music can also be a safe place
• 1:04:22
  to experience the whole gamut of emotion, right?
• 1:04:25
  I don't just play music that's positive.
• 1:04:28
  Sometimes I watch a movie or play music that's sad on
• 1:04:32
  purpose, and I like that whole spectrum of complexity and
• 1:04:35
  emotions, right? So it's not just that has to be
• 1:04:37
  all positive. So that's kind of the
• 1:04:39
  clarification. And also to clarify, just to
• 1:04:42
  build on that idea. And you said that when they're
• 1:04:45
  improvising, it's against a backdrop of music.
• 1:04:47
  That makes that that makes sense, right?
• 1:04:50
  Yeah, that makes them sound good, Yeah.
• 1:04:52
  Yeah. So I'm so I wonder if the, if
• 1:04:54
  that, if the those quote UN quote negative experiences that
• 1:04:57
  they had was because, and I, I did a podcast episode with the
• 1:05:01
  gentleman Kurt Ellenberger, who's a professor of music and
• 1:05:04
  jazz. And one thing they said was that
• 1:05:07
  our brains automatically can detect what's right or wrong
• 1:05:10
  about music. And like, if you like, we
• 1:05:12
  subconsciously can just fill in a musical note.
• 1:05:14
  Just intuitive. I'm curious that if the kids are
• 1:05:18
  given a backdrop of music that makes sense and they're given
• 1:05:21
  these 5 keys that could all be, you know, played within that
• 1:05:23
  with their brains are detecting like while they're improvising
• 1:05:27
  or while they're just messing around or tinkering.
• 1:05:29
  Hey, they didn't, they didn't belong where it's supposed to
• 1:05:31
  go. And so it's picking up on that.
• 1:05:33
  Yeah. Well, so the whole thing is it
• 1:05:34
  shouldn't pick up that right. Like the the whole point of us
• 1:05:37
  giving the music and the backdrop we gave them is so that
• 1:05:40
  it will never sound bad. As long as you play the notes we
• 1:05:43
  gave you, it'll sound good. So actually.
• 1:05:45
  There's no wrong note you. Mean, yeah.
• 1:05:46
  So there is no wrong note. It's not pause.
• 1:05:48
  Like I can even send you the files later to listen to, but
• 1:05:51
  it's like, there's no wrong note.
• 1:05:52
  Like if you play the flag black notes and we've put all 5 black
• 1:05:56
  note harmonies, there's literally no mistake you can
• 1:05:59
  make. If you just played the same note
• 1:06:00
  over and over again, it would sound good.
• 1:06:03
  Expectations meant then maybe like what you would be expecting
• 1:06:06
  the next. I know that when I'm oodling on
• 1:06:08
  my guitar where I, I, I start to play like a little riff and I
• 1:06:15
  don't, and if I and I don't know my guitar fret board well enough
• 1:06:18
  to know where that next sound that I want to make will come
• 1:06:21
  from, right. I have a general idea, you know,
• 1:06:24
  you know, lower down is a little higher and higher up is a little
• 1:06:26
  deeper, but I don't really know. And so like I'm, I'm noodling,
• 1:06:29
  I'm playing and then I hear like a date there and I, oh, shoot,
• 1:06:32
  that was totally wrong. I was expecting something else
• 1:06:35
  and, and I didn't know where to find it.
• 1:06:37
  And so like you, you're saying that there's that it's
• 1:06:40
  objectively can't be wrong, but I'm curious if they're trying to
• 1:06:43
  follow their own kind of pattern maybe and.
• 1:06:45
  Maybe. Not letting themselves down in
• 1:06:47
  that kind of sense. Yeah, so while they literally
• 1:06:49
  can't make a mistake, that doesn't mean they don't have
• 1:06:51
  their own anxiety about trying to figure out what notes should
• 1:06:54
  go right. Like, so I've done this myself
• 1:06:55
  too, and I'm a pianist and I'm used to be using my 5 notes and
• 1:06:59
  I'm like, I don't know which one I'm going to move.
• 1:07:00
  So there is a little bit of things like which finger should
• 1:07:02
  I move next and what happens? And then what do I do if I don't
• 1:07:06
  know what to do after that note? So there is that little bit of a
• 1:07:08
  thought process, at least even for me.
• 1:07:10
  So it's entirely possible that, well, they couldn't make a
• 1:07:12
  mistake. That doesn't mean they didn't
• 1:07:14
  have some anxiety about trying to figure out what they should
• 1:07:16
  do next, you know, and that might have been why there was a
• 1:07:19
  little bit of negative. Or even expectations of what
• 1:07:21
  they want the next sound to sound like, and maybe they
• 1:07:23
  weren't meeting that. Yeah, it's like, I know what I
• 1:07:25
  want it to sound like, but I'm such a beginner.
