WEBVTT - Ep84 "Why do brains love music?" 0:00:05.040 --> 0:00:08.479 How can we understand what music is about from the 0:00:08.520 --> 0:00:13.200 point of view of neuroscience. Can music be leveraged to 0:00:13.280 --> 0:00:18.120 help with anxiety disorders, or with dementia or with Parkinson's disease? 0:00:18.840 --> 0:00:22.080 Is music universal or does it have to do with 0:00:22.120 --> 0:00:25.840 what you have absorbed in your lifetime? How is music 0:00:26.360 --> 0:00:30.400 like a language but one with very particular structure and 0:00:30.440 --> 0:00:33.319 therefore high predictability. And what does this have to do 0:00:33.680 --> 0:00:36.919 with Stevie Wonder on the High Hat or the relationship 0:00:37.040 --> 0:00:42.920 between music and color. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me 0:00:43.080 --> 0:00:46.680 David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford 0:00:47.000 --> 0:00:50.520 and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three 0:00:50.600 --> 0:00:54.920 pound universe to understand why and how our lives look 0:00:54.960 --> 0:01:08.200 the way they do. Today's episode is about music and 0:01:08.240 --> 0:01:10.440 the brain, and this is a topic that has been 0:01:10.480 --> 0:01:16.320 requested by several different listeners, so I prioritized making this episode. Music. 0:01:16.520 --> 0:01:20.039 I suspect is a popular topic because music can be 0:01:20.160 --> 0:01:25.400 so emotive for us and so catchy and so meaningful. 0:01:26.319 --> 0:01:30.000 My father, for example, who was the quintessential tough guy 0:01:30.480 --> 0:01:34.399 when he would listen to Mozart or Brahms or Beethoven, 0:01:34.880 --> 0:01:38.720 he would have tears streaming down his cheeks. And as 0:01:38.760 --> 0:01:41.479 a child, I didn't have much understanding of classical music, 0:01:41.560 --> 0:01:44.880 but that really caused me to wonder, what is going 0:01:44.920 --> 0:01:48.280 on here? Why does this music wafting out of the 0:01:48.400 --> 0:01:54.760 radio evoke such strong emotions and perhaps such deep memories 0:01:54.880 --> 0:01:57.160 in my father? And as I got older and became 0:01:57.160 --> 0:02:00.440 a neuroscientist, I wondered, is there something you unique in 0:02:00.440 --> 0:02:03.600 the structure of the human brain that ties music so 0:02:03.880 --> 0:02:09.280 closely with our emotional experiences? So I decided to do 0:02:09.360 --> 0:02:11.800 an episode on this today, and I realized there was 0:02:11.840 --> 0:02:14.799 no one better to ring up than my friend and colleague, 0:02:14.960 --> 0:02:19.239 Daniel Leviton. He's the founding Dean of Arts and Humanities 0:02:19.280 --> 0:02:23.600 at Minerva University in San Francisco and a professor emeritus 0:02:23.639 --> 0:02:28.360 of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. You 0:02:28.480 --> 0:02:31.160 may know Dan because he wrote a book called This 0:02:31.200 --> 0:02:35.280 Is Your Brain on music, the Science of a Human Obsession, 0:02:35.320 --> 0:02:38.280 which became a big New York Times bestseller, and he's 0:02:38.320 --> 0:02:41.440 also written four other best selling books, including his latest, 0:02:41.520 --> 0:02:45.040 which is called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord. 0:02:45.600 --> 0:02:49.480 Music as Medicine. Now, as you may suspect. Dan is 0:02:49.480 --> 0:02:53.080 also a very talented musician. He composes music and he's 0:02:53.160 --> 0:02:56.920 worked on albums by Blue Oyster Cult and Chris Isaac 0:02:56.960 --> 0:03:00.799 and Joe Satriani, among many others. He does this as 0:03:00.840 --> 0:03:04.960 an advisory producer a recording engineer. So given his expertise, 0:03:05.040 --> 0:03:07.239 I wanted to sit down with Dan to get his 0:03:07.320 --> 0:03:15.960 take on music and the brain. Okay, Dan, what goes 0:03:16.040 --> 0:03:18.920 on in the brain when you listen to music? 