Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Understanding the Brain. This podcast is designed to
introduce individuals with or without a background in science to
the modern field of neuroscience, drawing on everyday experience and
popular books as well as current research to enlighten the listener.
Let's get started.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome back everyone. Well, today we have a great guest,
Doctor Annie Patel pa Tel is a professor of psychology
at Tufts University. He received his PhD from Harvard University.
He then joined the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California,
where here's a senior fellow from two thousand and five
to twenty twelve. So what are we going to be
talking to doctor p Tel about. Well, he focuses on
(00:47):
music cognition, the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and
responding to music. Areas of emphasis include music language relations,
the topic of his two thousand and eight book, which
I highly recommend, called Music Language and the Brain, Rhythmic process,
and cross speech. She studies of music cognition a whole
lot more. You know, we've been talking a lot about
(01:07):
the brain this year, and we continue, so I'm really
looking forward to this conversation. Before we get started, my
show share subscribe. Hey, if you're an Apple, give us
five stars. That's not waste any more time and welcome
to the show. Doctor Bateell Walkome, Professor, Hi, thank you,
thank you for having me, Thank you for being here.
Fascinating topic. I've looked at music. We know music plays
(01:27):
a huge role in our lives. What got you motivated
to studying music and cognition?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I was a biologist as an undergraduate of studying biology,
and I loved it, and I kind of knew I
wanted to.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Study biology in some way, and I got sort of.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Interested in behavior and how our brains support the various
behaviors that we have. And one day, kind of walking
around campus as an undergrad, I thought, God, what is
the most What's the behavior I want to study the most?
What do I want to understand from a biology perspective?
And I love music, but I had never studied it.
(02:07):
Wasn't a music major or anything, but I had such
a strong personal relationship to it that I thought, Wow,
what's that about. Why does this affect me so deeply
and so many people so deeply? Could we ever understand
this from a biological perspective? And that kind of set
me down the path of studying music in the brain.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Fascinating stuffic, but see, it's a lot of fun. It's
an interesting topic and I no doubt about that. So
I guess, for gravity's sake, what are some of the
things you've been looking at regards to using and cognition.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Well, one of my big areas has kind of been
looking at how is the processing of music related to
the processing of language. I'm talking about ordinary spoken language
when I say language, and you know, music I'm talking
about could be instrumental music, could be singing. And these
things are, you know, obviously very different. No one would
ever confuse speech and song, or speech with playing a
(03:02):
musical instrument, but they're both kind of forms of communication.
And there was a long line of theorizing that they
were just fundamentally different beasts inside the brain, that they
kind of were processed by totally different brain regions, they
didn't really have much to do with each other in
kind of light of modern neurology, and I began to
(03:25):
wonder if that was really true, and so my graduate
work kind of started me down the path of actually
doing experiments to see to what extent does our brain
use some of the same principles and mechanisms when we
process music and language, even purely instrumental music, compared to
ordinary spoken language, and found some surprising overlap in that,
(03:48):
and that ended up having implications for various real world
things like whether or not you can use music training
to help people with language problems like dyslexia or other
kinds of problems after stroke, for example. So it was
kind of like finding the hidden connections between the way
the brain does things that at the surface look very
very different.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
I can imagine. So, and did you notice what areas
of bringing I guess, let's say, get activated the most
when you're listening to music, or does it vary depending
on the type of music of the genre.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Great question.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
People used to think that, you know, music was largely
a right brain phenomenon and like language was largely a
left brain phenomenon. And one of the first things we
learned when we started looking at human brains through brain
imagy was how oversimplified that view was. It turns out
music and language both used widespread networks on both sides
of the brain. There are some regions that seem specialized for.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
One or the other.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
In the in the auditory regions of our brain, for example,
But there are also regions where those sound processing things overlap,
and so we use widespread networks front including things that
happen towards the front of our brain, things that happened
toward the more to the back, the cerebellum, and the
basal gang of these deep brain structures, as well as
(05:07):
motor planning regions. One of the cool findings of recent
years is that when we experience music with a beat
that makes us want to move even if we don't move,
even if we're perfectly sitting perfectly still with no intention
of moving, we see strong activity in the motor regions
of our brain brain that normally handle movement, as if
somehow just feeling a beat internally is a kind of
(05:29):
inner movement that it's not activating these motor systems. We
think probably that's involved in predicting the timing of beats,
which is part of what beat perception is.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Oh, is that that part of my brain compromise. I
can't dance worth a lick. It's interesting. I guess it
makes me think about Parkinson's. Have we seen anything regards
to that.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah, I'm super glad you mentioned that that is actually
one of the areas where this kind of work meets
the real world. So it turns out that for some
Parkinson's patients ufer from difficulties with walking and initiating movement
and walking fluidly, that music with a beat can really
help them. And you know, this has been known for
a while clinically. Some colleagues of mine have helped turn
(06:14):
this into a therapy for Parkinson's patients called rhythmic auditory stimulation,
and it can help some of these patients quite a bit.
And you can see videos of this on YouTube. In fact,
there are people posting videos of themselves just in their
living rooms and you can see they have Parkinson's. They're
walking a very shuffy their gaita is kind of shuffy,
unstable gait. And then they put on the music and
(06:35):
you see how they just become so much more fluid
and they start to move to the beat. And so
this beat, you know, which seems like this is something
with music, right not with not has nothing to do
with disease. Actually, it seems to affect and enhance movement
in people with very serious motor disorders. It doesn't work
for everybody, but for some people it really helps and
(06:58):
therapies based on this can actually help bring back some movement.
Obviously doesn't cure Parkinson's, but it can help and give
people Parkinson's patients a way to feel holy again.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
That's awesome, that's really cool. I think I've seen some
of those videos of some of those places where they're
doing therapy and they've included the music component of it.
And I when to bring back in a minute, head
over to dementia in a second as well, because I
know I've seen sometimes there's areas using music. But before
we get to that, I'm going to bring you back
for a second, back to Parkinson's and the areas of
(07:31):
the brain that will highlight with music. Are we seeing
We know Parkinson's one of the things is actually low dopamine.
Do we see any kind of neurotransmitter change because of music?
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yes, it's actually my colleague get in Montreal, Professor Robert
Zatore and his colleagues have been doing a lot of
work on music and dopamine and the role of dopamine
in our experience of musical pleasure. And we now know
that music strongly activates dopamine system when we enjoy music,
and that's the reward side of dopamine. There's also a
(08:05):
motor side of dopamine where dopamine plays a role in
initiating movements, and that happens to a somewhat different brain
pathway than the reward pathway. And with the Parkinson's patients
are telling us is that there's probably an impact of
music on this other dopamine pathway. And what's cool about
music is people like music, and so it puts together
movement and pleasure, and that's part of what motivates, I think,
(08:27):
for us to move to music and gives us that
sense of reward of popping along to the beat, even
if you know we're not getting that reward from anybody else,
like just sitting in our car or in our living room.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
I know.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's always amazing because if you look at you step
back and you look at it functionally. I guess when
you see a concert and you're thinking, what are you
getting out of this? You're just jumping up and down?