• 1:07:28
  Oh, I hit something that wasn't what I wanted, you know,
• 1:07:30
  entirely possible. And, you know, I didn't really
• 1:07:32
  do interviews or anything to figure out what they were
• 1:07:34
  feeling when they were doing this.
• 1:07:36
  But that would also be something that, yeah, we could get more.
• 1:07:39
  And, like, were you? Because they didn't say they
• 1:07:41
  were scared. Everyone thought it was really
• 1:07:42
  cool to be in this experiment. They felt like they were helping
• 1:07:45
  science. You know, no one was scared per
• 1:07:48
  SE, but I didn't ask them, Well, what was it like when you're
• 1:07:50
  improvising versus, you know, I didn't get into that little
• 1:07:52
  detail. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:54
  Because and you know something and a key theme for a lot and I
• 1:07:59
  had to learn this really because I thought I was going crazy, you
• 1:08:02
  know, was that with a lot of great improv bands is that not
• 1:08:06
  every time that they play is going to sound good.
• 1:08:10
  Days, you know, it's like. I don't know why I don't work
• 1:08:13
  song. And I was like, dude, that song
• 1:08:14
  sucks. Of course you don't like it.
• 1:08:15
  They didn't play love that night.
• 1:08:16
  I'm like, oh, I thought I was nuts the whole time.
• 1:08:18
  You know, I didn't realize. You have to look at everyone's
• 1:08:21
  output. We always used to joke in
• 1:08:23
  Conservatory. Even Beethoven had to learn how
• 1:08:25
  to be Beethoven. His early Beethoven doesn't
• 1:08:27
  sound like his, you know, Ode to Joy, like Ninth Symphony, right?
• 1:08:31
  Like we have everyone who's a musician goes through their own
• 1:08:35
  period of development. So if you're a performer, some
• 1:08:38
  days are good, some days are bad.
• 1:08:40
  In fact, another thing that I'm doing with the NEA Research lab
• 1:08:43
  is I'm interviewing these NEA jazz masters.
• 1:08:46
  So these are, it's the largest of the highest award our country
• 1:08:49
  gives towards jazz musicians. So we're talking about really
• 1:08:52
  amazing. And I asked them about their
• 1:08:53
  creative process and I asked them, hey, do you still have bad
• 1:08:57
  days? Do you ever have performance
• 1:08:59
  anxiety still? And many of them are like, you
• 1:09:01
  know what, I'm too old. I don't I don't have that kind
• 1:09:03
  of performance anxiety anymore, but they of course, they say
• 1:09:06
  some days are bad. Some days you're just not going
• 1:09:09
  to play as well as other days. And when everything aligns
• 1:09:12
  nicely, that's an amazing performance.
• 1:09:14
  But you can't always control that, you know, just like I'm
• 1:09:17
  sure you have Daisy. It's like going to the gym or or
• 1:09:20
  teaching, right? Some days feel like it's going
• 1:09:22
  really nicely. It flows easily.
• 1:09:24
  You feel like on top of your work and other days not so much.
• 1:09:29
  I think that happens even to great musicians too, you know,
• 1:09:32
  it's just that we don't always see their worst days.
• 1:09:35
  And here's the thing, too. Let's say you are a Coltrane.
• 1:09:37
  Even your bad day probably sounds pretty good, you know,
• 1:09:40
  compared to what it could be. So I think that that's something
• 1:09:43
  I've learned too, is that expert artists also know how to, you
• 1:09:47
  know, how how to do things in a way that make it work towards
• 1:09:50
  their favor, right? Like I said, if they did have a
• 1:09:53
  bad day and they're making a ton of steaks, maybe they just keep
• 1:09:56
  using those mistakes. And so you don't even notice it
• 1:09:58
  was a mistake. You notice something's a little
• 1:10:00
  off, but they used it cook, you know, in an impressive enough
• 1:10:03
  way that other people wouldn't notice.
• 1:10:04
  Or I used to do ballet when I was in high school and I would
• 1:10:07
  notice the really senior dancers, they could fall, make
• 1:10:10
  falling look really graceful, right?
• 1:10:12
  So I think it's not so much that they don't have bad days, that
• 1:10:15
  people don't fall as though they know how to cover, recover and
• 1:10:18
  get back up and use it somehow and recover quickly.
• 1:10:22
  I mean, when I played piano, I would make mistakes all the
• 1:10:25
  time. My, my, my.
