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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll, and today we have a fun interdisciplinary episode looking at the area where music meets neuroscience. We’ve had a little bit of music, we had Wynton Marsalis, after all. Quite a bit of neuroscience, but we’ve never looked at this particular issue teaming them up, how we learn about music and how music helps us learn, how it changes us as people. Today’s guest, Indre Viskontas, is a PhD neuroscientist and she still does neuroscientific research, but her main focus has become music. She is an opera singer, someone who gets up there and belts out the arias on stage, but also someone who creates new musical projects. She’s the Creative Director of the Pasadena Opera, for example. So it’s very natural that she would address this question of how musical influence changes what’s going on in our brain, and also how what’s going on in our brain creates different kinds of music, how it inspires us to do different things. Her most recent book is called How Music Can Make You Better. The idea being that in various ways, not only do we learn music, but music helps us learn other things, helps us train our minds, helps us be sociable and can even have therapeutic uses.

0:01:11 SC: So it’s been a lot of fun to learn about this while reading the book and talking with Indre on the podcast, because neuroscience, you know, it’s one of those things where we learn a lot. There’s been enormous progress in recent years and months. There’s constantly new neuroscientific discoveries coming down the pike, but there’s so much that we don’t know. It’s so easy to ask a question in neuroscience to which we don’t know the answer. So we’ll do both of that, we’ll hear some of the fun new results that have been coming out, but also point at a lot of areas where we don’t exactly know what music and the brain are doing with each other, one way or the other.

0:01:55 SC: I should also mention that Indre has her own podcasts, two of them in fact. One is called Inquiring Minds, which I’ve appeared on. The other is a new one called Cadence, which is specifically about music and the mind. Here at the Mindscape podcast, we have the news that we’ll be joining the Wondery podcast network. They’re the folks who will be giving us the ads to eventually play here on the podcast episodes. So if you want to tell Wondery a bit about the demographics of Mindscape listeners, you’re welcome to go to Wondery.com/survey, look for the little button that says Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, and tell them a little bit about yourself. That will help them decide what kinds of ads we should have. That’s Wondery.com/survey. And with that, this is going to be a very fun episode. So let’s go.

[music]

0:02:46 SC: Indre Viskontas, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:48 Indre Viskontas: Thanks so much for having me.

0:02:50 SC: So, I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but you have a more unusual than most job description, splitting your time between being a neuroscientist and being an opera singer and generally sort of a musical person, as well as having a whole separate outreach component. In fact, let’s… Let me be a good podcast host and let you plug your own podcast that you have.

0:03:11 IV: Sure, I actually have two now. The one that is weekly is called Inquiring Minds and that’s a sort of broad view of science and society we say, where science and society collide. And then I launched a couple of years ago, a podcast called Cadence, what music tells us about the mind, which has had two seasons come out, it’s much more produced. The seasons are 8 to 10 episodes. And it was actually the inspiration for a book that I think hopefully we will talk about today.

[laughter]

0:03:38 SC: We might talk about the book, yeah.

0:03:40 IV: And so, I’m working on the third season now, which is going to be about how music influences us, which I’m really excited about.

0:03:45 SC: Wow.

0:03:46 IV: So hopefully… We were about halfway through having recorded the interviews, so hopefully that’ll come out in a few weeks.

0:03:53 SC: Okay, that’s fantastic. But neuroscience… You had a PhD in neuroscience, you’re still practicing research in neuroscience, right?

0:04:00 IV: Mm-hmm. A little bit, a little bit.

0:04:00 SC: Yeah.

0:04:01 IV: Yeah. The kinda research I do now is much more kind of applied research that I find interesting that I think might help me become a better performer, or me become a better teacher, or somehow that I could do that nobody else can do rather than having a big lab where I’m running subjects all the time.

0:04:16 SC: No, that’s a… You can quickly become an administrator and it’s a full-time job, right?

0:04:20 IV: Yeah, exactly, so I don’t do that. But I’ll tell you about one study that I’m kind of excited about. So, I’ve recently gotten interested in how technology can change our minds and can help us become more efficient, if not less efficient as in the case of most [chuckle] technology, it seems makes us less efficient as we try to multitask. And so, I was really skeptical of this idea that you could stimulate your brain into becoming a better pianist, right?

[chuckle]

0:04:45 SC: Ah, yes.

0:04:46 IV: I don’t know if you’ve seen some of these ads, but there’s a company called Halo Neuroscience that made this headset that’s commercially available and it’s transcranial direct stimulation and it’s supposed to essentially stimulate the motor cortex, put it into what they call a hyperplastic mode, which means, it’s kind of more open to change, and then you practice your instrument or you work on some kind of athletic skill, and that’s supposed to increase the efficacy with which you can train. And so, we’re examining that, we’re trying to see whether that’s true for our students at the Conservatory of Music. So highly motivated, professional grade musicians. And so, that’s the kind of research I do now, like is this really something that might actually work? And if it does work, are there protocols that we should think about that would make it most effective?

0:05:34 SC: So the music and the neuroscience view are not two separate things. You’re doing a thing and part of that thing is neuroscience and part is music. Is that fair?

0:05:41 IV: Yes, totally fair. I mean, I’m really interested in how the brain changes overall. Even my PhD was about neuroplasticity, and to me, music is a kind of a really great model of neuroplasticity, because we can easily measure changes that happen with training. Even single exposures to music can leave their signatures in the brain, just like virtually any other experience that is immersive in some way. So that’s interesting to me as a model, but more so, music to me is a really powerful way of looking at what it means to be human, because it’s so bizarre, like why is it that we… [laughter] We can fall in love over music, we can incite hate over music. I mean, people get killed because they play the wrong rap song, or performed the wrong rap song. And so, why? It’s so stupid, ultimately, right?

[laughter]

0:06:31 SC: Yeah.

0:06:31 IV: It’s just… These are just rarefactions and compressions of air. Steven Pinker will argue it’s totally meaningless, language is much more important. And yet, it’s pretty hard to kill somebody with words, [chuckle] not that it’s easy to kill somebody with music, but it does seem to really powerfully incite people to behave in ways that they might not otherwise.

0:06:51 SC: There’s something visceral about it, yeah, there’s some connection. And so, I do want to get into where that comes from, but first, it’s not just that you like music and study it, you do it, so let’s fill in the audience what it means when I say that you do music.

0:07:03 IV: Sure. So, forever since I can remember, I was a singer. When I was a kid, I grew up in choirs and then I started doing opera and even during my graduate work as a PhD student in neuroscience, I maintained my love of music and I would scurry away every week for lessons and coachings and then in the summers I’d go off to Europe and perform a role somewhere in some small company or training program. And so, it was always a part of me. And then once I graduated from my PhD, I just realized that I really needed to give it a shot, whatever that means.

0:07:33 SC: Right.