0:03:19.520 --> 0:03:23.079 Yeah, well, it really is quite fascinating. So it begins 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:27.240 with the sound waves impinging on your ear drums. They 0:03:27.320 --> 0:03:30.520 wiggle in and out, and all the information you have 0:03:30.800 --> 0:03:35.680 about the auditory world comes from molecules vibrating in some medium, 0:03:35.760 --> 0:03:39.040 in our case air, it could be underwater, and then 0:03:39.920 --> 0:03:41.840 your ear drums just wiggle in and out, and then 0:03:41.880 --> 0:03:44.360 your brain has to take that wiggling in and out 0:03:44.800 --> 0:03:48.960 and extract from it all the different sounds a bird chirping, 0:03:49.040 --> 0:03:52.240 a leaf blower going, the oboe in the symphony as 0:03:52.280 --> 0:03:56.360 opposed to the French horns in a crowded room, the 0:03:56.440 --> 0:03:59.280 conversation you're trying to listen to in front of you, 0:03:59.360 --> 0:04:01.560 as well as that when you're eavesdropping in. It has 0:04:01.600 --> 0:04:04.000 to separate all that out. And the way it does 0:04:04.040 --> 0:04:09.560 that is that your brain has special processing circuits. I 0:04:09.600 --> 0:04:11.120 was going to use the word designed, but of course 0:04:11.120 --> 0:04:16.440 they weren't designed, but evolved to do different distinct functions. 0:04:16.520 --> 0:04:21.960 One circuit processes the loudness is anything louder, is it 0:04:21.960 --> 0:04:25.280 getting softer? And it follows that loudness trajectory, which can 0:04:25.800 --> 0:04:28.200 be an important cue as. 0:04:28.000 --> 0:04:31.719 To what's going on. Pitch duration. 0:04:32.760 --> 0:04:36.200 The pitches get in a separate circuit, bound into a 0:04:36.279 --> 0:04:41.440 representation of melody and harmony, the durations into a representation 0:04:41.520 --> 0:04:46.560 of rhythm and meter, the loudness into accent structure, timbre, 0:04:47.160 --> 0:04:51.080 which is the quality that distinguishes your voice from my 0:04:51.200 --> 0:04:53.920 voice when we're saying the same thing, or a trumpet 0:04:53.920 --> 0:04:56.680 from a piano when they're playing the same note. That's 0:04:56.680 --> 0:05:01.200 a combination of spectral temporal information, in other words, pitch 0:05:01.600 --> 0:05:06.520 and time and loudness. It all comes together later in 0:05:06.560 --> 0:05:10.040 the brain and you just hear that song where later 0:05:10.120 --> 0:05:14.479 in the brain is maybe forty milliseconds. It happens so 0:05:14.640 --> 0:05:17.920 seamlessly that it just sounds like we're hearing the song, 0:05:18.000 --> 0:05:21.000 but we're not. Our brain is hearing the pitch, the rhythm, 0:05:21.080 --> 0:05:25.479 the loudness, the timber, and our evidence, David, that this 0:05:25.640 --> 0:05:29.560 happens is not just from neuroimaging, but from patients. We 0:05:29.680 --> 0:05:33.720 see patients with focal brain damage who suddenly lose their 0:05:33.800 --> 0:05:37.440 perception of pitch, but they retain rhythm or vice versa. 0:05:38.000 --> 0:05:43.159 Okay, so it's this terrifically complicated computational process. So why 0:05:43.200 --> 0:05:45.520 does it end up feeling so emotional for us? 0:05:46.360 --> 0:05:46.680 Well? 0:05:46.800 --> 0:05:52.200 So I think there are both neurobiological reasons and evolutionary 0:05:52.240 --> 0:05:57.039 reasons that are connected. Of course, the simple answer is 0:05:57.360 --> 0:06:01.880 it's emotional for us because emotion circuits in the brain 0:06:01.880 --> 0:06:05.400 are involved in music processing. And by that I mean, 0:06:05.600 --> 0:06:09.640 among others, the well known reward center that you and 0:06:09.640 --> 0:06:12.279 I have talked about in our own classes over the 0:06:12.320 --> 0:06:16.120 years and with one another, the limbic system, the structures 0:06:16.160 --> 0:06:19.800 like the nucleus of Cumban's, the amygdala, the ventral tegmental area. 0:06:20.279 --> 0:06:23.479 This is the emotional core part of the reptilian brain 0:06:23.600 --> 0:06:26.440 that you know motivates us to move out of the 0:06:26.440 --> 0:06:30.680 way of some approaching danger or to signal pleasure when 0:06:30.680 --> 0:06:34.160 we're hungry and we finally get a taste of something sweet. 