• 1:10:27
  I guess the thing that would always make ruin my performance
• 1:10:30
  is I would have memory slips. Like, all of a sudden I'm
• 1:10:32
  playing and I forget what I'm supposed to do.
• 1:10:33
  But the older I got and realizing it was going to
• 1:10:35
  happen, I just learned to recover really quickly.
• 1:10:38
  So if you don't know the music as well as I do, you wouldn't
• 1:10:40
  know that I had a memory slip, you know?
• 1:10:42
  But I know that wasn't a good performance, right?
• 1:10:44
  Oh, yeah. I think that's the difference
• 1:10:46
  between domain expertise. Like, OK, that wasn't great, but
• 1:10:48
  I covered well enough, you know, whereas the kids like, I don't
• 1:10:51
  even know if what I'm hitting next is going to be what I think
• 1:10:54
  it is. So this, that's a very different
• 1:10:55
  kind of artistic experience. Really cool.
• 1:10:57
  And it's super different, I'm sure, as far as psychology and
• 1:11:00
  their and their brain and their brain development goes.
• 1:11:02
  Too. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:11:04
  I think there's, you know, artists will.
• 1:11:06
  If you think about artists now as adults, they're they're
• 1:11:08
  expressing their own artistic voice, right.
• 1:11:10
  You can't help but have a lived experience and inject your own
• 1:11:13
  experience and your culture and your artistic voice into your
• 1:11:16
  expression. But kids don't have that level
• 1:11:18
  of domain. They don't have years and years
• 1:11:20
  of experience. They're just doing it in a very
• 1:11:22
  raw, unfiltered way that's different from what adults do.
• 1:11:26
  Yeah, it's really cool. It's really, really awesome.
• 1:11:28
  I, I love, I love that you're doing this research and I love
• 1:11:31
  that I, I love that it's that because this is something that
• 1:11:35
  could really go, this could be something that could really
• 1:11:38
  change education and development and the way that we even
• 1:11:41
  perceive what learning is and what self-expression is.
• 1:11:46
  And I think it's really, really crucial to be able to do this
• 1:11:50
  kind of research and really be, you know, scientific and fun and
• 1:11:53
  serious about fun and serious about in the same, in the same
• 1:11:55
  breath. Yeah.
• 1:11:56
  Well. Yeah, I think something we have
• 1:11:59
  felt as scientists is obviously I'm preaching to the choir.
• 1:12:01
  I believe the arts are amazing but in abundant themselves,
• 1:12:04
  right. But we, you know, as a teacher
• 1:12:06
  in public school systems, the arts are being defunded in many
• 1:12:09
  education systems across the country.
• 1:12:11
  And I think what we hope is that by having all this rigorous
• 1:12:15
  scientific research, we show why the arts are important and how
• 1:12:19
  they can be leveraged to help us.
• 1:12:21
  Right. Like, you know, I think if all
• 1:12:23
  of us could figure out a way to be more creative, wouldn't that
• 1:12:25
  be great? You know, that's good for
• 1:12:26
  humanity. I mean, if you think about
• 1:12:28
  creativity being the bedrock of innovation and, you know,
• 1:12:31
  development and things like that, then everyone wants to be
• 1:12:34
  more creative. Whether you're a Fortune 500
• 1:12:36
  company or teachers or, you know, musicians, everyone wants
• 1:12:39
  to be more creative. So we think at this science is
• 1:12:41
  trying to support that. But moreover, showing like, OK,
• 1:12:44
  but when you are being creative, it's a very unique brain
• 1:12:47
  pattern. It's good for you to do these
• 1:12:49
  things, be doing creative artistic tasks is good for the
• 1:12:52
  longevity of your brain, you know, and that you will continue
• 1:12:55
  to develop if you keep doing these things versus, you know,
• 1:12:58
  slipping into cognitive and neurodegenerative decline,
• 1:13:02
  right? Like it's one maybe that we can
• 1:13:03
  maybe combat some of the normal things that would happen.
• 1:13:06
  So I think many of us hope that this science helps with
• 1:13:09
  advocacy, that it helps show how important the arts are by
• 1:13:13
  themselves, but also because of what we can do for us.
• 1:13:16
  Yeah, maybe we got to keep on having these type of
• 1:13:17
  conversations. I know, I know.
• 1:13:21
  And I want to kind of end our. This has been so much fun.
• 1:13:25
  I want to end our conversation talking about a topic you just
• 1:13:30
  brought up, aging, longevity. And specifically I am curious
• 1:13:35
  too, and I don't know if you do any of this.
• 1:13:36
  I want to talk about dementia for sure.
• 1:13:38
  Yeah. You've done any kind of research
• 1:13:39
  as far as stroke victims go because?