0:07:33 IV: So I went and got a Master’s in Music, and now I perform. I would say that my performing life maybe makes up a quarter or maybe 10% of my actual income generating or kind of project-based work, but it’s a really important part of it. And so now I kind of do at least one or two big musical performance projects a year.

0:07:56 SC: And that includes not just singing, but you’re a musical director or something like that?

0:08:00 IV: Yeah, so I’m the creative director of a little company that I founded with a friend of mine, Dana Sadava, she’s the artistic director, called Pasadena Opera. And we picked Pasadena, your backyard.

0:08:09 SC: Yeah.

0:08:11 IV: For two reasons, one, there’s a big intellectual community there, and generally people who are well-educated tend to be more likely to have been exposed to opera and therefore like it. And also, there’s a lot of history of arts focus in Pasadena, and there’s a kind of openness in the community towards cultural change.

0:08:31 SC: Right.

0:08:32 IV: And so, we were really interested in starting a company there that would really be about putting on opera that’s accessible, that’s interesting, that’s relevant and that speaks to whatever is going on in the community.

0:08:42 SC: So how many operas have you put on?

0:08:44 IV: We’ve put on four and we’re in the midst of putting on… Our fifth is actually our first commission.

0:08:51 SC: Okay.

0:08:51 IV: So, we’re really committed to supporting living composers. So we commissioned a New York-based composer named Daniel Felsenfeld to write an opera based on a novel by a feminist from the ’70s named Angela Carter. She used to like… She wrote these retold fairy tales with feminist endings, and she was not… She was kind of forgotten in her time, and her works have kind of resurfaced interestingly through this Me Too movement maybe, but maybe didn’t… Because feminism is always changing.

0:09:22 SC: Yeah.

0:09:22 IV: Anyway, so it’s this retelling of the Bluebeard Castle story, which is this psychological thriller where you have Bluebeard, who’s some kind of big rich aristocrat, whatever you want to call him, he brings his new bride home and he says to her, “You have access to this entire house, except that one room.”

0:09:39 SC: Right.

0:09:39 IV: And it’s a real metaphor for marriage, or partnership where like how much… Like, do you really let your whole self be open to your partner or do you keep a little bit to yourself? [chuckle] Maybe your darkest part. And of course, she opens that door ’cause she can’t help herself and in it are all his dead wives.

0:09:55 SC: Bad things happen. Yes, that’s right, [laughter] yeah, yeah, I could have guessed that, right. Doesn’t she ever watch TV, come on?

0:10:00 IV: Yeah, no, so I’m spoiling it for you only because the ending is different in The Bloody Chamber, which is what it’s called. So I’m really excited to put that on. And so, that’s going on in January of 2020.

0:10:11 SC: Cool, good, we’ll watch out for that. And when you are performing, it’s singing, right? I mean…

0:10:16 IV: Yes.

0:10:16 SC: Opera singing, just the phrase comes fraught with people being a little bit scared. It’s different than other kinds of singing. It looks hard, the standards are very high. Why did you pick the hardest kind of singing there is to do?

[chuckle]

0:10:30 IV: Yeah, it is hard. To me, it’s the only kind of singing where there… And even these days, it’s kind of changing, but there shouldn’t be any, in my opinion, amplification. So there should be nothing separating the human voice from the audience.

0:10:43 SC: Right.

0:10:43 IV: And that’s why it sounds weird, because in order to project in a big space, you have to be able to make a lot of noise, but it still has to sound pretty. So, that’s what we train for so many years to do, to use our bone structure, our resonance, our diaphragm, our lungs to be able to project sound as far as it can possibly go, but still sound beautiful. To me, I love the aesthetic of it, I love the sound, ’cause I grew up listening to it, so it’s very comfortable for me. But I also just love the stories.

0:11:10 SC: Yeah.

0:11:10 IV: I mean, opera is big.

0:11:12 SC: The spectacle.

0:11:12 IV: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you don’t… You know, Seinfeld The Opera would be a really tough sell.

[chuckle]

0:11:17 SC: It was the Game of Thrones of its time.

0:11:18 IV: Yeah, yeah. Well, Game of Thrones would make a great opera, I mean, epic, epic. In some ways, the Wagner Ring Cycle is like…

[laughter]

0:11:26 SC: There you go, that’s right.

0:11:26 IV: Kind of really mild version of Game of Thrones. But yeah, so I think that’s what appeals to me about it is that I have this connection to it. To me, it’s beautiful and it’s challenging. It’s like anybody who pursues any athletic thing, why do people do gymnastics? That’s really hard.

0:11:43 SC: I don’t understand that one either, yeah.

[laughter]

0:11:46 IV: But there’s a kind of euphoria that comes with doing something hard and being able to do it well.

0:11:51 SC: And now you’re coming out… You’ve come out with a book that combines your passions for neuroscience and music, what is the title?

0:11:58 IV: Yeah, it’s called How Music Can Make you Better. And it’s left kind of an open question mark, ’cause of course the first thing better at what? Better at how?

[chuckle]

0:12:05 SC: Exactly, yes.

0:12:07 IV: And the answer is just better in many different ways. So the first is really divided up into three sections. The first section is sort of how does your brain turn sound into music and essentially make sound better, which to me is really fascinating. And the second part is, what people are more expecting to hear, which is, can it actually heal my brain or body? And so, I talk about different ways that music is used in medicine, but also is it effective in terms of a workout tool, that kind of thing. And then finally, I turn to whether music can make society better. In my opinion, that’s probably why it evolved the way it did, because it’s a powerful social glue. It helps us communicate when we don’t have language or communicate ideas and emotions that surpass language. But it can also be used in ways that are not so good, to incite violence, to get people to create tribes or groups that then are identified on the basis…

0:13:08 SC: Fight songs, right?

0:13:09 IV: Yeah, fight songs, exactly. So those are the three sections.

0:13:14 SC: Cool, so that’s good. We have time to get into this. So, let me just start with even before we get to music, what about sound? What do we know about what happens when you hear something? What happens in the brain? And I actually know a little bit about the visual process of the brain. I know nothing about how we perceive sound.

0:13:30 IV: Huh, huh, well, yeah, it surprises me, because I feel like it’s all physics.

[laughter]

0:13:35 SC: Well, sorry, just to explain. When I was at the University of Chicago, I was on the PhD thesis committee for some students who were physics graduate students, but studying neuroscience of the visual cortex.

0:13:47 IV: Oh, okay, okay, okay.

0:13:48 SC: That’s why I know something about that.

0:13:49 IV: Got it, got it, got it. So… And by the way, right at the top, when you… It’s a pot calling the kettle black a little bit here, Sean. [laughter] Multiple interests, you’re the physicist who in my opinion wrote one of the best books about consciousness ever written.

0:14:04 SC: Oh, thank you.