0:06:34.839 --> 0:06:37.120 Music activates that same center, and in fact, it was 0:06:37.200 --> 0:06:40.240 my lab that was the first to show that our 0:06:40.240 --> 0:06:44.320 brain produces dopamine in response to music listening, and later 0:06:44.360 --> 0:06:49.000 we showed that our brain produces its own endogenous opioids 0:06:49.040 --> 0:06:51.479 in response to music listening, all part of that well 0:06:51.520 --> 0:06:55.560 known pleasure network. Now, of course, that raises the question 0:06:56.279 --> 0:07:01.920 why why is you know, over ever solutionary timescals did 0:07:02.040 --> 0:07:05.920 music hit that emotional center and hear The answer is 0:07:05.960 --> 0:07:11.200 by fer Kate. One is that the well known startle response. 0:07:11.800 --> 0:07:16.560 You hear a sudden, loud noise and you jump. That's 0:07:16.600 --> 0:07:23.080 evolutionarily adaptive because you know, you know, even lizards, snakes, 0:07:23.080 --> 0:07:26.040 reptiles have to move out of the way of something 0:07:26.080 --> 0:07:30.360 that might step on them or smash them. And that 0:07:30.440 --> 0:07:34.840 startle response in humans goes directly from the inner ear 0:07:35.440 --> 0:07:39.200 to the cerebellum and the brain stem. Before we even 0:07:39.200 --> 0:07:42.520 figure out what the sound is, we startle and that's 0:07:42.520 --> 0:07:46.000 connected to emotion centers. And so music, because it's an 0:07:46.040 --> 0:07:50.560 auditory stimulus, is hardwired to movement and to emotion. 0:07:51.080 --> 0:07:54.160 So what happens in the brain when you play an instrument. 0:07:54.960 --> 0:07:58.360 Playing instrument is one of the most neuroprotective things we 0:07:58.440 --> 0:08:02.560 can do. Glistening activates every area of the brain that 0:08:02.600 --> 0:08:06.200 we so far mapped, as does playing an instrument. But 0:08:06.320 --> 0:08:08.960 the added advantage of playing an instrument is that it's 0:08:09.040 --> 0:08:14.680 active rather than passive, and it involves prediction centers in 0:08:14.720 --> 0:08:19.240 the prefrontal cortex, particularly broad An area forty seven, which 0:08:19.280 --> 0:08:21.920 is a pattern detector. You know, Venode, Menna and I 0:08:21.960 --> 0:08:24.240 at Stanford for thirty years have been looking at this 0:08:24.280 --> 0:08:27.200 little sliver of tissue on either side of your between 0:08:27.200 --> 0:08:29.760 your top of your ears and your eyeballs broad and 0:08:29.840 --> 0:08:33.120 forty seven, and Michael Patritus and I at mcgil have 0:08:33.160 --> 0:08:37.000 also looked at it as that part of the human 0:08:37.080 --> 0:08:45.400 brain that primates lack that allows us to process temporal patterns, 0:08:45.440 --> 0:08:49.920 either in vision, touch or sound. And so in playing 0:08:49.920 --> 0:08:53.000 an instrument, you've got to plan what you want it 0:08:53.080 --> 0:08:57.000 to sound like. Hopefully you've got some idea of what 0:08:57.040 --> 0:08:59.839 you want to come out, and then you've got to 0:09:00.080 --> 0:09:03.120 use a feedback loop to listen to what came out 0:09:03.920 --> 0:09:06.439 and see how well it matches with what you intended 0:09:06.559 --> 0:09:10.480 and that adjust or not. And Broaden forty seven is 0:09:10.520 --> 0:09:12.920 a part of that, as well as other prefrontal areas 0:09:13.040 --> 0:09:14.479 and temporal areas. 0:09:15.880 --> 0:09:17.760 Before we move on some other questions, I want to 0:09:17.760 --> 0:09:22.120 ask what got you into this intersection between music and 0:09:22.200 --> 0:09:22.680 the brain. 0:09:23.800 --> 0:09:25.080 It wasn't intentional. 0:09:25.920 --> 0:09:28.960 I had dropped out of college after my sophomore year 0:09:29.080 --> 0:09:32.640 to play in a series of bands, and that led 0:09:32.720 --> 0:09:36.080 to me becoming a staff producer at Columbia Records in 0:09:36.120 --> 0:09:40.760 the eighties and in the nineties, when the music business 0:09:41.040 --> 0:09:44.160 seemed to be imploding, a bunch of us who had 0:09:44.240 --> 0:09:46.800 entered the business around the same time, figured we needed 0:09:46.800 --> 0:09:49.840 a plan B, that this may not be a sustainable career, 0:09:50.800 --> 0:09:53.480 and so I went back and finished my bachelor's degree 0:09:53.640 --> 0:09:56.440 at Stanford. I just worked in every lab that would 0:09:56.440 --> 0:10:01.079 have me. Then I went to graduate school and Oregon 0:10:01.280 --> 0:10:05.040 in order to work with Doug Hintsman and Helen Neville 0:10:05.200 --> 0:10:08.720 a language specialist, and of course Mike Posner on neuroimaging. 