• 1:13:42
  I myself have not, but I I can tell you about some of the
• 1:13:45
  literature, but go ahead first. Yeah, because I was going to.
• 1:13:47
  So I I know that, I know that. I know, for example, Jerry
• 1:13:50
  Garcia famously had a stroke and I had to relearn pretty much
• 1:13:54
  guitar from scratch and what you know, and what happens and how
• 1:13:57
  that works. I know that my my grandfather,
• 1:13:59
  my mom's father, before he passed away had a stroke.
• 1:14:02
  And obviously that affects, that affects our ability to speak.
• 1:14:05
  And you know, the, we know that it does something to a good
• 1:14:09
  chunk of our brain. What do we know about music?
• 1:14:15
  Is there a difference in consuming versus playing as far
• 1:14:18
  as aging goes? And and what and what?
• 1:14:20
  What does some of that look like, if you don't mind?
• 1:14:22
  Yeah, so let's start with the the stroke and traumatic brain
• 1:14:25
  injury. I think so the systematic
• 1:14:27
  reviews do show that using music therapy.
• 1:14:29
  So music therapy is when you have do music in the context of
• 1:14:33
  a therapeutic relationship with like a board certified music
• 1:14:36
  therapist. So you have like goals much like
• 1:14:38
  you would as if you went to talk therapist, right?
• 1:14:41
  So what they find is that music therapy really does help with
• 1:14:44
  traumatic brain injury. So like with if you're
• 1:14:46
  recovering from stroke, you may gain your limb use better or you
• 1:14:49
  know things like that. So there's a lot.
• 1:14:50
  So music therapy is very powerful for brain injury.
• 1:14:54
  Now what we see too is actually music therapy.
• 1:14:56
  The most robust and rigorous research that we've seen is in
• 1:15:00
  older in, in older adults. So we've signed that music can
• 1:15:03
  really help with things like Parkinson's disease because
• 1:15:06
  music has a beat. So let's say you have
• 1:15:07
  Parkinson's disease and you're struggling just to get walkie to
• 1:15:11
  find this inner beat to start walking.
• 1:15:13
  When you play music and work with a music therapist, it helps
• 1:15:16
  you get back into that so that you can maybe start walking by
• 1:15:18
  yourself. And what we see with dementia is
• 1:15:21
  there's an amazing movie. If people haven't seen it, it's
• 1:15:24
  called Alive inside. It used to be on Netflix.
• 1:15:26
  It's probably on Prime now. But basically it's it's it was a
• 1:15:29
  nonprofit organization that was doing what was called the iPod
• 1:15:32
  Project. And they brought little iPods to
• 1:15:35
  nursing homes and older adults and gate let them listen to
• 1:15:37
  whatever music they wanted. And, you know, these were
• 1:15:40
  dementia patients who were very inert, you know, maybe not
• 1:15:43
  moving, maybe not always remembering their old family
• 1:15:45
  couldn't speak that well. And all of a sudden when you
• 1:15:47
  play them the music they like, they become alive again right
• 1:15:50
  there. They are articulate and they
• 1:15:52
  have opinions and they, you know, they're alert and, you
• 1:15:55
  know, engaging. And so we see that music is
• 1:15:57
  really amazing for dementia. In fact, for a lot of people
• 1:16:01
  with dementia, specifically among Alzheimer's disease,
• 1:16:04
  memory for music is actually pretty well preserved.
• 1:16:07
  And So what you can use, you can take advantage of that, right?
• 1:16:11
  And, and bring use music to bring people into themselves and
• 1:16:14
  help them remember things. Now, we still don't know why it
• 1:16:17
  works, you know, like, what is the mechanism that music helps
• 1:16:20
  people with Alzheimer's disease? But there's a theory.
• 1:16:23
  The theory is that in dementia, if you think about it, parts of
• 1:16:25
  the brain are kind of going offline and they're starting to
• 1:16:28
  become isolated, like little islands, your brains not talking
• 1:16:30
  to each other. But music brings it all back
• 1:16:33
  together into right. So that's a working hypothesis,
• 1:16:36
  a working theory. More research is being done.
• 1:16:39
  But yeah, there's actually some research, you know, people are
• 1:16:41
  trying to figure out like, OK, can music, you know, along with
• 1:16:45
  dementia, there are a lot of what we call behavior on
• 1:16:47
  psychological symptoms of dementia.
• 1:16:50
  So let's say depression, anxiety, agitation, lethargy,
• 1:16:54
  right? We're starting to try to very
• 1:16:55
  systematically be like, OK, when can we use music?