0:14:05 IV: So, yeah. But okay, so let’s start with what sound is, right? So sound is just rarefactions and compressions of air. For some reason, our species has decided that the way it samples sound is by turning it into a perceptual experience that we recognize as sound, or sound waves, I should say. So, we can imagine that this could have been very different, right, like the way a bat hears through echolocation is probably very different. It’s probably more like the visual system. And so, that is kind of arbitrary part of the way that we evolved is that…

0:14:42 SC: Actually, do we know if the way that bats think about sound sort of melds with the visual system differently than it does in humans?

0:14:51 IV: Well, I would imagine… I don’t know the answer to that question very deeply except to say that if I were a bat and I was… ‘Cause I think of echolocation as a way of seeing the world, because they use it to navigate and to find things. So there are a couple of stories of… One in particular that I’m thinking of, a kid named Ben Underwood, who when he was two… Do you know the story of Ben Underwood?

0:15:12 SC: No.

0:15:12 IV: When he was two, he lost his eyes to cancer, and he developed the ability to echolocate. So there are these amazing videos that you can hear… Yeah, watch on YouTube…

0:15:23 SC: Oh. Maybe I do know him.

0:15:26 IV: Yeah, so…

0:15:26 SC: Maybe I’ve been on stage with him.

0:15:27 IV: Oh, [laughter] okay.

0:15:30 SC: I just forgot his name.

0:15:30 IV: Okay, yeah. Ben Underwood.

0:15:31 SC: Yeah. He clicks.

0:15:32 IV: So he clicks, that’s right, and that’s how he sees. So unfortunately, he died, but I would have loved to…

0:15:38 SC: Oh, then I don’t know him. I know someone else who had the same ability.

0:15:40 IV: Well, okay, so maybe, yeah, maybe there are others who do this. To me it’s really fascinating. And if you were one of these people that does this, please, please, please, reach out. I really want to talk to you about this.

0:15:48 SC: I can get you in touch, ’cause the guy who I was on stage with, they have a school. They’re in LA and they teach blind people to echolocate.

0:15:52 IV: Oh, okay. Oh, so cool.

0:15:55 SC: Yeah.

0:15:56 IV: Oh, yes. Now, I have to go and see that, because I think that’s the answer to our question is like… I mean, what seems to happen is that they repurpose their visual cortex to use sound to essentially navigate through the world. So I just wonder what that experience is like for them.

0:16:10 SC: Yeah.

0:16:10 IV: I mean, do they actually in their mind’s eye, see the sound? And…

0:16:17 SC: And there’s a reason why Thomas Nagel’s famous piece is What Is It Like To Be A Bat? ‘Cause it must be so different than being a person.

0:16:20 IV: Exactly. And that’s why I chose the bat analogy, ’cause because of that exact piece. And so, that’s what I… Anyway. So that [chuckle] already gets us down one rabbit hole. So I don’t know what it’s like to be a bat, but I imagine it’s different from what it’s like for me to hear sound.

0:16:36 SC: Right.

0:16:37 IV: And so, anyway, so we’ve developed this ability to somehow turn these sound waves into something that we now perceive of as sound. We have a cochlea, which is the inner part of your ear, that essentially does this transduction. It takes… There’s literally a fluid-filled structure that has all these little hair cells, and the hair cells sway as the fluid moves to the pattern of the sound wave that opens these ion channels at the tips of the cells, which lets in essentially, or changes the membrane potential. It creates an electrical change, which then your brain… That’s the language of the brain, right?

0:17:13 SC: It almost makes you sympathetic to intelligent design when you hear these complicated kinds of things. Then you trace it back in evolutionary time, see how it developed.

0:17:19 IV: Well, every cell has a membrane, every cell exchanges ions. One cell just happened to turn that into a different signal that also releases chemicals and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, to me it’s all like in some ways even more evidence that this is the process that is something that just happened over these small little tweaks. So anyway, so we have like 10,000 of these hair cells or something like that. And so, we can tell different frequencies apart, different timbres, and so forth. Now, imagine that your cochlea does not function and you’re hard of hearing. One thing that we can do is we can implant a cochlear implant for some of these patients and restore hearing to a way that is pretty remarkable. So, my friend, Charles Limb, who’s an ear surgeon who does this kind of work, he argues that in fact we can restore hearing better than we can restore any other sense. But it’s not nearly perfect, and we can talk about how.

0:18:11 SC: It’s a system, yeah.

0:18:13 IV: And in my understanding of the history of cochlear implants, people kind of thought, “Oh, you can just put an electrode into the cochlea that kind of… ” But the problem is, it’s only going to have maybe 10 to 20 leads as opposed to 10,000 hair cells. And also then how are you going to teach the brain to interpret this signal? And my understanding of the history is that they were really worried about this for a long time. And then finally, some rogue ear surgeon just put one in. [laughter] And it turns out they didn’t have to worry about it, because the brain…

0:18:43 SC: Well, actually, yeah, I was going to guess that I don’t know about the sensitivity and the 10 versus tens of thousands, but my impression from talking to neuroscientists is the brain figures out how to do things.

0:18:53 IV: Yeah, exactly.

0:18:55 SC: It’s not just a module that only does one thing, it figures it out.

0:18:58 IV: Yeah, it figures about, and if the person is motivated enough to continue to repeatedly try and repeatedly listen in that way, and try to make sense of it, then the brain will help out. So, that’s what happens in these patients. They essentially learn to understand speech, which if you think about it is a really complex sound, right? The difference in a sound wave between two words spoken by the same person is so minimal compared to all the other sounds available. Yet, they’re able to do that. They’re able to essentially, able to understand and speak a language. They don’t really learn to appreciate music. Music still is something that…

0:19:36 SC: Really?

0:19:37 IV: Yeah. Like, there’s this… Sometimes they give descriptions like it sounds like broken keys or it just sounds like noise. I interviewed this one guy who basically has had a cochlear implant for a long time, and he was just like, “I don’t understand why anybody would pay a single dollar for a piece of music.”

0:19:53 SC: What about… Was this people who were deaf from birth?

0:19:57 IV: Yeah, it doesn’t really matter, for the most part. Everybody is somewhat different.

0:20:01 SC: Yeah.

0:20:02 IV: So there are some people who were great music aficionados, lost their hearing, but even for them, in most cases, the cochlear implant does not restore their love of music. A person who, like the gentleman I was telling you about, he was hard of hearing from a very early age and he still doesn’t… So he doesn’t understand… But anyway, one of my little research projects with Charles Limb actually was to create a choir of people who are hard of hearing, most of whom had cochlear implants, in order to give them the motivation to spend the same kind of energy parsing music as they might…

0:20:36 SC: Nice, yeah.

0:20:36 IV: Parsing speech. And we sort of had these iPads in front of them where they could see their voice spectrograph. Like, they can actually see the sound that they were making and we had the pitches colored in different colors. And so, in order to… We’re like, “Okay, everybody sing in A. Here’s what it sounds like on the piano.” We don’t know what it sounds like for them with their cochlear implants, but then we can say, “It’s going to be green on your iPad. So make noise until it’s green.” And so, anyway, so we kind of… The kind of work I do. But this is a long preamble to say essentially that ultimately how we interpret sound as music depends on our brains.