0:10:09.320 --> 0:10:12.080 And I was just doing all these things in parallel 0:10:12.360 --> 0:10:16.240 and loving it. I mentioned all these names because they 0:10:16.240 --> 0:10:20.319 were very important mentors to me, each of them. And 0:10:21.200 --> 0:10:24.440 in the third year of my graduate program, Posner, who 0:10:24.480 --> 0:10:28.199 was my principal advisor, said, you know you're gonna have 0:10:28.240 --> 0:10:32.240 to specialize. What do you want to do when you 0:10:32.280 --> 0:10:35.120 grow up. I said, well, I really love all of this. 0:10:35.280 --> 0:10:39.600 I love psycholinguistics, I love memory, I love decision making, 0:10:40.200 --> 0:10:44.320 and I had worked in all those areas. And he said, well, 0:10:44.440 --> 0:10:48.040 you know, you have this background as a musician, and 0:10:48.080 --> 0:10:51.160 there's a lot of competition for jobs in those other fields. 0:10:51.960 --> 0:10:54.840 There's this emerging field of psychology of music with a 0:10:54.880 --> 0:10:57.080 handful of people in it. Maybe if you go into 0:10:57.120 --> 0:11:00.360 that field, there'll be a lot of low hanging fruit, 0:11:00.400 --> 0:11:03.719 as it were, a lot of studies that have obviously 0:11:03.800 --> 0:11:06.120 need to be done that haven't been done yet. And 0:11:06.200 --> 0:11:10.840 in addition, although nobody's going to advertise for a music 0:11:10.880 --> 0:11:15.439 psychology faculty member, all those other things apply to music psychology, 0:11:15.559 --> 0:11:17.880 decision making, how do we decide what we want to 0:11:17.920 --> 0:11:22.160 listen to? Cyclel linguistics, psychology of lyrics and music, individual 0:11:22.160 --> 0:11:25.960 differences in musical taste, memory for music. So it was 0:11:26.040 --> 0:11:30.719 Mike who said preciently that I should brand myself as 0:11:30.720 --> 0:11:34.360 a music psychologist. Of course, back in those days, there 0:11:34.360 --> 0:11:37.800 were no neuroscience departments, there were no neuroscience programs. You 0:11:37.800 --> 0:11:41.360 could not study neuroscience as you and I know it. 0:11:41.840 --> 0:11:44.000 And I'll make a distinction for our listeners between like 0:11:44.120 --> 0:11:48.600 molecular neuroscience, which was done in biology departments where you 0:11:48.679 --> 0:11:50.800 only look at a single neuron and you've never even 0:11:50.880 --> 0:11:54.120 considered what a thought might be and what we call you. 0:11:54.160 --> 0:11:56.880 And I work in the area systems neuroscience, where we're 0:11:56.880 --> 0:12:01.720 looking at the big ideas andions of neurons communicate with 0:12:01.760 --> 0:12:02.920 other millions in neurons. 0:12:03.559 --> 0:12:08.360 I know that you feel like that the music psychology 0:12:08.440 --> 0:12:12.040 world was not particularly good let's say twenty years ago, 0:12:12.120 --> 0:12:14.640 so give us a sense of what it was like 0:12:14.720 --> 0:12:16.640 at that point when people thought about I'm going to 0:12:16.640 --> 0:12:19.040 study the psychology music and what it's like now and 0:12:19.080 --> 0:12:19.760 what's changed. 0:12:19.920 --> 0:12:22.319 And there were a bunch of other people who hadn't 0:12:22.640 --> 0:12:27.679 studied cognitive psychology but fancy themselves music psychologists, and they 0:12:27.679 --> 0:12:30.840 did a bunch of bad studies, the poster child for 0:12:30.880 --> 0:12:36.520 that being the Mozart effect study, which purported to show 0:12:36.559 --> 0:12:39.560 that listening to Mozart for twenty minutes would make you smarter. 