• 1:16:58
  And how does it help with agitation or lethargy or
• 1:17:01
  depression or anxiety, right? We're kind of at that stage Be
• 1:17:04
  like, imagine if eventually we could prescribe music the way we
• 1:17:07
  would prescribe an antidepressant.
• 1:17:09
  Might be like OK I want you to go and I want you to your choir
• 1:17:12
  three times a week 30 and we're going to see you know and see
• 1:17:14
  how that affects your behavior and your these what we call
• 1:17:17
  behavior on psychological symptoms of dementia.
• 1:17:20
  So there's a lot of work that's being done on it In fact that's
• 1:17:23
  why two of my grants are actually I recently got an NIA
• 1:17:26
  from the NIHI got AK 01 Thank you It's a career development
• 1:17:30
  grant to study the use of improv based music therapy help people
• 1:17:35
  with dementia and their care partners.
• 1:17:37
  I want to look at like, does it help that, you know, because
• 1:17:39
  care as a unit, yeah, as a unit, caregivers have a lot of burden
• 1:17:43
  when and you're taking care of someone who's sick, right?
• 1:17:45
  So can we use improv based music therapy to reduce stress, reduce
• 1:17:49
  depression, introduce. To my grandparents, I would love
• 1:17:52
  to. Yeah.
• 1:17:53
  I mean and. I think, yeah.
• 1:17:55
  And I think one of the benefits of doing something like this is
• 1:17:57
  it's non pharmacological, right? Like I could you know, people
• 1:18:01
  obviously there is medication to help things, but if you think
• 1:18:03
  about medication can often have side effects, right?
• 1:18:06
  Whereas if you pick the right music, you're working with board
• 1:18:09
  certified music therapist, there's not likely to be adverse
• 1:18:12
  events. And so it's it's like a good
• 1:18:14
  frontline first. Low risk.
• 1:18:16
  Low risk, a good way to try starting to help someone who's
• 1:18:19
  dealing with dementia. And granted, again, this is for
• 1:18:21
  early dementia. We're not talking about late
• 1:18:23
  stage dementia yet or but you know, this is where, you know,
• 1:18:26
  that's one of the research areas that I'm looking into that I'm
• 1:18:29
  starting. I'm at the beginning of it.
• 1:18:31
  It's so amazing, it's so cool. I and I mentioned to you that
• 1:18:36
  that I think I mentioned to you that I used to visit the
• 1:18:38
  assisted living homes back when I was in college.
• 1:18:40
  And one of the things they used to do was I used to just sing
• 1:18:42
  and, and people that and, and people and, and, and the
• 1:18:45
  residents in the in these homes, you know, it doesn't even make a
• 1:18:49
  difference. It was, it was So it almost
• 1:18:51
  felt, and obviously I'm sure it wasn't, but it almost felt
• 1:18:54
  unanimous. As far as anecdotally, everyone
• 1:18:58
  remembers the pink Sinatra songs that we would sing.
• 1:18:59
  Everyone remember the classic show tunes that we would sing.
• 1:19:02
  And it would and and what I'm and I and what I would imagine
• 1:19:05
  is is also brings back a whole bunch of series of associations
• 1:19:10
  and memories. Exactly like a.
• 1:19:12
  Yeah, drawback. You know, I know, for example,
• 1:19:14
  that I have a very strong association with James Taylor
• 1:19:17
  that you know, like I, you know, my wife and I had gone to his
• 1:19:20
  concert in Tinglewood and you know, and and and and, you know,
• 1:19:23
  the drive there and and and and the music.
• 1:19:25
  But even being introduced to his music in college, college, I
• 1:19:28
  have very, very strong and and so I I play music and parts of
• 1:19:31
  myself that I haven't even thought about in years.
• 1:19:35
  Just come rushing to the Chicago.
• 1:19:38
  You know, you're the inspiration was like breakup song in high
• 1:19:40
  school and I didn't listen to it in like a decade and it came on
• 1:19:43
  on the radio and I just was transported back and I thought
• 1:19:46
  about the girl that a girl that I hadn't thought about.
• 1:19:49
  For years. 20 years and like all these memories and associates,
• 1:19:53
  so, so I'm sure that that has a lot to do with it.
• 1:19:54
  It's really, really. I mean, they, they call this a
• 1:19:57
  music cognition. We joke the phenomena is like
• 1:19:59
  they're playing our song. So think about it.
• 1:20:01
  Let's say you're 8090 years old, but you remember the song you
• 1:20:05
  dance to at your wedding, right? It brings you back right there.
• 1:20:08
  And that's the thing, Music. Has an amazing way to pull on
• 1:20:11
  all these associations and you know something else we're trying
• 1:20:14
  to start doing again. We're still trying to find
• 1:20:16
  funding. So we haven't done it much yet,
• 1:20:18
  but we're trying to bring personalized playlists to older
• 1:20:21
  adults who are treated in the emergency room.