What it does? It really kicks that dopamine in and
there's so much pleasure going on. It even seems like
I don't know, I'm gonna take a wild guess, but
it even seems like if you're around people, even maybe
oxen toasin goes up.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah, I mean there's interesting theories about that too, and endorphins.
And this social piece is really interesting. You said, you know,
when we're at concerts, and there is something about experiencing
music socially that people seem to really enjoy, and especially
when it comes to dance, people really.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Like to do that with other people.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
A lot of people are perfectly happily listening to music
on their own on their personal devices, but when they
feel like dancing, most people kind of want to do
that with other people.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
They're not just putting on.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Music and dancing by themselves typically so, and this is
actually one of the neat things about the dance, the
effect of music on Parkinson's. There's actually a group in
New York, the Mark Morris Dance Group. It started a
dance for Parkinson's group, and it's hugely successful because not
only does it give them the benefits of rhythm on movement,
it gives them socialization, a chance to work towards something
(09:51):
in this case of performance. And there's a wonderful film
called I Think It's Capturing Grace about the dance for
Parkinson's Pride started in Mark Morris Company and now spread
around the country. And if you know somebody with Parkinson's,
this is a wonderful thing because they take people that
aren't dancers, and people in this film were not professional dancers.
(10:11):
They were just ordinary people. But by going through this
program of learning to dance with other parkinson patients, they
overcome one of the biggest challenges of partners Parkinson's, which
is the isolation social isolation that comes with that disease.
So it's kind of both social, emotional and movement in
terms of benefits.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Professor of psych we both know how important social engagement is.
Oh yeah, I'm gonna switch, I guess to a different
part of the brain.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I can't remember where I saw. I'd have to forgive
me for that, but I know there was somebody I
was reading where they were doing using music, especially a
nostalgic type of music with people with dementia and other
memory issues are Nearcago disorders, and it seemed to help
them in some capacity, maybe just from my remembering. Obviously,
the dopamine hit again there. What have you seen anything
(11:02):
regards to music and memory area.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Of that nature. Oh yeah, that's a fascinating topic.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
I mean, it's certainly we all know intuitively that music
has this profound power over our memory systems. We can
hear a song that we loved in college and haven't
heard it for twenty years, and it comes on the
radio and we're singing right along, transported back to that
time of life and the things that were happening, and
who we were with and what we were feeling.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
What we were doing.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
You know, long before there was writing the stories, the
great stories of the world, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the
Bedas in India, the epics, the ballads, they were all
sun you know, that's how people remember them. So music
has this profound and ancient relationship to human memory. And
what's kind of cool about modern research on this is
(11:51):
the persistence of musical memory and light of some serious
brain disorders like dementia. And you know, there's that film
that was very I think you interviewed the director or
producer of the film Alive Inside about patients with Alzheimer's
dementia that hear music and sort of reawakens memories.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
And what's also interesting about this is musical.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Memory and autobiographical memory can be very tightly related in
the brain.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
Right.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
The music you love in your youth is often tied
to specific memories of what was going on at that
time in your life, and so listening to that music,
not only you don't just remember the music, you kind
of reactivate some of the memories of that part of
your life. And that's what's so interesting for these patients
is can we use music to help them reactivate some
(12:41):
of their memories when they can't seem to remember their
families or other things that they spent their lives around.
What does music give us access to help kind of
reawaken some of those memories.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
That's fascinating stuff. And I guess one of the questions
that popped out out of that where is it in
the brain? Do we know where there where the memories
holding these memories of music? Is it in the hippocampus
somewhere else? Because silent?
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Yeah, that's so sailing. So I have a colleague at
UC Davis, professor Peter Janata, and he has done some
great work on this on the relationship between music and
memory and autobiographical memory, and he's even done brain imaging.
The hip campus is very important for laying down memories,
but it's probably not where these memories are stored themselves.
(13:27):
It interacts with many parts of the brain to help
those parts of the brain lay down those memories. He
found that there are regions in the frontal middle frontal
parts of the brain seem particularly important for recalling music
that you remember and associating it with autobiographical memories. So
it's you know, probably the hippo campus and interaction with
(13:49):
those frontal areas and other areas that gives us this
rich experience. The more we learn about the brain, the
more we realize that anything is complicated. As you know,
remembering a piece of music is not handled by any
one brain area. It's going to be a network of
regions playing slightly different roles.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
And in this.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Case, it looks like these medial frontal areas with one
of these hubs where.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Some of these key things come together.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
That's definitely one thing about when you study the brain,
you get more questions and answers half the time. Yeah, people,
I think people are starting finally to drift away of
the how would you call it the polaroid photo type
memory that we have or file folders. It doesn't seem
to be working exactly like that anymore.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
No, I mean, we've known for a long time that
memory is not like that. It's much more of a
reconstruction that's influenced by all kinds of things, including what's
happening in your life at the moment that you try
to remember something that can influence what you remember, and
suggestions can influence what you remember. And yeah, memory is
(14:56):
much more fluid and valuable than a photograph.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
It reminded me of an interview I did a while
back ago. Oh what was his name, doctor Kuntinanidish? Sorry,
my friend, wherever you are listening, he's over in Greece.
I think, oh, he's in London now, I think. Anyway,
he was. We talked about psychology and nostalgia and one
of the things always cracks me up. And I know
(15:21):
that this is kind of a shot in the dark methought.
I throw it at you anyway, But if you ever
break up, you know, when you're young, for some reason,
we start listening to all the sand songs, which kind
of strengthens our depression, I guess you could say, or
lack of happiness. At that time. We started listening to
these songs, and I remember asking him, so, why do
(15:42):
we do that? Why don't we torture ourselves instead of
listening something happy and we go into these I want
to age myself Shinead O'Connor type songs like Oh my God.
Did you see anything like that at all in your research?
Speaker 4 (15:56):
You know?