0:12:40.120 --> 0:12:43.640 And there have now been literally one hundred studies that 0:12:43.760 --> 0:12:46.440 shows that that was just bullshit. It was a poorly 0:12:46.480 --> 0:12:48.960 controlled study, It was done by people who had no 0:12:49.080 --> 0:12:52.840 experience in human experimental design. They stepped outside their lane, 0:12:53.160 --> 0:12:55.760 and so there was a lot of garbage work being done. 0:12:56.200 --> 0:13:02.640 What's different now is that we've had twenty years of 0:13:02.800 --> 0:13:06.440 people applying to graduate school who knew they wanted to 0:13:06.480 --> 0:13:10.840 study music psychology. Some of them went into music psychologists' 0:13:10.920 --> 0:13:14.559 labs like mine. Others did what I did. They went 0:13:14.559 --> 0:13:17.679 into the lab of a memory person or an attention 0:13:18.320 --> 0:13:23.640 or brain imaging person and just used that interest in 0:13:23.720 --> 0:13:25.040 music to design studies. 0:13:25.679 --> 0:13:27.760 And so what sort of things have come out in 0:13:27.800 --> 0:13:29.800 the last twenty years. Part of this has to do 0:13:29.840 --> 0:13:32.840 with the advent of neuroimaging, right. 0:13:33.240 --> 0:13:36.000 Well, that really, that really is what kicked it off, because, 0:13:36.080 --> 0:13:41.319 as you know, David, the study of emotion was rather unseemly. 0:13:41.920 --> 0:13:45.240 I think it began with the foundation of the first 0:13:45.280 --> 0:13:49.360 psychology labs in the world by Vuntenfeckner in Europe. Of course, 0:13:49.400 --> 0:13:52.840 William James was always more interested in the esthetics and 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:56.400 artistics side, but it was the behaviorist movement of the 0:13:56.440 --> 0:14:00.640 fifties led by BF Skinner, that if something wasn't deservable 0:14:00.679 --> 0:14:04.960 and replicable, it wasn't worth study. And so emotions just 0:14:05.040 --> 0:14:07.920 seemed too squishy, and music as the language of emotion 0:14:08.440 --> 0:14:11.600 seemed like the squishiest of all. What happened with the 0:14:11.600 --> 0:14:16.439 first studies of neuroimaging, which Mike Posner was part of 0:14:16.800 --> 0:14:20.040 nineteen ninety eight ninety nine. We were able to actually 0:14:20.160 --> 0:14:25.360 see pictures of the brain caught in the act of 0:14:25.440 --> 0:14:29.760 thinking and remembering and imagining, and that gave it a 0:14:29.800 --> 0:14:36.680 biological basis reality. You could replicate brain imaging experiments, and 0:14:36.760 --> 0:14:41.160 so first the study of emotion, and then shortly followed 0:14:41.160 --> 0:14:43.480 by the study of music with the first neu imaging 0:14:44.160 --> 0:14:48.080 studies of music in the early two thousands, that put 0:14:48.080 --> 0:14:51.200 it back on the table as something that was worthy 0:14:51.240 --> 0:14:54.000 of study and could be done in a rigorous fashion. 0:14:54.720 --> 0:14:57.600 So your latest book, I heard, There was a Secret Chord, 0:14:58.360 --> 0:15:02.040 looks at this issue of muse musick as medicine. So 0:15:02.040 --> 0:15:03.760 tell us about that. 0:15:03.760 --> 0:15:09.400 That's something that I think most of us have experienced intuitively, certainly, 0:15:09.400 --> 0:15:12.400 it goes back tens of thousands of years using music 0:15:12.480 --> 0:15:16.640 to treat injury and disease to shamans and faith healers 0:15:16.720 --> 0:15:21.680 and indigenous tribes. And it was really in the last 0:15:21.840 --> 0:15:26.720 ten years. I would say that the idea that music 0:15:27.720 --> 0:15:33.440 had an evidence base for treating injury disease promoting wellness, 0:15:34.120 --> 0:15:38.320 helping with mental disorders like depression, post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety. 0:15:38.880 --> 0:15:42.440 There's been eight thousand papers in the last two years 0:15:42.440 --> 0:15:45.800 alone in peer review journals on medical applications of music, 0:15:46.320 --> 0:15:51.640 and so about five years ago I became involved with 0:15:51.720 --> 0:15:54.800 the National Institutes of Health and the White House Science Office, 0:15:55.320 --> 0:16:01.280 leading various expert panels to figure out what do we 0:16:01.320 --> 0:16:02.960 really know and what do we don't know and what 0:16:03.040 --> 0:16:06.080 remains to be done. That led to a call for proposals. 