• 1:20:23
  Right. So the emergency room is a
• 1:20:24
  really stressful place enough so that many older adults will feel
• 1:20:27
  delayed. They won't they'll get confused.
• 1:20:29
  They don't know where they are or those get angry and start
• 1:20:31
  getting agitated And right like normally maybe you would have to
• 1:20:34
  use medication to calm them down.
• 1:20:36
  But if we give them a pot, you know, modify with their
• 1:20:39
  headphones, you know, we often do like, what do you want to
• 1:20:41
  listen to? You know, and anecdotally we
• 1:20:43
  joke OK, well, take when they were born and add 18 to 25
• 1:20:47
  years. We all remember the music of our
• 1:20:49
  youth, right. And so if you do that like, like
• 1:20:51
  it's a Frank Sinatra is that, you know, it's like if you add
• 1:20:53
  the the songs of their youth, it often does calm them down or at
• 1:20:56
  least it takes a very stressful medical situation like the
• 1:20:59
  emergency room and makes it so they can function again and
• 1:21:02
  remember who they are right. So this is all work that's being
• 1:21:04
  done right now. It's all ongoing.
• 1:21:07
  Still. Still being studied, but I, I do
• 1:21:09
  think so I think that's why that music has, you know, music isn't
• 1:21:13
  the only domain. You know, scent is also one of
• 1:21:15
  those that has a very strong association.
• 1:21:17
  But music has a very strong association with memory.
• 1:21:20
  And like I said, specifically in Alzheimer's disease, it's
• 1:21:23
  amazing that they might forget their name.
• 1:21:25
  They might forget their, their family members.
• 1:21:27
  They don't know why they're here, but they hear that song
• 1:21:30
  and they're like, oh, I went to prom on that was the song at
• 1:21:33
  prom or I danced to that at my wedding and I went to see that
• 1:21:36
  show. The tickets were really
• 1:21:37
  expensive. And right, it brings back all
• 1:21:39
  this what we call autobiographical memory.
• 1:21:41
  Like if you think about it, as you know, everyone in our life,
• 1:21:44
  we all have these soundtracks that accompany our lives, right?
• 1:21:47
  The soundtrack of our own personal life, right?
• 1:21:50
  And so when you play that back when you're 80 or 90, it brings
• 1:21:53
  you back into these autobiographical memories.
• 1:21:56
  Is there research on the impacts of someone with dementia or some
• 1:22:00
  kind of neurodegenerative disease playing as opposed to
• 1:22:03
  consuming music? We're still looking at that
• 1:22:06
  right now. So I they, you know, in music
• 1:22:08
  therapy, they considered listening to music is something
• 1:22:10
  known as receptive music therapy compared to playing an
• 1:22:13
  instrument that's active music therapy.
• 1:22:15
  So, you know, we're trying both. I think there's benefits to
• 1:22:18
  both, likely higher benefits to actually playing because it's
• 1:22:22
  again, a more complex process, but that is that's something for
• 1:22:25
  example, my KO1 will do because they're going to be playing
• 1:22:27
  marimbas. And then I also am a Co
• 1:22:30
  investigator on an R61 with Doctor Julene Johnson here at
• 1:22:33
  UCSF, where we're teaching older adults with mild cognitive
• 1:22:37
  impairment. That's like the preclinical
• 1:22:38
  stage to Alzheimer. It's like what directly precedes
• 1:22:41
  Alzheimer's disease. And we're offering them improv
• 1:22:44
  lessons, piano improv lessons. They were trying to see how does
• 1:22:47
  this affect it. Again, all in progress right
• 1:22:49
  now. So I can't speak too much to the
• 1:22:51
  findings since we're still gathering the data, but that is
• 1:22:53
  the type of research we are doing right now.
• 1:22:55
  It's so exciting. That means they have to be in
• 1:22:57
  touch about, about, about like when you, when you, while you
• 1:23:01
  keep on doing all this research because this is all awesome
• 1:23:03
  stuff. I love all this.
• 1:23:04
  Stuff, you know, thank, you know, it's like science is not
• 1:23:07
  an easy path by any way and by any means, particularly now in
• 1:23:11
  this funding climate. But it's really nice to get to
• 1:23:14
  talk to people and realize that, you know, most people care about
• 1:23:16
  this. Because I mean, something I
• 1:23:18
  think about too is that we know from music cognition is that
• 1:23:21
  literally every culture on this planet has had music.
• 1:23:24
  The oldest instruments are from 40,000 years ago, and they
• 1:23:27
  predate visual art. They come before the caves of
• 1:23:30
  Lesco and things like that. So it's amazing.