Speaker 3 (15:56):
I don't work on that myself, but I do know
those people that are very interest than that, like Professor
David Huron at Ohio State, who's very interested in why
we're attracted to sad music. I wish I could pull
up his theory for you.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
I can't. We'll have to have him on your show.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Yeah, he has a theory about that, and I don't
remember what it is, but I remember it was. He
thought it through very carefully because it's a puzzle. It's
a puzzle that's funny.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, how about again to be another one of these
four fetchments and I'll bring you back to normal in
a minute. But how about epic music? I have a
couple of podcasts we talk a lot with military law enforcement,
but even movies like Brave Heart, Gladiator, this kind of
an epic sound anything. Have you ever studied or anybody
(16:45):
even know who's studied that. Why does that motivate us?
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Yeah? Yeah, there is there are people studying that.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
In fact, I have a wonderful colleague at Tufts University,
professor Frank Layman, and he's in the music department. He's
a music theorist, but he has been very interested in
epic music and why you know, He's actually studied a
lot of John Williams scores and he has a book
I think called Hollywood Harmonies about this wow, you know,
(17:11):
what is it about the structure of certain pieces of
music that has that incredibly epic character to it? And
he really analyzes the nuts and bolts of the musical structure,
you know, the way a surgeon would analyze a you know,
a human body, to look at the anatomy of the
music and figure out what what are composers doing to
give us that sense of triumph for that huge expansiveness
(17:33):
that we look for in these kinds of epic soundtracks
that accompany you know, some of the films like Star
Wars and some of these big blockbuster movies that are
trying to create this gigantic universe where epic things happen. So,
you know, and he's come up with some actual music
theoretic findings there that you know, I'm not in a
(17:56):
position to translate right now. But it's for people who
are music theory kind of nerves in your audience. That's
I highly recommend taking a look at Frank Lehman's work,
because he was interested exactly this question.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
It's interesting. Nothing's new under the sun. It's amazing how
much you how much your fingertips doctor? But sounds like, oh, yeah,
I know this guy, I know this guy. Definitely well, yeah,
definitely been well exposed. I guess back to a more
normal type of questions. I guess we've heard a lot
about being able to listen to music to help you study.
(18:34):
I can't remember that. Sometimes people say classical music all
what was that? Oh it's Baccarini. I think it was.
It's supposed to to help with depression. Are any of
those valid?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Well, I'm glad you asked that, because.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Basically, we're learning that music can have a real effect
on people in terms of attention and other cognitive functions.
But it seems like there really is no one size
fits all answer to what music does that for you? You know,
the music that we are exposed to is a product
of our culture and our experience and our personal tastes
(19:13):
and so what works for you may not work for me,
and and in fact, even the act of listening to
music may be helpful for you and may be quite
distracting from me. So, for example, I find it impossible
to work when there's music in the background, as much
as I love music, if I'm trying to write, say,
for example, or do any kind of focused mental work
that can't call it that involves language. So there's you know,
(19:39):
personality issues. Some people need music to help them kind
of focus.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Others are already.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
So hopped up on goofballs that they listen to music,
they'll just kind of go over the top and won't
be able to focus at all. So the game now
really is not kind of is realizing that there's no
single answer questions like this music help study. It definitely
helps some people, And the trick is understanding why do
(20:05):
those people get a benefit out of music and what's
going on in their brains when they get that benefit,
rather than just saying, is you know, composer X universally
good for studying.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
Subjective?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Then yeah, subjective, but it's not there are real effects,
like the fact that it really works for this person
but not for that person. There's a basis for that,
and we can study that as scientists. We can say,
what is it about this person's the way they hear things,
the way they process things that makes them respond to
music in a way that heightens their attention, And once
(20:41):
we understand some of the principles, we can go and
look for other people like that. It's a bit like
personalized medicine. You know, why does this person respond to
this drug and not to that drug. Why does this
person get a tremendous benefit from this therapy and this
person gets no benefit from this therapy? It's you know,
it's not that if you looked at fifty people and
twenty five got a benefit that was really substantial and
twenty five got no benefit. If you just zoomed out
(21:03):
and said, oh, you know, it only works for half
the people, let's throw.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
This away, you're going to be missing something really important.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
There are twenty five people who really got a benefit
from the Therapy's what's different about them, What's different about
their biology, It's different about their brains. Why did they
get that benefit? That's where the future is right. We're
increasingly moving away from one size fits all solutions for medicine,
for psychology for so many things, and taking individual variations
seriously and studying its biological underpinnings.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Like I always say, life is more complicated than people think.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
That's so true.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
People like to make it sound like it's simple, but
it's I wish it was. I really wish it was.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, I talked to as UCI professor a while back.
I can't remember, and she did along while I say
the lines we were just talking about now regards to
how music could affect your personality. I think she did
a study. I'm sure you've heard of her. She just
studies on rap music I think it was, and how
it influenced people. And I had a student a while back,
or go back, you did some research on I think
(22:02):
it was hard rock or something like that, and it's
relationship to aggression, anything on those two topics at all.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Well, I think the persistent question is in that line
of work, is you know, to what extent does listening
to aggressive music make you aggressive versus simply reflect You're
an already aggressive kind of tendency that you have, you
know doesn't exacerbate.
Speaker 4 (22:28):
Is it a reflection of you or is it shaping you?
Speaker 3 (22:31):
And you know this debate goes back and forth, and
again it may be for certain people it's simply reflecting
what they feel, it's not making them any more aggressive.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
But for others, maybe.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
It's actually promoting those thoughts in ways that lead to
those kinds of actions. That is a that's an interesting question,
and it's an old one. I mean, this goes back
to Plato. He really thought that listening to the wrong
kind of music was messing up the kids in his
you know, his day. So it's not a new question, right, So, uh,
(23:07):
I think, you know, we need we look for music
that expresses what we feel, and sometimes that can be
quite boisterous or even violent, I suppose. But if you
deny people that, you know, are they going to bottle
it up and express it in some other way?
Speaker 4 (23:24):
You know? So sure, yeah, oh sorry, that's right.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Usually there's multiple pathways of causation, right.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Well yeah, And and you know, it certainly is something
that parents, you know, over many generations have always thought
about you if you you know, you have a person
who listens to a lot of music that is hateful
towards other people, that is concerned, you know, in terms
(23:55):
of where we are in our world today, and we
should be talking about that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
You know, it's interesting because I know some of your
research have been looking at the evolutionary side of music,
and it kind of goes along now that you mentioned Plato.
I don't know, it's kind of hard to measure this
because you know, you can't go back one hundred years.
I guess it'll be more of a conjecture and your
part to you do you see large changes in music
over the last centuries in the sense of maybe how
(24:24):
they affect us cognitively, or how they do you think
they could affect us cognitively, or how are we even
using music?