0:16:06.120 --> 0:16:09.600 The NIH put forty million into music and medicine research 0:16:10.320 --> 0:16:12.440 a few years back. So I looked for a book 0:16:12.520 --> 0:16:14.560 on music and medicine because I wanted to know what 0:16:14.640 --> 0:16:17.880 the state of the art was, and I couldn't find one. 0:16:18.320 --> 0:16:20.560 There were a lot of papers, but no books, and 0:16:20.640 --> 0:16:22.680 so I ended up writing the book I wanted. 0:16:22.440 --> 0:16:25.040 To read and so give us a sense when it 0:16:25.080 --> 0:16:29.640 comes to something like, let's start with dementia, how would 0:16:29.720 --> 0:16:33.600 music be useful in the case of something like Alzheimer's. 0:16:34.200 --> 0:16:37.480 Not all dementia is Alzheimer's, of course, and not all 0:16:37.520 --> 0:16:42.360 memory loss comes from Alzheimer's. But the most straightforward case 0:16:42.400 --> 0:16:46.240 of somebody with profound memory loss, perhaps due to Alzheimer's, 0:16:46.280 --> 0:16:51.320 Corsokov's stroke, whatever. They may not recognize where they are, 0:16:52.800 --> 0:16:55.680 They may not recognize loved ones. They may not even 0:16:55.720 --> 0:17:01.400 recognize themselves in the mirror. This is profoundly We've seen 0:17:01.480 --> 0:17:04.400 patients who will walk by a mirror and think they're 0:17:04.480 --> 0:17:07.359 talking to someone else, and then they get angry because 0:17:07.359 --> 0:17:09.360 the person in the mirror appears to be mocking them 0:17:09.840 --> 0:17:14.200 by gesturing the same way they are, and it causes 0:17:14.680 --> 0:17:19.760 one of two reactions. Individuals either turn in on themselves, 0:17:19.800 --> 0:17:22.679 fold in on unsells because the external world makes no 0:17:22.840 --> 0:17:29.080 sense and they become somewhat catatonic, or they become angry, agitated, 0:17:29.119 --> 0:17:32.720 and violent and in that case have to be medicated. 0:17:32.920 --> 0:17:36.600 They might start beating up on their spouses, not recognizing them. 0:17:37.119 --> 0:17:43.200 Music follows a kind of principle that computer science talks about, 0:17:43.240 --> 0:17:45.360 which is first in, last out. 0:17:45.600 --> 0:17:48.200 This is a holder for the old models of computer memory. 0:17:48.600 --> 0:17:50.600 The first thing that goes into the memory is the 0:17:50.680 --> 0:17:54.000 last thing to come out. And because we've been listening 0:17:54.040 --> 0:17:57.200 to music in the womb most of us and through 0:17:57.240 --> 0:18:01.639 our childhoods, those memories the most deeply embedded in the 0:18:01.680 --> 0:18:06.720 brain and the most resilient and resistant to decay or damage. 0:18:06.760 --> 0:18:10.080 And so if we play music from the youth of 0:18:10.119 --> 0:18:14.520 an Alzheimer's patient, somebody with profound memory loss, play the 0:18:14.600 --> 0:18:17.040 music from say the ages of twelve to fourteen or 0:18:17.080 --> 0:18:22.520 sixteen that's preserved in most cases, and it allows them 0:18:22.920 --> 0:18:29.040 to profoundly reconnect with a part of themselves they had lost. 0:18:29.720 --> 0:18:35.040 It eases them, it comforts them, It triggers memories that 0:18:35.240 --> 0:18:39.560 had been buried, and that kind of therapy or intervention 0:18:40.359 --> 0:18:43.600 can pull them out of the state they're in and 0:18:43.720 --> 0:18:47.320 actually have consequences for days or weeks where they come 0:18:47.359 --> 0:18:48.000 alive again. 0:18:49.920 --> 0:18:55.399 It doesn't cure or help the dementia the cognitive loss exactly, 0:18:55.600 --> 0:19:00.440 but it triggers memories and pulls them back to state 0:19:01.359 --> 0:19:06.159 where they've been. And it can also revivify skills that 0:19:06.200 --> 0:19:11.400 someone has. For example, musicians with profound dementia who get 0:19:11.440 --> 0:19:14.119 an instrument put in their hand and they go and 0:19:14.880 --> 0:19:16.880 play again as though they're young. 