0:21:12 SC: Clearly, yeah.

0:21:13 IV: And it’s high up in there. And so, your… If you don’t like opera, it’s probably because you haven’t listened to it enough, [chuckle] or it’s just not interesting to you. I’m not saying that everybody ultimately has to like opera, but usually it means that if there is a genre of music that a lot of people really like a universally agreed upon good piece of music and you just don’t like it, part of it might be because your brain is not processing it in the same way, it’s not finding meaning in the same way. Like my mom, for example, hates rap. She hates heavy metal. And I think it’s because it just sounds like noise to her. I mean, if you brought a chainsaw into the room, I would find that annoying too. But Metallica, I get. [laughter] But it’s not that different.

[laughter]

0:22:00 SC: Right.

0:22:00 IV: Right?

0:22:00 SC: Yeah. So how would you define music? What is it that separates music out from other sounds?

0:22:04 IV: Yeah, so I think it depends on every person’s brain. I think it’s how… The question is how would you define it? And that’s why some things are music to some people and not to others, and even silence can be music, as some experimental composers have demonstrated. It’s the context that you bring in terms of how you listen to the soundscape. So if you’re listening to the soundscape for meaning that goes beyond the speech or the kind of physical aspects of the sound, like where is it located, is it a bird or a car, then I would argue that it’s music.

0:22:36 SC: Okay. But in the music that we know and love there are certain properties, right, the repetition versus variation kind of story.

0:22:43 IV: Yes, exactly. In fact, repetition is the one universal feature of virtually every music that we know of, except the music that explicitly avoids it, which is like…

0:22:52 SC: But that’s kind of post-repetition, right? Like, you knew what repetition was…

0:22:54 IV: Exactly, exactly. They’re doing it…

0:22:56 SC: And you’re just being ornery.

0:22:57 IV: Exactly. And it’s hard to listen to. And in fact, if you hack some of that music and add repetition, people will label it as more interesting, more enjoyable, and more likely to have been composed by a human being.

[laughter]

0:23:09 SC: Right.

0:23:10 IV: So, I think that’s pretty good evidence that repetition is a key feature of music and I think that that’s the reason that it is, is because that sort of sets the pattern, right? So you can turn a simple sentence into music by repeating it over and over again, add a beat, add some other kind of thing, and all of a sudden you’ve got a piece of music and that’s because I think the way that your brain… Your brain habituates. So, you poke a California Aplysia, a sea slug, on its tail a bunch of times, eventually it stops withdrawing its tail. That’s habituation, very simple nervous system.

[chuckle]

0:23:40 SC: It just gets tired of putting up with you.

0:23:41 IV: Yeah. It’s not getting any new information. So, if you are listening to a repeated pattern, you’re going to search for new information on it, or you’re going to ignore it. So your refrigerator hum, probably doesn’t have that much more info, so after living in your place for a couple of nights, you ignore it, you no longer hear it. But when it comes to music, great music in my opinion, has multiple layers of meanings that your brain enjoys finding and seeing and we are ultimately, as you probably talk about it better than I can, interested in the search for meaning. Isn’t that why you went into physics?

0:24:14 SC: That’s right, yeah. [laughter] Yes, meaning and understanding, yeah.

0:24:18 IV: Yeah, meaning and understanding. So it’s the same thing I think in terms of music, especially when that meaning and understanding tells us something really authentic about humanity. So there’s this great quote by Harlan about country music. So country music is three chords and the truth. Even if you don’t like country music, it gives me chills thinking about that’s true of music.

0:24:40 SC: Truth is the hard part.

0:24:41 IV: Truth is the hard part, but it’s exactly right. Great music tells you something truthful that you can’t get in any other medium.

0:24:47 SC: Yeah, whether or not there are words.

0:24:49 IV: Yeah, whether or not there are words.

0:24:50 SC: The truth might transcend the sort of literal meaning of the words. So you mentioned… I just now had this thought, you mentioned that repetition, rhythm in some sense, is universal in how music gets done everywhere. Is melody universal?

0:25:04 IV: Yeah, so I guess the two main components of music are rhythm and melody. So I think most people will argue that the vast majority of music out there has these two components. And I think that, again, I think it depends on exactly how you define melody, and I’m sure you can have a musicologist who will talk about that for three hours. I’m not that person, except to say I think of it as a line that is recognizable, that sometimes is repeated, sometimes is not, but has a kind of phrase quality to it. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end to a melody and it’s recognizable as a line. And that kind of speaks to the fact that music is something that happens over time.

0:25:47 SC: Time is crucially important, yeah.

0:25:48 IV: Crucially important. And so, music is there in the moment and it kind of unfolds over time. And the melody is kind of what is the person taking the journey whereas the rhythm is the one that’s setting the time scale.

0:26:02 SC: Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So, you’re just sparking my brain with all these questions that I’ve never thought of before. Is there an explanation for why traditionally music likes to pick a certain discrete set of notes rather than just have… If you had a violin, you could just play any note you wanted to. But we agree ahead of time these are the notes you’re supposed to play, the major scale or something like that.

0:26:23 IV: Sure, and I think that’s because it allows us a kind of boundary or framework for where we’re going to find these patterns and where we’re going to extract the meaning.

0:26:31 SC: It certainly helps with repetition if there’s only a finite number of choices to pick.

0:26:35 IV: That’s right, that’s right. And also different genres will have different rules, whether it’s jazz or rap or hip-hop or classical music, depending on the era, it will have different rules of tonality. So how much can you deviate from the particular established tones? So a lot of the really great composers like Beethoven, for example, was like scandalously deviant.

0:26:56 SC: Really?

0:26:57 IV: Yeah, from his time. And yet, we listen to it as it seems so pleasant, and almost uptight in its rule-based structure. So I think that in order for you to know and predict where the music is going to go there has to be a kind of understanding of what the rules are. So the example I started to give is jazz. So if you never listen to jazz, then you’d probably gravitate towards relatively simple riffs and melodies that is easily recognizable to you. You know where the melody is and you can kind of predict where it’s going to go. And it might surprise you a little bit, but it’s not totally shocking.

0:27:34 IV: Now, if you have a jazz aficionado, smooth jazz, which is a lot of this… You just rolled your eyes. It’s excruciating because it’s far too simple. It’s mind-numbingly boring in that sense, because there’s nothing interesting about it. It’s like eating white bread. So I think that that means that you listen to it differently because… So then when you listen to a really great jazz player, and they’re playing My Funny Valentine, for example, or some other really famous melody, but you barely recognize the melody in it, but you know where it’s going and it all kind of fits in, it’s like this magical puzzle that you’re listening to and it’s really great.

0:28:11 IV: So yeah, so I think that… Again, I think that depends on your genre, and depends on within the genre how old the genre is, how much it has these established rules, how much composers have had to push against these rules to create something new and so on. And all this is to say that it harnesses what I think of as the brain’s fundamental trait, which is it wants to predict the future.