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Well, music is certainly the huge change and how we
use music. It's so much more personalized these days. I mean,
when I was in college, you know, if somebody mentioned
their favorite song or their favorite artists, you probably had
heard of them. Now, you know, I have students in
my class to share their most meaningful songs, and very
most of the time the other students have never even
(24:51):
heard of the artists, much less the song. You know,
and then a lot of times spent listening to music
over your private headphones. You're not sharing music in the
same way that people used to have to share it
because you know, you had to hear it out loud
one hundred years ago, right or no headphones.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
Yeah, and you had to hire a.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Live musicians and they're not going to sit around and
play for one person unless you're and even the king
would probably want to hear it with his or her buddies.
So yeah, that's been a huge change, and music just
evolves continuously. It's you know, it's a deeply cultural product,
(25:32):
and what we consider music today one hundred years ago
would have really alarmed a lot of people probably, and
that's probably going to be true one hundred years from now,
you know for us, and I think people will listen
to stuff on hundreds from now that we would think wow,
is that even music, which is exactly what people one
hundred years ago would have probably said about some of
(25:52):
our music today. So it's moving target. But I do
think there are some fundamental biological brain mechanisms that support
music processing that you know, are deeply shared by all
human beings.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Interesting, can you name a couple of those?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah, I mean it's things that are so fundamental that
we rarely even think about them. So let's just take
beat perception, like we don't think it's a big deal that.
You know, when we hear with MKE music, we can
feel a beat and you know, tap along with it
or bob along with it. Doesn't seem to be effortful.
You don't have to teach kids how to do this.
They just kind of come to it. You see it
all over the world. And yet modern research suggests that
(26:33):
this this ability is actually very complex in the brain
in terms of all the different brain areas that have
to get coordinated to make this happen. And we don't
seem to share this sense of beat and rhythm with
many other animals, including our closest living relatives, the great apes,
which surprises people because people thought, wow, there's one aspect
of music we would share with other species in terms
(26:53):
of how we experience it and feel it. It's going
to be rhythm or beat. But they don't seem to
get beat in terms of music rhythm the way we do.
They don't seem to respond to it. They don't seem
to move in time with it, and when we try
to teach them to move in time with it, they
do it very differently. We move to a beat predictably,
We're always predicting when the next beat's going to happen,
and that's.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Why we can move in time with it. So precisely.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
When we tap to a beat, our taps fall right
on the beat, makes it sometimes a little bit ahead,
or you know, sometimes a little behind, but very closely
aligned in time. And that's what allows us to play
in time with others and dance with others. Other primates,
when you try to train them to tap to a beat,
they can do it, but they always their natural tendency
is to tap a few hundred milliseconds after the beat,
like they're reacting or listening and reacting, not predicting, which
(27:38):
is so fundamentally different from what we do. And that's
what allows us to move in time together and dance together,
which some people think has been an ancient and important
part of human behavior for a long time.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I've never even thought about that.
I guess my last couple of questions here before we
wrap up again, folks, we're talking to doctor Annie Patel,
pat El, professor at Tuff's University. This book was called
Music Language on the Brain. Doctor Patel, I guess my
last question would be any studies that really actually make
(28:11):
a comments. He reminded me of that. He reminded me
of Queen and we Will rock you. We talked about beats.
Oh yeah, that's by one of the more popular beats
I think of. I've heard almost every generation seems to
remember that one.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Yeah, that's the great one.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
But back to that, because anything that stood out to
you in the last few years in your research that
you said, wow, I never saw that coming.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Well, let me talk a little bit about some of
the recent research I've been learning about. There was just
a conference called the Neurosciences and Music. It was held
in Denmark but also online for kind of the community
that studies music in the brain. This is a conference
that happens every three years the research community that focuses
on music in the brain. And I was hearing about
(28:54):
some really neat recent research on the power of music
and singing to help people recover language function after stroke. So,
strokes can often leave people a phasic. That's a problem
with language after stroke, and it can be quite devastating
if it leaves them with what's called non fluent aphasia,
where you just can't seem to get the words together
(29:16):
in sentences to communicate with other people and it's not
a lack of intelligence, and it's not a problem with
your mouth or your basic motor control. It's really cognitive
problems getting words together and out, and it's quite serious.
There's a colleague in Finland, his name is Tepo Sarkamo,
(29:36):
who's been leading a neat research program using singing to
help people with this disorder, because it's based on an
old observation that sometimes people with aphasia with this condition
can still sing fluently even though they can't speak more
than a couple of words coherently. Typically it's older songs
they can sing fluently. So he got kind of started
(30:00):
these a phasic choirs where he got five to ten
phasics and their family members to come together and sing
both old songs but also learn a couple of new songs,
and then they were they've worked their way up to
a performance over the course of several weeks, so there
was an end goal and this apparent. This study was
wonderful because it had multiple beneficial effects. He did all
(30:22):
kinds of measurements before and after the therapy of both
of the phasics and the family members. He found that
the verbal fluency of a phasics improved in this as
a result of this therapy in terms of being able
to produce words, not just songs. He found that family
members reported an ease in the amount of burden of
care because of the emotional benefits that this provided to
(30:44):
the aphasic patients. As well, he saw structural changes in
the brains of these aphasic patients that seemed to correlate
with their enhanced language recovery. And so I just thought
this was a super neat study showing how music can
help bring back language after brain damage, and what an
(31:05):
important role the social police plays in this, because this
is not kind of where you're alone with a therapist
by yourself.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
You're with others.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
You're doing a social activity that's aimed at making something
beautiful and presenting it to other people. It's deeply embedded
in what we think of as normal social behavior for humans.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
And I think that's part of why it works as fast.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
That's great, that's inspiring, and comprise a lot of hope
for individuals too.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, so I think we're going to be seeing more
of that in the future, and research based interventions using
music to help people recover from language problems or to
help them with memory problems. But to kind of get there,
we definitely need a lot of basic research on.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Why it works, how it works, who it works for, who.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
It doesn't work for, how to optimize those therapies to
benefit the people that can and will benefit from those therapies.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Fascinating stuff. Fascinating well, doctor Patel, thank you so much
for taking the time to join us today.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
That's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
A lot of fun questions, a lot of great research
being done by you and your group out there, which
truly appreciate it. You're helping society out quite a bit.
I think people don't realize that that a lot of
times researchers are the behind the scenes heroes in a way, right,
You're helping a lot of people, and since it's sometimes
small population groups that we don't always pay attention to
in the news, it goes by the wayside, so definitely
(32:30):
like to highlight that fact. Doctor Annie Pattel from Tufts University. Again, everyone,
thank you for listening. Make sure to share, subscribe, and
hit that like button.
Welcome to Understanding the Brain. This podcast is designed to
introduce individuals with or without a background in science to
the modern field of neuroscience, drawing on everyday experience and
popular books as well as current research to enlighten the listener.