0:19:17.640 --> 0:19:20.480 It's really extraordinary. And we saw this play out in 0:19:20.520 --> 0:19:24.640 recent years with Glenn Campbell first and then with Tony Bennett, 0:19:25.359 --> 0:19:28.359 both of whom had profound memory loss and did not 0:19:28.520 --> 0:19:31.399 know where they were. When Glenn did his final tour 0:19:32.640 --> 0:19:37.360 with dementia and in the throes of Alzheimer's. He would 0:19:37.400 --> 0:19:39.520 sometimes play a song two or three times in a 0:19:39.600 --> 0:19:41.560 row because they didn't realize he had just played it, 0:19:42.160 --> 0:19:44.520 or he'd forget what song he was supposed to play. 0:19:44.560 --> 0:19:47.199 But once the notes, the first few notes happened, he 0:19:47.240 --> 0:19:50.440 knew where he was. Say, with Tony Bennett, he could 0:19:50.480 --> 0:19:53.480 sing for an hour and a half without stopping once 0:19:53.520 --> 0:19:57.400 the music took over. These are what we cognitive scientists 0:19:58.160 --> 0:20:02.919 call overlearned. They're not just in memory, but they're in 0:20:03.000 --> 0:20:06.400 memory with thousands and thousands of traces overlaid on top 0:20:06.440 --> 0:20:10.119 of one another and their procedural memory. Once your vocal 0:20:10.160 --> 0:20:13.560 cords and your fingers get going, they kind of take over. Now, 0:20:13.600 --> 0:20:16.280 to be clear, the memory is not in your fingers, 0:20:16.359 --> 0:20:18.679 although it feels that way. If I were to scoop 0:20:18.720 --> 0:20:21.080 your brain outside your head, your fingers would not keep 0:20:21.080 --> 0:20:23.639 playing like a chicken with its head cut off. But 0:20:24.160 --> 0:20:29.560 those pathways are so profoundly deeply embedded that yeah, you 0:20:29.600 --> 0:20:32.520 can keep going even with Alzheimer's, and it gives the 0:20:32.600 --> 0:20:38.240 patient a rare act of competence in a world in 0:20:38.280 --> 0:20:43.119 which they're otherwise incompetent. It gives them agency in the world. 0:20:43.840 --> 0:20:47.919 This can really affect their mood and their quality of 0:20:47.920 --> 0:20:49.399 life and way of being in the world. 0:21:04.920 --> 0:21:06.359 Now, one of the things I've talked about on in 0:21:06.440 --> 0:21:09.919 previous episode is right Bo's law, which is where older 0:21:09.960 --> 0:21:13.600 memories are more secure, they're burned down more deeply than 0:21:13.840 --> 0:21:16.119 newer memories. And of course we see this with people 0:21:16.160 --> 0:21:16.919 with cogno. 0:21:17.040 --> 0:21:18.800 I thought you were going with Bow's law, like the 0:21:18.840 --> 0:21:23.879 bow on a violin, the earliest violin pieces are the 0:21:23.880 --> 0:21:25.639 ones that are the most embedded. 0:21:25.960 --> 0:21:30.800 Yeah, nope, Riebo Ribot, Yeah, which is you know, he 0:21:30.920 --> 0:21:32.760 was the first I think this is actually the first 0:21:32.840 --> 0:21:35.160 rule in neurology, as in the oldest rule. 0:21:35.480 --> 0:21:35.720 Yeah. 0:21:35.760 --> 0:21:40.520 But anyway, he saw that, you know, things from childhood 0:21:40.680 --> 0:21:45.160 were remembered by people with let's say dementia, and things 0:21:45.160 --> 0:21:47.560 they did last week or last month were not remembered, 0:21:47.800 --> 0:21:49.760 so older members more stable. Now, the reason this is 0:21:49.800 --> 0:21:54.040 so strange is because nothing else works that way. Institutions, 0:21:54.080 --> 0:21:56.800 for example, don't remember their older stuff better than they 0:21:56.880 --> 0:22:00.960 remember their newer stuff. But brain works this way. 0:22:01.280 --> 0:22:02.280 That is true. 0:22:02.359 --> 0:22:04.879 So my question is, I mean, when when it comes 0:22:04.920 --> 0:22:09.760 to music, presumably most of these great musicians have been 0:22:09.800 --> 0:22:13.280 playing since they were a little kids, and these particular 0:22:13.320 --> 0:22:17.200 songs are overlearned, as you mentioned. Is this an expression 0:22:17.240 --> 0:22:20.240 of simply of Ribo's law, which is that it's an 0:22:20.280 --> 0:22:21.879 older memory and that's why they're able to do it? 0:22:22.000 --> 0:22:24.520 Or is there something different about music than if I 0:22:24.600 --> 0:22:28.160 ask them something about their you know, their their childhood home. 0:22:28.840 --> 0:22:29.720 What a great question. 