0:28:30 IV: Our memory is not about the past. It’s about giving us the ability to create a potential future and see whether our behavior is going to make us survive or kill us. So that’s really what ultimately music does, it harnesses the brain’s desire to predict the future. And so you create tension as a musician for an ultimate release, if you stop the piece before the tension is released, unless that’s really an intentional… It’s annoying, or it’s an intentional choice, in which case you’ve annoyed your audience and that’s your art.

0:29:03 IV: So I think that that’s kind of… We have to be able to give our listeners enough information about what the future is going to hold for them, and then as great musicians, we know that we can push and pull against that to tell them something truthful or interesting.

0:29:19 SC: Do you know about the Bayesian brain hypothesis? Have you heard of that?

0:29:22 IV: I know about Bayes’ theorem. So yeah, tell me more about the Bayesian brain hypothesis.

0:29:27 SC: Karl Friston, who apparently is a famous neuroscientist…

0:29:30 IV: Neuroimaging guy.

0:29:31 SC: Yeah, exactly. So he’s a little funny ’cause he got very famous and a billion citations, etcetera, for imaging. But now his whole thing is this grand unified theory of the brain, called the free energy principle, or the Bayesian brain hypothesis. And it’s basically a formalization of exactly what you said, all the brain tries to do is predict the future. So it’s called Bayesian because you’re constantly updating when you get new information in and you’re trying to minimize the surprise is that happens, and he tries to… It’s very controversial, some people love it, some people hate it, lots of people say, “I would love it, but I don’t understand what he’s saying.” But it’s probably too simple to be exactly true, but I think there’s probably something true about it.

0:30:13 IV: Yeah, and I think it’s actually really important from a neuroscience perspective to put it out there like that. I think that takes a lot of courage, especially nowadays as… Anyway, we have access to so much more information than it seems like we did 30 years ago. But yeah, I probably would endorse a lot of that particular idea.

0:30:30 SC: Well, so you mentioned the difference between a simplistic pop song and a outré jazz improvisation. You also mentioned in the book that there are two points in a person’s life when they are especially susceptible to learning and being impressed by music.

0:30:50 IV: Yeah, yeah.

0:30:51 SC: One is when you’re a kid, and you’re very young.

0:30:53 IV: Exactly. And I almost think like that… Maybe, of course, as you know, you write a book and then a bunch of time goes by and then it comes out, and so you’re like, “Man, I wish I had written this differently.” Sometimes I think that it really is about the early period, which is like early childhood, is essentially when your auditory cortex is developing, is when your brain is learning to process sound. So kids who are trained as musicians early on, their brains literally react to sound differently, even if they stop playing piano or stop learning their instruments, many, many years later, we can still see the kind of “musician’s signature.”

0:31:24 SC: Something was wired in there.

0:31:25 IV: Something was wired in there. So you take a kid who’s exposed to a lot of extraneous noise, who has to actually tune it out, then their relationship with sound is going to be different. And in fact some of these kids who grow up in urban environments who generally are more likely to be low-income because they’re exposed to a lot of noise that can’t be tuned out, they sometimes have trouble with language skills later on in life because they’re just not hearing. They have trouble parsing speech out of noise.

0:31:54 IV: So you can imagine that that’s a problematic thing. And if you teach them to play a musical instrument you can actually undo some of this damage, because what you’re doing is essentially re-training their brain to process sound differently, to have this different neural signature when it comes to a sound stimulus or a sound wave. So, that’s the early period. So that’s kind of like the nuts and bolts of it…

0:32:13 SC: Sorry, that is when we like the most simple and repetitive stuff? Like the Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.

0:32:17 IV: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And part of that is because the kid is trying to figure out… He likes to predict the future too. Why these kids like these songs that never end really… Like Baby Shark, all these things, this is right for earworms.

0:32:34 SC: There’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that says… Calvin is grumpy. He clearly just got upbraided by his mom and he says, “I think if a novelty Christmas song is funny once, it’s funny the thousandth time too.”

0:32:45 IV: Yeah, I know. They don’t understand why. It’s totally illogical. Why isn’t it funny the thousandth time? Well, they’ll learn. But I think that the second period is what I think of more as kind of the emotional, the part of your life that you always return to nostalgically through music. It’s the part of your life where your brain, your prefrontal cortex, which is the last part of your brain to develop and wire up, essentially. That’s when it’s being myelinated, when there’s this fatty sheet that is wrapping itself around the connections between neurons to make them faster and more efficient, and the front part of your brain is where you do a lot of complex decision-making, emotional regulation, social interactions, these kind of higher level cognitive and human traits. So that’s all developing in your late teens, and even into your early 20s.

0:33:37 SC: So tell me more about the myelinating. I don’t think I know anything about that.

0:33:40 IV: Yeah, so myelination is essentially one of the reasons that we have the brains that we do is because we as mammals and vertebrates have developed the ability to make our axons more efficient. So the axon is the part of the cell that takes information from the cell body, from the dendrites, and sends it down… It’s wire essentially and then lets out information on the other end. So in order to be able to cross large swaths of brain or to go from your spinal cord to your big toe, we need that signal to be really fast. So one of the ways that the nervous system has evolved to make it faster is by myelinating, essentially covering it with a fatty sheath, like, think about it, insulating a wire. So the electrical changes don’t bleed out all the way down, the action potential just propagates all… Essentially, it jumps, it’s called saltatory conduction, so you can think of it as like, you’ve got a bus in your local town, it can make a stop at every single stop sign, which makes it really slow, more people have to get in and out, or you can have the rapid bus that is the express, right?

0:34:46 SC: Yeah. Right.

0:34:48 IV: So myelin creates express buses out of our axons.

0:34:53 SC: Does it happen to every axon or is it the most important ones?

0:34:55 IV: I mean, you know, never say every in [chuckle] neuroscience, but the vast majority.

0:35:02 SC: Huh. And you have to be a teenager before that happens?

0:35:05 IV: You have to be a teenager before that happens in the prefrontal cortex.

0:35:07 SC: Oh.

0:35:08 IV: So in the rest of the brain it’s happening earlier on, and this is actually one of the reasons why it seems that maybe people who ultimately develop schizophrenia have their first psychotic breaks or their first disorganized thinking episodes around their early 20s, late teens, because as the healthy teenage brain, or neuro-typical teenage brain is myelinating up and you’re becoming more rational and you’re able to control your emotions, the brain of a person with schizophrenia is not myelinating in the same way and so, their thoughts become disorganized, they start to have these other experiences. So, yeah, so myelination of the prefrontal cortex seems to be what is happening during these late teenage years.

0:35:48 SC: But this worries me into thinking that there’s something that freezes about you when you’re a teenager, it’s baked in.

0:35:54 IV: Well, I mean, a lot of people argue that some of your personality traits do get formed there, although there’s this really interesting now kind of movement in personality psychology to question that, like do we actually change pretty substantially in terms of our personality as we get older, but yes, that’s the traditional model, is that you’re developing your… A lot of your… A lot of the way… Your habits of thinking, I should say, in this time period.