Let's get started.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome back everyone. Well, today we have a great guest,
Doctor Annie Patel pa Tel is a professor of psychology
at Tufts University. He received his PhD from Harvard University.
He then joined the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California,
where here's a senior fellow from two thousand and five
to twenty twelve. So what are we going to be
talking to doctor p Tel about. Well, he focuses on
(00:47):
music cognition, the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and
responding to music. Areas of emphasis include music language relations,
the topic of his two thousand and eight book, which
I highly recommend, called Music Language and the Brain, Rhythmic process,
and cross speech. She studies of music cognition a whole
lot more. You know, we've been talking a lot about
(01:07):
the brain this year, and we continue, so I'm really
looking forward to this conversation. Before we get started, my
show share subscribe. Hey, if you're an Apple, give us
five stars. That's not waste any more time and welcome
to the show. Doctor Bateell Walkome, Professor, Hi, thank you,
thank you for having me, Thank you for being here.
Fascinating topic. I've looked at music. We know music plays
(01:27):
a huge role in our lives. What got you motivated
to studying music and cognition?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I was a biologist as an undergraduate of studying biology,
and I loved it, and I kind of knew I
wanted to.
Speaker 4 (01:42):
Study biology in some way, and I got sort of.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Interested in behavior and how our brains support the various
behaviors that we have. And one day, kind of walking
around campus as an undergrad, I thought, God, what is
the most What's the behavior I want to study the most?
What do I want to understand from a biology perspective?
And I love music, but I had never studied it.
(02:07):
Wasn't a music major or anything, but I had such
a strong personal relationship to it that I thought, Wow,
what's that about. Why does this affect me so deeply
and so many people so deeply? Could we ever understand
this from a biological perspective? And that kind of set
me down the path of studying music in the brain.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Fascinating stuffic, but see, it's a lot of fun. It's
an interesting topic and I no doubt about that. So
I guess, for gravity's sake, what are some of the
things you've been looking at regards to using and cognition.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Well, one of my big areas has kind of been
looking at how is the processing of music related to
the processing of language. I'm talking about ordinary spoken language
when I say language, and you know, music I'm talking
about could be instrumental music, could be singing. And these
things are, you know, obviously very different. No one would
ever confuse speech and song, or speech with playing a
(03:02):
musical instrument, but they're both kind of forms of communication.
And there was a long line of theorizing that they
were just fundamentally different beasts inside the brain, that they
kind of were processed by totally different brain regions, they
didn't really have much to do with each other in
kind of light of modern neurology, and I began to
(03:25):
wonder if that was really true, and so my graduate
work kind of started me down the path of actually
doing experiments to see to what extent does our brain
use some of the same principles and mechanisms when we
process music and language, even purely instrumental music, compared to
ordinary spoken language, and found some surprising overlap in that,
(03:48):
and that ended up having implications for various real world
things like whether or not you can use music training
to help people with language problems like dyslexia or other
kinds of problems after stroke, for example. So it was
kind of like finding the hidden connections between the way
the brain does things that at the surface look very
very different.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
I can imagine. So, and did you notice what areas
of bringing I guess, let's say, get activated the most
when you're listening to music, or does it vary depending
on the type of music of the genre.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Great question.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
People used to think that, you know, music was largely
a right brain phenomenon and like language was largely a
left brain phenomenon. And one of the first things we
learned when we started looking at human brains through brain
imagy was how oversimplified that view was. It turns out
music and language both used widespread networks on both sides
of the brain. There are some regions that seem specialized for.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
One or the other.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
In the in the auditory regions of our brain, for example,
But there are also regions where those sound processing things overlap,
and so we use widespread networks front including things that
happen towards the front of our brain, things that happened
toward the more to the back, the cerebellum, and the
basal gang of these deep brain structures, as well as
(05:07):
motor planning regions. One of the cool findings of recent
years is that when we experience music with a beat
that makes us want to move even if we don't move,
even if we're perfectly sitting perfectly still with no intention
of moving, we see strong activity in the motor regions
of our brain brain that normally handle movement, as if
somehow just feeling a beat internally is a kind of
(05:29):
inner movement that it's not activating these motor systems. We
think probably that's involved in predicting the timing of beats,
which is part of what beat perception is.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
Oh, is that that part of my brain compromise. I
can't dance worth a lick. It's interesting. I guess it
makes me think about Parkinson's. Have we seen anything regards
to that.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah, I'm super glad you mentioned that that is actually
one of the areas where this kind of work meets
the real world. So it turns out that for some
Parkinson's patients ufer from difficulties with walking and initiating movement
and walking fluidly, that music with a beat can really
help them. And you know, this has been known for
a while clinically. Some colleagues of mine have helped turn
(06:14):
this into a therapy for Parkinson's patients called rhythmic auditory stimulation,
and it can help some of these patients quite a bit.
And you can see videos of this on YouTube. In fact,
there are people posting videos of themselves just in their
living rooms and you can see they have Parkinson's. They're
walking a very shuffy their gaita is kind of shuffy,
unstable gait. And then they put on the music and
(06:35):
you see how they just become so much more fluid
and they start to move to the beat. And so
this beat, you know, which seems like this is something
with music, right not with not has nothing to do
with disease. Actually, it seems to affect and enhance movement
in people with very serious motor disorders. It doesn't work
for everybody, but for some people it really helps and
(06:58):
therapies based on this can actually help bring back some movement.
Obviously doesn't cure Parkinson's, but it can help and give
people Parkinson's patients a way to feel holy again.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
That's awesome, that's really cool. I think I've seen some
of those videos of some of those places where they're
doing therapy and they've included the music component of it.
And I when to bring back in a minute, head
over to dementia in a second as well, because I
know I've seen sometimes there's areas using music. But before
we get to that, I'm going to bring you back
for a second, back to Parkinson's and the areas of
(07:31):
the brain that will highlight with music. Are we seeing
We know Parkinson's one of the things is actually low dopamine.
Do we see any kind of neurotransmitter change because of music?
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yes, it's actually my colleague get in Montreal, Professor Robert
Zatore and his colleagues have been doing a lot of
work on music and dopamine and the role of dopamine
in our experience of musical pleasure. And we now know
that music strongly activates dopamine system when we enjoy music,
and that's the reward side of dopamine. There's also a
(08:05):
motor side of dopamine where dopamine plays a role in
initiating movements, and that happens to a somewhat different brain
pathway than the reward pathway. And with the Parkinson's patients
are telling us is that there's probably an impact of
music on this other dopamine pathway. And what's cool about
music is people like music, and so it puts together
movement and pleasure, and that's part of what motivates, I think,
(08:27):
for us to move to music and gives us that
sense of reward of popping along to the beat, even
if you know we're not getting that reward from anybody else,
like just sitting in our car or in our living room.