0:22:29.960 --> 0:22:34.120 Well, there is something different about music to invoke Claude Shannon. 0:22:34.880 --> 0:22:42.440 It's a highly organized and structured stimulus like language, and 0:22:42.920 --> 0:22:49.720 so in an information theory perspective, which is Shannon, your 0:22:49.760 --> 0:22:53.280 ability to predict what will come next in any sequence 0:22:54.119 --> 0:22:58.119 defines how structured highly structured it is. Even more so 0:22:58.280 --> 0:23:01.920 than language. Music is highly constrained. So I could say 0:23:01.920 --> 0:23:04.439 a sentence to you like this, Let's try this, the 0:23:04.480 --> 0:23:08.119 pizza was too hot to blank? What comes to mind? 0:23:08.320 --> 0:23:15.359 Eat yeah or touch yeah? I would not be likely 0:23:15.400 --> 0:23:19.400 to say the pizza was too hot to sleep. Once 0:23:19.440 --> 0:23:21.399 I say it, you understand what I meant, and you 0:23:21.480 --> 0:23:23.320 understand that I use the correct part of speech. I 0:23:23.359 --> 0:23:26.760 put a verb at the end, But it's an unlikely outcome. 0:23:28.040 --> 0:23:30.800 Music is even more constrained because there are only twelve 0:23:30.800 --> 0:23:34.280 notes in our scale, and there are I wouldn't call 0:23:34.320 --> 0:23:37.560 them laws of music theory, but customs of music theory. 0:23:38.000 --> 0:23:40.800 And there are rhythmic rules or customs. 0:23:41.440 --> 0:23:43.160 And so once you. 0:23:43.160 --> 0:23:47.280 Get going on a piece of music, its own structure 0:23:48.320 --> 0:23:52.439 constrains what the possible completions are, making it easier to 0:23:52.640 --> 0:23:56.439 remember and then easier to recollect, easier to store and 0:23:56.480 --> 0:24:01.640 easier to retrieve, and then moreover, as its own internal tempo. 0:24:02.600 --> 0:24:06.200 Once the beat is going, it's carrying you along, whether 0:24:06.240 --> 0:24:08.600 you're ready to go along with it or not. And 0:24:08.680 --> 0:24:11.760 so you're going to fill those slots with what needs 0:24:11.800 --> 0:24:15.040 to go there or your best approximation for it. And 0:24:15.080 --> 0:24:18.720 when you look at performing musicians, like typically the ones 0:24:18.760 --> 0:24:21.920 that work holiday ins on Friday night lounge bands and stuff, 0:24:22.680 --> 0:24:26.159 they might know two thousand songs where I would use 0:24:26.200 --> 0:24:29.960 the word no in quotes, they probably don't know every 0:24:30.040 --> 0:24:32.240 single note and every single rhythm. 0:24:32.720 --> 0:24:34.080 But they can approximate it. 0:24:34.119 --> 0:24:37.160 They can improvise and estimate it so that you don't 0:24:37.160 --> 0:24:38.280 really notice the difference. 0:24:38.720 --> 0:24:42.360 Well, that's actually a good segue into Parkinson's disease. 0:24:42.760 --> 0:24:46.280 How is music used there? So in all these cases 0:24:47.359 --> 0:24:50.439 of music is medicine. We're not talking about like a 0:24:50.520 --> 0:24:55.320 music module in the brain or a music medicine prescription 0:24:55.520 --> 0:24:59.080 that's straightforward, because music is doing different things in different 0:24:59.080 --> 0:25:01.879 parts of the brain, different aspects of the music are 0:25:01.920 --> 0:25:04.480 doing it, and Parkinson's is I'm so glad you brought 0:25:04.480 --> 0:25:07.480 this up. It's actually the best case for understanding this 0:25:07.560 --> 0:25:14.080 differentiation in Parkinson's disease. At some point, most patients will 0:25:14.119 --> 0:25:19.159 experience difficulty walking movement disorders in general, but walking in particular, 0:25:19.680 --> 0:25:24.280 and it's because the disease degrade circuits in the basal 0:25:24.320 --> 0:25:27.439 ganglia that are required to maintain a smooth and steady 0:25:27.480 --> 0:25:30.640 gait and to orchestrate the movements of one foot has 0:25:30.680 --> 0:25:32.160 to go after the other and you have to put 0:25:32.160 --> 0:25:33.679