0:36:18 SC: Okay, so you’re myelinating, but you also have raging hormones, you’re going through puberty…

0:36:22 IV: Yup.

0:36:23 SC: And you’re listening to tunes with your friends.

0:36:25 IV: Yes, because you have a push to separate from your parents, right? There’s this… I mean, it’s better for you to go off and have sex with people who are not genetically related to you, right? [laughter] So you need to leave the family nest.

0:36:37 SC: Yes.

0:36:38 IV: So there seems to be this… The kind of rebellious part of our nature that comes online here, which you could imagine is actually very evolutionarily adaptive. And so, one… But we don’t like to be alone, right? We don’t want to feel isolated. Especially when we’re having these big emotions and we just can’t regulate them yet, and there’s all these things of… Everything is… Self-esteem is coming into play, but we’re pimply and gangly, and everything, right? It’s a lot.

0:37:04 SC: I don’t know why there are people who think that those were the good times in their lives, but they exist, yeah.

0:37:07 IV: It’s the terrible times. Yeah. So, one of things that’s great about music is that it’s a powerful social glue. So when you listen… When you bounce in sync with someone else to music, you actually raise levels of an attachment hormone called oxytocin in both of your brains, and that makes you feel more bonded. So there are some clever little experiments where you’d have people bouncing in sync with each other to a particular piece of music or in sync with the experimenter and then the experiment finishes and, thank you very much, and here’s the debriefing sheet, “Oh, let me just walk you to the elevator,” and on the way to the elevator, you drop a pencil, how likely is the person to pick it up?

0:37:46 SC: Huh.

0:37:46 IV: It turns out that if you bounced in sync, much more likely.

[laughter]

0:37:51 SC: Is that a reproduced thing, though?

[chuckle]

0:37:54 IV: Well… And it’s been reproduced in toddlers, nonetheless.

0:37:56 SC: Wow.

0:37:57 IV: So toddlers will also be more likely to help an accidentally dropped toy if they were bounced in sync by the adult or by the adult’s friend, but not if there’s a neutral person in the room that seems to be a stranger. So there does seem to be some kind of attachment that happens where you tend to then associate the person that you were in sync with literally physically as part of your tribe, and people who you’re out of sync with as another tribe.

0:38:20 SC: I wonder if mirror neurons have something to do with that.

0:38:22 IV: I mean, for sure, for sure.

0:38:23 SC: Yeah.

0:38:24 IV: Or at least the mirror neuron system, this idea that in our brains we mirror the activity of the brains of the person that we’re watching as they perform some goal-directed activity, right, so there’s that and it’s related to empathy. But this kind of synchronization fostered by more oxytocin, this is all pro-social bonding stuff. So, people sometimes think of oxytocin as the love hormone, right? It’s not just… You know, it’s much more accurate to say, it’s the attachment hormone, because it’s also the hate hormone.

0:38:58 SC: Right.

0:38:58 IV: So, you actually feel more aggression towards people you deem as threatening your tribe or outside of your tribe when you’re high on oxytocin.

0:39:07 SC: I had Patricia Churchland on the podcast recently and the same message, like, oxytocin very, very important, but more is going on than you might think.

0:39:14 IV: Way more.

0:39:15 SC: I still I’m going to call it the cuddle molecule, [chuckle] just ’cause that’s an irresistible name, sorry.

0:39:19 IV: Yeah. And you still might be skeptical, you know, how much… You know you can snort oxytocin now, you can like… You have these oxytocin sprays.

0:39:26 SC: I didn’t know that.

[laughter]

0:39:26 IV: There’s like these nasal sprays, and if you… There’s a study that I really like where if you spray people with this or you give them this oxytocin nasal spray, they actually keep the rhythm better.

0:39:38 SC: Really?

0:39:38 IV: It like gives them rhythm, [laughter] yeah, it makes them more in sync when they’re…

0:39:41 SC: The rhythm molecule, alright.

[laughter]

0:39:42 IV: Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about what it means to be in sync with someone that… It seems like that would make sense.

[chuckle]

0:39:49 SC: Alright, the synchronization molecule. This is connecting a whole bunch of different podcast topics, ’cause I talked to Steven Strogatz about synchronization in different animal systems.

0:39:56 IV: Oh, yeah, yeah.

0:39:58 SC: Wow, okay. So, yeah. And so… But this story helps explain why we always have a special attachment to the tunes that we really fell in love with when we were teenagers, right?

0:40:09 IV: Yeah.

0:40:09 SC: Even if we look back and with a slightly more jaundiced eye we say, “Well, I get that that’s not the best song ever, [chuckle] but it’s my song.”

0:40:15 IV: That’s right. That’s right. I mean, it still… Especially, the first time you hear it again after a while, it still gives you this rush of nostalgia, this rush of feeling, this rush of kind of security that you probably found in the music that you loved, ’cause it helped you find yourself in your tribe. But you’re exactly right that we can recognize that it is actually not objectively good music and still have this good effect. What’s interesting is that I feel like we actually tire of it more quickly, though. So, imagine that you have… What’s your favorite song from when you were a teenager or your early 20s? Can you name one or a favorite band?

0:40:50 SC: Yeah, I can name a bunch, let me name, Yes.

0:40:52 IV: Yes, okay, now let’s say you spent all day listening to Yes, how soon would you start getting sick of it?

0:40:58 SC: Well, so here’s the thing, the reason why I named Yes, is because fairly recently I, I don’t know why, but I re-downloaded an album that they came out with when I was in college. I started listening to it and I cannot get that thing out of my head anymore. It is embedded now, and reading your book made me think about that.

0:41:17 IV: Oh, great, yeah.

0:41:17 SC: So sadly, apparently I can listen to it again and again. I’m not quite as elevated as some of the other people you’re talking about.

0:41:22 IV: But do you enjoy it as much? I feel like in my experience at least anyway, and I don’t have any science to back this up, but it seems that yes, when you hear them again for the first time it feels great. It feels like you’re finding your own teenage self again, which is really encouraging if you’re not that close to your teenage years anymore. But I also find that I get bored more quickly.

0:41:46 SC: Well, you certainly want to move on, but you also mentioned the idea of the earworm, that sometimes we really find it difficult to move on from a melody that is stuck in our head.

0:41:54 IV: Yeah. And I think there are certain characteristics of melodies that make them more likely to be stuck in their heads, and things like Baby Shark or Wheels on the Bus have this problem where they’re never ending, so there isn’t an ultimate release.

0:42:03 SC: There’s no resolution.