Speaker 4 (08:41):
I know.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's always amazing because if you look at you step
back and you look at it functionally. I guess when
you see a concert and you're thinking, what are you
getting out of this? You're just jumping up and down?
What it does? It really kicks that dopamine in and
there's so much pleasure going on. It even seems like
I don't know, I'm gonna take a wild guess, but
it even seems like if you're around people, even maybe
oxen toasin goes up.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah, I mean there's interesting theories about that too, and endorphins.
And this social piece is really interesting. You said, you know,
when we're at concerts, and there is something about experiencing
music socially that people seem to really enjoy, and especially
when it comes to dance, people really.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
Like to do that with other people.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
A lot of people are perfectly happily listening to music
on their own on their personal devices, but when they
feel like dancing, most people kind of want to do
that with other people.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
They're not just putting on.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Music and dancing by themselves typically so, and this is
actually one of the neat things about the dance, the
effect of music on Parkinson's. There's actually a group in
New York, the Mark Morris Dance Group. It started a
dance for Parkinson's group, and it's hugely successful because not
only does it give them the benefits of rhythm on movement,
it gives them socialization, a chance to work towards something
(09:51):
in this case of performance. And there's a wonderful film
called I Think It's Capturing Grace about the dance for
Parkinson's Pride started in Mark Morris Company and now spread
around the country. And if you know somebody with Parkinson's,
this is a wonderful thing because they take people that
aren't dancers, and people in this film were not professional dancers.
(10:11):
They were just ordinary people. But by going through this
program of learning to dance with other parkinson patients, they
overcome one of the biggest challenges of partners Parkinson's, which
is the isolation social isolation that comes with that disease.
So it's kind of both social, emotional and movement in
terms of benefits.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Professor of psych we both know how important social engagement is.
Oh yeah, I'm gonna switch, I guess to a different
part of the brain.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Now.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
I can't remember where I saw. I'd have to forgive
me for that, but I know there was somebody I
was reading where they were doing using music, especially a
nostalgic type of music with people with dementia and other
memory issues are Nearcago disorders, and it seemed to help
them in some capacity, maybe just from my remembering. Obviously,
the dopamine hit again there. What have you seen anything
(11:02):
regards to music and memory area.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Of that nature. Oh yeah, that's a fascinating topic.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
I mean, it's certainly we all know intuitively that music
has this profound power over our memory systems. We can
hear a song that we loved in college and haven't
heard it for twenty years, and it comes on the
radio and we're singing right along, transported back to that
time of life and the things that were happening, and
who we were with and what we were feeling.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
What we were doing.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
You know, long before there was writing the stories, the
great stories of the world, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the
Bedas in India, the epics, the ballads, they were all
sun you know, that's how people remember them. So music
has this profound and ancient relationship to human memory. And
what's kind of cool about modern research on this is
(11:51):
the persistence of musical memory and light of some serious
brain disorders like dementia. And you know, there's that film
that was very I think you interviewed the director or
producer of the film Alive Inside about patients with Alzheimer's
dementia that hear music and sort of reawakens memories.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
And what's also interesting about this is musical.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Memory and autobiographical memory can be very tightly related in
the brain.
Speaker 4 (12:19):
Right.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
The music you love in your youth is often tied
to specific memories of what was going on at that
time in your life, and so listening to that music,
not only you don't just remember the music, you kind
of reactivate some of the memories of that part of
your life. And that's what's so interesting for these patients
is can we use music to help them reactivate some
(12:41):
of their memories when they can't seem to remember their
families or other things that they spent their lives around.
What does music give us access to help kind of
reawaken some of those memories.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
That's fascinating stuff. And I guess one of the questions
that popped out out of that where is it in
the brain? Do we know where there where the memories
holding these memories of music? Is it in the hippocampus
somewhere else? Because silent?
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Yeah, that's so sailing. So I have a colleague at
UC Davis, professor Peter Janata, and he has done some
great work on this on the relationship between music and
memory and autobiographical memory, and he's even done brain imaging.
The hip campus is very important for laying down memories,
but it's probably not where these memories are stored themselves.
(13:27):
It interacts with many parts of the brain to help
those parts of the brain lay down those memories. He
found that there are regions in the frontal middle frontal
parts of the brain seem particularly important for recalling music
that you remember and associating it with autobiographical memories. So
it's you know, probably the hippo campus and interaction with
(13:49):
those frontal areas and other areas that gives us this
rich experience. The more we learn about the brain, the
more we realize that anything is complicated. As you know,
remembering a piece of music is not handled by any
one brain area. It's going to be a network of
regions playing slightly different roles.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
And in this.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Case, it looks like these medial frontal areas with one
of these hubs where.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Some of these key things come together.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
That's definitely one thing about when you study the brain,
you get more questions and answers half the time. Yeah, people,
I think people are starting finally to drift away of
the how would you call it the polaroid photo type
memory that we have or file folders. It doesn't seem
to be working exactly like that anymore.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
No, I mean, we've known for a long time that
memory is not like that. It's much more of a
reconstruction that's influenced by all kinds of things, including what's
happening in your life at the moment that you try
to remember something that can influence what you remember, and
suggestions can influence what you remember. And yeah, memory is
(14:56):
much more fluid and valuable than a photograph.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
It reminded me of an interview I did a while
back ago. Oh what was his name, doctor Kuntinanidish? Sorry,
my friend, wherever you are listening, he's over in Greece.
I think, oh, he's in London now, I think. Anyway,
he was. We talked about psychology and nostalgia and one
of the things always cracks me up. And I know
(15:21):
that this is kind of a shot in the dark methought.
I throw it at you anyway, But if you ever
break up, you know, when you're young, for some reason,
we start listening to all the sand songs, which kind
of strengthens our depression, I guess you could say, or
lack of happiness. At that time. We started listening to
these songs, and I remember asking him, so, why do
(15:42):
we do that? Why don't we torture ourselves instead of
listening something happy and we go into these I want
to age myself Shinead O'Connor type songs like Oh my God.
Did you see anything like that at all in your research?
Speaker 4 (15:56):
You know?
Speaker 3 (15:56):
I don't work on that myself, but I do know
those people that are very interest than that, like Professor
David Huron at Ohio State, who's very interested in why
we're attracted to sad music. I wish I could pull
up his theory for you.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
I can't. We'll have to have him on your show.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
Yeah, he has a theory about that, and I don't
remember what it is, but I remember it was. He
thought it through very carefully because it's a puzzle. It's
a puzzle that's funny.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, how about again to be another one of these
four fetchments and I'll bring you back to normal in
a minute. But how about epic music? I have a
couple of podcasts we talk a lot with military law enforcement,
but even movies like Brave Heart, Gladiator, this kind of
an epic sound anything. Have you ever studied or anybody
(16:45):
even know who's studied that. Why does that motivate us?