• 1:23:33
  I'm like, well, that really speaks to the importance of
• 1:23:35
  music for human society, right? And so I think whenever I talk
• 1:23:39
  about this research, well, it can be hard when I'm in the
• 1:23:42
  throes of writing a grant or a manuscript, music is something
• 1:23:45
  that's very accessible to pretty much all of us, many of us,
• 1:23:48
  right? So.
• 1:23:49
  Yeah. I'm really, yeah.
• 1:23:50
  And I'd be curious, you know, one thing that I've, I've
• 1:23:53
  noticed recently as I've kind of been blowing more music is
• 1:23:58
  Speaking of ancient or older types of music, is that there's
• 1:24:02
  some genres like bluegrass or, you know, some types of, I guess
• 1:24:06
  maybe Irish or traditional music that don't have to such heavy
• 1:24:09
  emphasis on the, on the rhythm section or any kind of, you
• 1:24:13
  know, percussion in particular. And it's much more of a string
• 1:24:16
  sound. And they kind of depend on a
• 1:24:17
  bass or some kind of other heavy instrument to create that, that
• 1:24:21
  sense of rhythm. But I think that, that, that,
• 1:24:24
  but I always felt, at least again, anecdotally, that the,
• 1:24:27
  that, that the percussion was almost like the heartbeat, like,
• 1:24:29
  like the really, really a core primal aspect of the music that
• 1:24:35
  just kind of sweeps people up almost as much as as anything
• 1:24:39
  else. It's almost like the, the whole
• 1:24:40
  like backdrop. And then everything else is kind
• 1:24:42
  of just flares and colours coming from that.
• 1:24:45
  And, and, and, and it was curious to see, you know, the
• 1:24:48
  difference between, you know, I again, I love Springsteen's
• 1:24:50
  drummer, Max Max Weinberg and, and the way that he drums in
• 1:24:54
  particular really feels because Springsteen was known for
• 1:24:57
  changing the tempo a lot, even mid song, you know, So what do I
• 1:25:04
  do? Especially when you're jogging
• 1:25:06
  and you feel like, you know, like, and it gets you that in
• 1:25:09
  that place that runner's high. But then you listen to Billy
• 1:25:11
  Strings, man, and you're like, there is no percussion.
• 1:25:13
  And there's somehow still find a way to keep that, to keep that
• 1:25:17
  going. And how does that work?
• 1:25:18
  I all that stuff to me is awesome.
• 1:25:19
  In that there in in the Billy stream, for example, it's
• 1:25:22
  implied beats. So even though there's not a
• 1:25:24
  percussion there, they're setting the meat from a music
• 1:25:27
  theory standpoint, they're setting the meter strongly
• 1:25:29
  enough that you feel it. So it's implied.
• 1:25:32
  But yes, is the percussion and often a grounding thing?
• 1:25:35
  Yeah, absolutely. So, for example, an improv music
• 1:25:37
  therapy, the base, the music therapist often will pay play a
• 1:25:41
  lower xylophone to set the beat. And that's grounding.
• 1:25:44
  It's to help set a foundation and everyone else layers on top
• 1:25:47
  of it. And you know, it's, it's very
• 1:25:49
  much tied to Physiology. Something music cognition people
• 1:25:51
  have found is that the tempos we tend to like, so the tempos that
• 1:25:55
  music fall in tend to be the same physiological tempos as our
• 1:25:59
  heart rate and our breath rate, right?
• 1:26:01
  Like, you know, like I and if you think music is human created
• 1:26:04
  right, we have created tempos that mimic our own physiological
• 1:26:08
  rates. So yes, absolutely, you're
• 1:26:10
  probably running right to a certain beat, permit it, and
• 1:26:13
  then it changes and it does mess with your Physiology, right.
• 1:26:16
  So yes, that music is this is again, this idea that music is
• 1:26:19
  very time to to culture and biology and things like that.
• 1:26:22
  And those are the type of things that music cognition in trying
• 1:26:24
  to understand. Awesome.
• 1:26:26
  And my last question for you, which I like to end now on every
• 1:26:30
  podcast on now is what are you excited and hopeful for as far
• 1:26:34
  as your research in the future and everything?