0:42:06 IV: There’s no resolution. And so your brain is like, “Oh yeah, I got that in my head now.” And then it just keeps looping, especially if you’re not paying very close attention to it. So one of the cures for earworms is to, in your head like volitionally make up a big ending, put a big finish onto the piece, work it through and then hopefully your brain will be like, “Okay, now, that’s done. I can move on.” But if that doesn’t work and this is really troubling to you, it turns out that medicines that are used for people with obsessive compulsive disorder can be effective in getting rid of the most severe types of earworms. And that’s because essentially it becomes a little bit of an obsession. And we see an overactive caudate nucleus, which is a nucleus in your brain that is part of the kind of goal-directed motivated learning system, part of your reward system…

0:42:53 SC: You have to explain that, it’s not my kind of nucleus. It’s not an atomic nucleus. You’re using the word nucleus to mean something different.

0:43:00 IV: Yes, yes, yes, no, I guess I forget that. A nucleus is a group of cell bodies in the brain.

0:43:05 SC: Okay, good. And the caudate nucleus, what does it do?

0:43:09 IV: The caudate nucleus. So, yeah, it’s part of the reward system, and essentially you think of it as the wanting part of the brain. So in the anticipation of something pleasurable or actually something awful you can see more dopamine activity in the caudate nucleus. And the caudate nucleus is also like if you lesion it, then animals have a hard time learning new kind of habits and skills. So patients with Parkinson’s disease, for example, or Huntington’s disease, have less dopamine in the brain and the caudate is affected. Anyway, so they have learning problems.

0:43:45 IV: So the caudate really… When it comes to music, we see it active during the building up of tension part of a musical phrase. And then once you get the release of tension, if you get the chills maybe or some other kind of reaction, we see a big spike in dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is the liking part of the brain. So if the caudate does the wanting part of the brain, the nucleus accumbens is the liking part of the brain. So it actually gives you the sense of pleasure as opposed to the pursuit of pleasure.

0:44:17 IV: So anyway, the caudate is really fascinating ’cause it’s been implicated in a lot of human behaviors that are hard to understand. For example, people who have anorexia we think now it might be partly to do with a habit of not eating, so that they find eating aversive, and we see an overactive caudate in the sense that… So it’s not just the desire to be thin, it’s just that eating is unpleasant. It becomes habitually unpleasant. And so the worst thing that you can do is force-feed a person with anorexia because then you give them a really aversive experience.

0:44:50 SC: You’re associating misery with eating…

0:44:51 IV: Even more misery…

0:44:52 SC: Which is not what you want.

0:44:55 IV: And the caudate is a part of that, it’s sort of tracking the aspects of the world that will lead to good things or bad things, but regardless, things that are important, emotionally. So this is also why a lot of people who overdose tend to do so in novel environments, like hotel rooms, because your brain… I know, it’s like… I’m going to connect the dots.

0:45:14 SC: Good. No, no, no. I’m almost there.

0:45:17 IV: Your brain expects a drug if you take it in the same place at the same time. And so, it’s interested in maintaining homeostasis, so it swings in the other direction. So let’s say you take a drug that makes you feel down, like benzodiazepines. They actually inhibit brain activity. They sedate you, get rid of your anxiety. Now, let’s say you take a lot of these drugs, you have to take more and more of them to get the effect because your brain is expecting them. It’s trying to predict the future. So it’s giving you actually more anxiety, more stress, more activity, so that you need more of the drug to get back down.

0:45:54 IV: Now, let’s say you go into a novel environment, you take the same dose of the drug you’ve been taking in your old environment, but your brain is not prepared for it. That’s when you overdose. So the same exact amount can now be fatal. And that’s because your caudate was not prepared. But in the other locations your caudate is trying to figure out what is it about this environment that’s going to cause this good thing to happen.

0:46:15 SC: Now I’m sort of surprised that Led Zeppelin could ever write Stairway to Heaven without knowing all this neuroscience. They actually manipulated the caudate nuclei of all their audience members without knowing that’s what they were doing.

0:46:26 IV: Exactly. That’s exactly what they did. And great musicians know this. They know that in order to have a great piece of music, you need to delay the release of tension as long as possible. The longer you extend the desire for the pleasure, the greater the pleasure when it comes and pleasure is the death of desire. So, yeah.

0:46:45 SC: And there’s some trade-off. You can’t extend it too long or…

0:46:47 IV: Well, yeah, people would get frustrated.

0:46:49 SC: Exactly. So I want to talk about music and learning. And this sort of has two sides to it. One is that we learn music. So what is the neuroscience of how we learn music? Let me just mention one fact that I read in your book, which actually I thought was absolutely fascinating. The musicians, certain musicians, play their instrument so much that when they’re playing two of their fingers always move in the same way in synchrony together. And their brain begins to forget that they’re two separate fingers. Their brain remaps. And I always heard that the other way around, how the brain can sort of remap extra parts. But I had never thought about the brain forgetting that there’s a part there.

0:47:32 IV: Yeah, this is the dark side of neuroplasticity, it’s called focal dystonia. So, essentially where you have a particular body part, which now your brain has trouble decoupling, you know, in this particular, and we’re still learning exactly how this works, but the idea, I think, that’s been gaining traction is that in some musicians you perform the same pattern over and over again or you train your hands to be in sync in a certain way, and then all of a sudden your brain actually remaps your somatosensory cortex as that being, just as you said, one finger rather than two fingers. And so, now it’s very hard for you to decouple them and play them one at a time, and it becomes actually a problem and you can develop musician’s cramp, these other kind of really, really painful, annoying conditions.

0:48:19 SC: So, a pianist would never get this ’cause their fingers are doing different things. So what kind of musicians?

0:48:23 IV: There are pianists have gotten it, but I think they’re… Yeah, mainly it’s… I’ve seen it in guitarists, wind instruments. But yes, you can get it in piano, although it might sort of look a little bit different where it’s not just maybe the fingers, it may be a part of the palm and a finger…

0:48:43 SC: Sure, okay.

0:48:43 IV: You know, where you have that kind of mapping. Or just some other kind of mapping gone awry basically. But yeah, I had a student for whom it was the pinky finger and the ring finger that got associated, she was a clarinetist.

0:48:58 SC: Okay.

0:48:58 IV: And so, she did play… And so, then she had all these consequences where she would get nervous and then it would start shaking, and yeah, these kind of neurological things that you sit there and you think, “Fingers, do your thing.” [chuckle] It’s really annoying.

0:49:13 SC: And they won’t do it.

0:49:13 IV: It’s brain, brain do your thing, right?

0:49:14 SC: Yeah.

0:49:15 IV: And so, it’s this painstaking then rehabilitation period where you have to re-train your brain to kind of map it differently again.

0:49:24 SC: And how much of learning to be a musician is subconscious in some way? How much is cognitive?

0:49:32 IV: Yeah. So, I mean, I… You know, just like playing a musical instrument or singing has so many complex different sub-skills, I would say it’s hard to say that kind of in a blanket statement, there’s lots of conscious aspects of music making, you know, the interpretation, the music reading, if that’s what you’re doing, etcetera. But in terms of just the pure motor skill, I like to think of, there’s this three-stage model by a guy named Fitz that I like, where things start clumsy and cognitive, like when your teacher tells you, “Okay, you gotta hold the… Your bow arm has to be in this direction, like keep your elbow up,” or whatever, you actually have to literally sit there and think about it.