Speaker 4 (16:49):
Yeah? Yeah, there is there are people studying that.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
In fact, I have a wonderful colleague at Tufts University,
professor Frank Layman, and he's in the music department. He's
a music theorist, but he has been very interested in
epic music and why you know, He's actually studied a
lot of John Williams scores and he has a book
I think called Hollywood Harmonies about this wow, you know,
(17:11):
what is it about the structure of certain pieces of
music that has that incredibly epic character to it? And
he really analyzes the nuts and bolts of the musical structure,
you know, the way a surgeon would analyze a you know,
a human body, to look at the anatomy of the
music and figure out what what are composers doing to
give us that sense of triumph for that huge expansiveness
(17:33):
that we look for in these kinds of epic soundtracks
that accompany you know, some of the films like Star
Wars and some of these big blockbuster movies that are
trying to create this gigantic universe where epic things happen. So,
you know, and he's come up with some actual music
theoretic findings there that you know, I'm not in a
(17:56):
position to translate right now. But it's for people who
are music theory kind of nerves in your audience. That's
I highly recommend taking a look at Frank Lehman's work,
because he was interested exactly this question.
Speaker 2 (18:09):
It's interesting. Nothing's new under the sun. It's amazing how
much you how much your fingertips doctor? But sounds like, oh, yeah,
I know this guy, I know this guy. Definitely well, yeah,
definitely been well exposed. I guess back to a more
normal type of questions. I guess we've heard a lot
about being able to listen to music to help you study.
(18:34):
I can't remember that. Sometimes people say classical music all
what was that? Oh it's Baccarini. I think it was.
It's supposed to to help with depression. Are any of
those valid?
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Well, I'm glad you asked that, because.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Basically, we're learning that music can have a real effect
on people in terms of attention and other cognitive functions.
But it seems like there really is no one size
fits all answer to what music does that for you? You know,
the music that we are exposed to is a product
of our culture and our experience and our personal tastes
(19:13):
and so what works for you may not work for me,
and and in fact, even the act of listening to
music may be helpful for you and may be quite
distracting from me. So, for example, I find it impossible
to work when there's music in the background, as much
as I love music, if I'm trying to write, say,
for example, or do any kind of focused mental work
that can't call it that involves language. So there's you know,
(19:39):
personality issues. Some people need music to help them kind
of focus.
Speaker 4 (19:43):
Others are already.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
So hopped up on goofballs that they listen to music,
they'll just kind of go over the top and won't
be able to focus at all. So the game now
really is not kind of is realizing that there's no
single answer questions like this music help study. It definitely
helps some people, And the trick is understanding why do
(20:05):
those people get a benefit out of music and what's
going on in their brains when they get that benefit,
rather than just saying, is you know, composer X universally
good for studying.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
Subjective?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Then yeah, subjective, but it's not there are real effects,
like the fact that it really works for this person
but not for that person. There's a basis for that,
and we can study that as scientists. We can say,
what is it about this person's the way they hear things,
the way they process things that makes them respond to
music in a way that heightens their attention, And once
(20:41):
we understand some of the principles, we can go and
look for other people like that. It's a bit like
personalized medicine. You know, why does this person respond to
this drug and not to that drug. Why does this
person get a tremendous benefit from this therapy and this
person gets no benefit from this therapy? It's you know,
it's not that if you looked at fifty people and
twenty five got a benefit that was really substantial and
twenty five got no benefit. If you just zoomed out
(21:03):
and said, oh, you know, it only works for half
the people, let's throw.
Speaker 4 (21:06):
This away, you're going to be missing something really important.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
There are twenty five people who really got a benefit
from the Therapy's what's different about them, What's different about
their biology, It's different about their brains. Why did they
get that benefit? That's where the future is right. We're
increasingly moving away from one size fits all solutions for medicine,
for psychology for so many things, and taking individual variations
seriously and studying its biological underpinnings.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Like I always say, life is more complicated than people think.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
That's so true.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
People like to make it sound like it's simple, but
it's I wish it was. I really wish it was.
Speaker 4 (21:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Yeah, I talked to as UCI professor a while back.
I can't remember, and she did along while I say
the lines we were just talking about now regards to
how music could affect your personality. I think she did
a study. I'm sure you've heard of her. She just
studies on rap music I think it was, and how
it influenced people. And I had a student a while back,
or go back, you did some research on I think
(22:02):
it was hard rock or something like that, and it's
relationship to aggression, anything on those two topics at all.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Well, I think the persistent question is in that line
of work, is you know, to what extent does listening
to aggressive music make you aggressive versus simply reflect You're
an already aggressive kind of tendency that you have, you
know doesn't exacerbate.
Speaker 4 (22:28):
Is it a reflection of you or is it shaping you?
Speaker 3 (22:31):
And you know this debate goes back and forth, and
again it may be for certain people it's simply reflecting
what they feel, it's not making them any more aggressive.
Speaker 4 (22:43):
But for others, maybe.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
It's actually promoting those thoughts in ways that lead to
those kinds of actions. That is a that's an interesting question,
and it's an old one. I mean, this goes back
to Plato. He really thought that listening to the wrong
kind of music was messing up the kids in his
you know, his day. So it's not a new question, right, So, uh,
(23:07):
I think, you know, we need we look for music
that expresses what we feel, and sometimes that can be
quite boisterous or even violent, I suppose. But if you
deny people that, you know, are they going to bottle
it up and express it in some other way?
Speaker 4 (23:24):
You know? So sure, yeah, oh sorry, that's right.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Usually there's multiple pathways of causation, right.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Well yeah, And and you know, it certainly is something
that parents, you know, over many generations have always thought
about you if you you know, you have a person
who listens to a lot of music that is hateful
towards other people, that is concerned, you know, in terms
(23:55):
of where we are in our world today, and we
should be talking about that.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
You know, it's interesting because I know some of your
research have been looking at the evolutionary side of music,
and it kind of goes along now that you mentioned Plato.
I don't know, it's kind of hard to measure this
because you know, you can't go back one hundred years.
I guess it'll be more of a conjecture and your
part to you do you see large changes in music
over the last centuries in the sense of maybe how
(24:24):
they affect us cognitively, or how they do you think
they could affect us cognitively, or how are we even
using music?