• 1:26:36
  Else, you know, I really hope that I can continue to keep
• 1:26:40
  doing research on music, you know, music work or arty arts
• 1:26:43
  space work has always been really kind of underfunded and
• 1:26:46
  undervalued, right? Certainly it's not Cancer
• 1:26:48
  Research, absolutely that you know, but you know, I do think
• 1:26:51
  it's really important and I think we're starting their scene
• 1:26:54
  that the public is starting to know more and more about using
• 1:26:56
  the arts and music. So what I'm really hopeful for
• 1:26:58
  is that I really hope more people start to see why the arts
• 1:27:03
  are valuable, but then also help advocate for funding sources
• 1:27:07
  and, you know, philanthropy that does support work like this on
• 1:27:10
  the arts. You know, because up until now,
• 1:27:12
  I think I've always considered what I do very niche.
• 1:27:15
  And I am still considered niche, particularly even at like a
• 1:27:17
  medical school like UCSF. So I hope, I'm very hopeful
• 1:27:21
  though, that in the future, people will continue to see how
• 1:27:23
  important the arts are and fund work like this.
• 1:27:26
  And then I hope that kind of work will eventually help
• 1:27:28
  artists, right? We have all these artists
• 1:27:30
  graduating from school and showing that they can have
• 1:27:33
  careers that are not just being in the arts.
• 1:27:35
  Maybe you become an arts therapist or a music
• 1:27:39
  practitioner or things like that, using your talent and your
• 1:27:41
  skills for health or for, you know, aging or working community
• 1:27:45
  homes. So, so that's what I'm hopeful
• 1:27:47
  for. That's like my pipe dream is
• 1:27:48
  eventually we get to that point. I love that.
• 1:27:51
  I just, I think I was talking again to talked to Kurt Ellen
• 1:27:56
  Morgan about this, but he said that there's a real disconnect
• 1:27:59
  between the research world of music and the university type of
• 1:28:04
  world and academia and the actual performance world.
• 1:28:08
  And he said there's a real, there's a real gap between them
• 1:28:10
  that means that, that, that he thinks should be bridged.
• 1:28:12
  And I would love to find, I would love to encourage that.
• 1:28:15
  I would love to, you know, for, for great musicians to want to
• 1:28:18
  go to universities and want to go to you guys and want to go
• 1:28:21
  and say, hey, you know, how can, how can we work together and
• 1:28:24
  understand this? And, and you know, and, and
• 1:28:26
  provide mutual, you know, beneficial research for
• 1:28:29
  everyone. And I think that I would love
• 1:28:32
  that. That's something I'm really I'm
• 1:28:33
  really hopeful for and I would love for that to happen.
• 1:28:35
  Yeah. And I've been really lucky with
• 1:28:36
  my National Endowment for the Arts funds.
• 1:28:38
  I've been very lucky that musicians have been buying in,
• 1:28:41
  that we've been able to get as far as Small and Colin Mockery
• 1:28:44
  and Zakir Hussein and these amazing greats to come in
• 1:28:47
  because they do think it's important.
• 1:28:49
  But yeah, this work doesn't happen unless musicians and
• 1:28:52
  artists buy in and help us support it.
• 1:28:54
  And I think some something that I have personally found as a
• 1:28:56
  scientist, it really helps that I do have this music background
• 1:28:59
  because I can go into conservatories and say, no, I'm
• 1:29:02
  not just some weird neuroscientist that was study
• 1:29:04
  your brain. I'm one of you.
• 1:29:06
  This is what's going to happen. Like I can speak.
• 1:29:08
  They they take me seriously because I have music training,
• 1:29:10
  right? Or art screening.
• 1:29:12
  So I, I do think I am hopeful that there's going to be more
• 1:29:14
  and more of this interdisciplinary work and
• 1:29:17
  that's going to be more and more public so that people realize
• 1:29:19
  how important it is. But yeah, I mean, I think we all
• 1:29:22
  know it. Like we all have aging parents
• 1:29:24
  or grandparents and want to use what we can.
• 1:29:26
  And so I think these are the more we bring this into our real
• 1:29:29
  lives, I think the better. So I I'm hopeful for that too.
• 1:29:34
  Doctor Karen Barrett, thank you so much for coming on.
• 1:29:37
  This is such a blast. I really appreciate your time
• 1:29:40
  and this is and I hope, I hope, I can't wait.
• 1:29:42
  I hope to do this again. This is a really ton of fun.
• 1:29:44
  Yeah, this was so much fun. I at first, as I didn't know
• 1:29:46
  which studies we'd be talking about.
• 1:29:47
  I love that. It was like a conversation that
• 1:29:49
  we got to have and it's great. And I, it did seem very like we
• 1:29:53
  were able to flow from top and top and very cohesively.
• 1:29:55
  So, so good job. Thank you, Efra.
• 1:29:57
  I. Appreciate it, this is a ton of
• 1:29:58
  fun. Have a great day.
• 1:29:59
  Thank. You let me know if you need
• 1:30:01
  anything else.