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Well, music is certainly the huge change and how we
use music. It's so much more personalized these days. I mean,
when I was in college, you know, if somebody mentioned
their favorite song or their favorite artists, you probably had
heard of them. Now, you know, I have students in
my class to share their most meaningful songs, and very
most of the time the other students have never even
(24:51):
heard of the artists, much less the song. You know,
and then a lot of times spent listening to music
over your private headphones. You're not sharing music in the
same way that people used to have to share it
because you know, you had to hear it out loud
one hundred years ago, right or no headphones.
Speaker 4 (25:08):
Yeah, and you had to hire a.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Live musicians and they're not going to sit around and
play for one person unless you're and even the king
would probably want to hear it with his or her buddies.
So yeah, that's been a huge change, and music just
evolves continuously. It's you know, it's a deeply cultural product,
(25:32):
and what we consider music today one hundred years ago
would have really alarmed a lot of people probably, and
that's probably going to be true one hundred years from now,
you know for us, and I think people will listen
to stuff on hundreds from now that we would think wow,
is that even music, which is exactly what people one
hundred years ago would have probably said about some of
(25:52):
our music today. So it's moving target. But I do
think there are some fundamental biological brain mechanisms that support
music processing that you know, are deeply shared by all
human beings.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Interesting, can you name a couple of those?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah, I mean it's things that are so fundamental that
we rarely even think about them. So let's just take
beat perception, like we don't think it's a big deal that.
You know, when we hear with MKE music, we can
feel a beat and you know, tap along with it
or bob along with it. Doesn't seem to be effortful.
You don't have to teach kids how to do this.
They just kind of come to it. You see it
all over the world. And yet modern research suggests that
(26:33):
this this ability is actually very complex in the brain
in terms of all the different brain areas that have
to get coordinated to make this happen. And we don't
seem to share this sense of beat and rhythm with
many other animals, including our closest living relatives, the great apes,
which surprises people because people thought, wow, there's one aspect
of music we would share with other species in terms
(26:53):
of how we experience it and feel it. It's going
to be rhythm or beat. But they don't seem to
get beat in terms of music rhythm the way we do.
They don't seem to respond to it. They don't seem
to move in time with it, and when we try
to teach them to move in time with it, they
do it very differently. We move to a beat predictably,
We're always predicting when the next beat's going to happen,
and that's.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
Why we can move in time with it. So precisely.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
When we tap to a beat, our taps fall right
on the beat, makes it sometimes a little bit ahead,
or you know, sometimes a little behind, but very closely
aligned in time. And that's what allows us to play
in time with others and dance with others. Other primates,
when you try to train them to tap to a beat,
they can do it, but they always their natural tendency
is to tap a few hundred milliseconds after the beat,
like they're reacting or listening and reacting, not predicting, which
(27:38):
is so fundamentally different from what we do. And that's
what allows us to move in time together and dance together,
which some people think has been an ancient and important
part of human behavior for a long time.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I've never even thought about that.
I guess my last couple of questions here before we
wrap up again, folks, we're talking to doctor Annie Patel,
pat El, professor at Tuff's University. This book was called
Music Language on the Brain. Doctor Patel, I guess my
last question would be any studies that really actually make
(28:11):
a comments. He reminded me of that. He reminded me
of Queen and we Will rock you. We talked about beats.
Oh yeah, that's by one of the more popular beats
I think of. I've heard almost every generation seems to
remember that one.
Speaker 4 (28:24):
Yeah, that's the great one.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
But back to that, because anything that stood out to
you in the last few years in your research that
you said, wow, I never saw that coming.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Well, let me talk a little bit about some of
the recent research I've been learning about. There was just
a conference called the Neurosciences and Music. It was held
in Denmark but also online for kind of the community
that studies music in the brain. This is a conference
that happens every three years the research community that focuses
on music in the brain. And I was hearing about
(28:54):
some really neat recent research on the power of music
and singing to help people recover language function after stroke. So,
strokes can often leave people a phasic. That's a problem
with language after stroke, and it can be quite devastating
if it leaves them with what's called non fluent aphasia,
where you just can't seem to get the words together
(29:16):
in sentences to communicate with other people and it's not
a lack of intelligence, and it's not a problem with
your mouth or your basic motor control. It's really cognitive
problems getting words together and out, and it's quite serious.
There's a colleague in Finland, his name is Tepo Sarkamo,
(29:36):
who's been leading a neat research program using singing to
help people with this disorder, because it's based on an
old observation that sometimes people with aphasia with this condition
can still sing fluently even though they can't speak more
than a couple of words coherently. Typically it's older songs
they can sing fluently. So he got kind of started
(30:00):
these a phasic choirs where he got five to ten
phasics and their family members to come together and sing
both old songs but also learn a couple of new songs,
and then they were they've worked their way up to
a performance over the course of several weeks, so there
was an end goal and this apparent. This study was
wonderful because it had multiple beneficial effects. He did all
(30:22):
kinds of measurements before and after the therapy of both
of the phasics and the family members. He found that
the verbal fluency of a phasics improved in this as
a result of this therapy in terms of being able
to produce words, not just songs. He found that family
members reported an ease in the amount of burden of
care because of the emotional benefits that this provided to
(30:44):
the aphasic patients. As well, he saw structural changes in
the brains of these aphasic patients that seemed to correlate
with their enhanced language recovery. And so I just thought
this was a super neat study showing how music can
help bring back language after brain damage, and what an
(31:05):
important role the social police plays in this, because this
is not kind of where you're alone with a therapist
by yourself.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
You're with others.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
You're doing a social activity that's aimed at making something
beautiful and presenting it to other people. It's deeply embedded
in what we think of as normal social behavior for humans.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
And I think that's part of why it works as fast.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
That's great, that's inspiring, and comprise a lot of hope
for individuals too.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, so I think we're going to be seeing more
of that in the future, and research based interventions using
music to help people recover from language problems or to
help them with memory problems. But to kind of get there,
we definitely need a lot of basic research on.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Why it works, how it works, who it works for, who.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
It doesn't work for, how to optimize those therapies to
benefit the people that can and will benefit from those therapies.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Fascinating stuff. Fascinating well, doctor Patel, thank you so much
for taking the time to join us today.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
That's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
A lot of fun questions, a lot of great research
being done by you and your group out there, which
truly appreciate it. You're helping society out quite a bit.
I think people don't realize that that a lot of
times researchers are the behind the scenes heroes in a way, right,
You're helping a lot of people, and since it's sometimes
small population groups that we don't always pay attention to
in the news, it goes by the wayside, so definitely
(32:30):
like to highlight that fact. Doctor Annie Pattel from Tufts University. Again, everyone,
thank you for listening. Make sure to share, subscribe, and
hit that like button.
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