0:50:10 SC: Yeah, it doesn’t feel natural.

0:50:11 IV: It doesn’t feel natural, you have to… And in order to do it, you have to consciously say, “Okay, arm lift up,” right? Over time, over multiple repetitions you start to associate, “Okay, when I’m going to pick up the bow I’m going to do this sequence of movements,” right? And so, that’s called the associative stage, where it’s becoming… Essentially what you’re doing is, you’re automatizing parts of the motor sequence, but you still usually have to think about how to implement them. So, another example is driving stick shift, learning to drive stick shift. At the beginning, you’re like, “What do you mean, [laughter] first gear, second gear, or third gear, clutch,” and then eventually you’re like, “Okay, every time I shift gears, I have to put the clutch down, I get that.” But then it’s like you have to put it all together and then eventually you get to the automatic stage, where it’s now implicit, and in fact, if you start thinking about it too much you can actually interfere with your ability to do the task, right?

0:51:00 IV: And this is because what’s happened in your brain is that you’ve gone from what we call explicit or a declarative memory version of the task where you’re actually thinking consciously, to a non-declarative or implicit performance of the task, where… And these two systems can compete with each other for your cognitive resources. So you don’t want to interfere with your implicit learning, if you can avoid it. But then, eventually, if you become really good at what you’re doing, like, I give the example of Tiger Woods who, in the middle of a golf swing, he can check his swing and re-adjust if he needs to, even though a lot of it is very automatic. That’s sort of bringing consciousness back to the automated gear…

0:51:40 SC: Oh, okay, there’s a higher level of conscious influence on what’s going on.

0:51:41 IV: Yeah, yeah. So you have like Yo-Yo Ma playing a cello suite, and somebody in the audience coughs, right, like he can… It probably doesn’t bother him at all, or there’s some kind of breeze that happens or one of his strings breaks or what have you, he can adjust while he’s doing on the fly, because he’s so good at what he does.

0:52:03 SC: Interesting. And is it true that we get worse at learning how to play music as we get older?

[chuckle]

0:52:09 IV: So, you know, I think we still have the same expectations of things happening quickly as we get older. We often don’t spend the same amount of time doing things as we get older, you know what I mean?

0:52:19 SC: I’ve long suspected that people exaggerate the difficulty of learning things as you grow older just ’cause they don’t remember how much work it was.

0:52:26 IV: That’s right, [chuckle] and in fact in studies in which they’ve pitted young kids against college age adults, like in a motor tapping task, for example, the college students do better quickly. It takes them fewer tries. And…

0:52:37 SC: Yeah. But what about 50-year-olds?

[chuckle]

0:52:42 IV: Well, I don’t know that they’ve done that study.

[laughter]

0:52:45 SC: Okay. Probably get them to volunteer.

0:52:45 IV: Yeah, I don’t… I mean, I know there’s this Gary Marcus book Guitar Zero, where he documents his own journey through this, and I have to disagree with him in a lot of parts of his book, because I just don’t believe that the way that he was approaching the deliberate practice component is going to be the same as somebody who’s devoting all of… I mean, I know he spent a year learning to play the guitar and so forth, but it’s a year. Like, any college student in my music program in their first year they’re barely surviving, it’s by their fourth year of doing this every single day with feedback, with training that they start to make serious gains. So I think it’s an unreasonable expectation that we can learn something very quickly as we get older without putting in the same kind of time.

0:53:27 SC: So you’re trying to offer hope to those of us beyond our hormonal teen age years when it comes to…

0:53:30 IV: Yeah, yeah, I mean, if you can… If you really can devote… Most of us just don’t have the time and the money to [chuckle] devote to what we need to do. But if you have it, I don’t think there’s any reason why you shouldn’t be able to do something really exceptional with an instrument.

0:53:43 SC: Is there… Have people talked about the relationship of that question to the question of learning new languages? I know that there has been at least some studies that say it really is harder to learn languages.

0:53:52 IV: Yeah, and part of that is because you do have this sensitive period in language learning, where the way that your brain processes language is different if you’re 5, than if you’re 55, it really is… Learning a second language, we see it mapping on differently in the 55-year-old brain compared with in the 5-year-old brain. The same is actually true for learning perfect pitch. Interestingly, there’s a study that came out of Japan that looked at kids who were between the ages of 2 and 4, and 100% of them that finished this training protocol had absolute or perfect pitch.

0:54:23 SC: So, could you say what perfect pitch is?

0:54:24 IV: Oh, perfect pitch is where I sing any note and you can tell me exactly…

0:54:27 SC: A flat.

0:54:28 IV: Exactly. Right? Yeah, or like a bus rumbles by and you could tell me what note it’s “playing.” So that’s perfect pitch, and in neuroscience parlance we call it absolute pitch, because what does perfect mean, right?

[chuckle]

0:54:41 SC: Sure.

0:54:42 IV: So these kids, 100% of them ended up getting absolute pitch, and that’s because the way that they process sound is different, and when they’re in that sensitive period, they can extract regularities differently, than when they get older and they listen to it differently as their auditory cortex matures. So I think you’re going to see some similarities in language. That’s why kids who learn languages early don’t necessarily speak with an accent, because the way their brain processes that sound is different. So there’s probably some elements of that, but music again, it’s so subjective, like, do you really want to be a perfect player as a musician?

0:55:23 SC: Well, it’s better than being what I am. [laughter] Yeah, it’s all relative.

0:55:27 IV: But you also have a reason for why you want to play music, right?

0:55:29 SC: Sure, that’s…

0:55:30 IV: Whereas like the 6-year-old, who’s playing piano is probably doing it because their parents told them to.

0:55:33 SC: That’s right. And you make the point that you can even learn to sing well more than most people think, but I think most people probably think that there are good singers out there and less good singers. And you argue that it’s more about training and practice and knowing what you’re doing than most people think.

0:55:50 IV: Yeah, because we see the differences in the brains of singers as they’ve… And song birds, and other species that have this unique ability to vocalize in many different ways. We see the brain changes. So, you gotta wire it up differently, but that takes time. And I think one of the things that is really hard is that for a lot of people, awkward singing is really embarrassing, you know?

0:56:13 SC: Oh, yeah, right.

0:56:14 IV: So they don’t… So it’s tied into this whole emotional thing that makes it… So if you’re trying to sing and you’re having such a big emotional reaction, your brain is going to be like, first of all, I don’t want to do that again.

0:56:27 SC: I don’t want to do that.

0:56:27 IV: Or It’s going to be focusing on what are the aspects of the emotion, not on the content of the information that you’re getting, right? So, I think because our voices are such a reflection of who we are as people, it can be something that’s… It’s hard to be objective and just say, “I’m just going to keep training on this until I get it right.”

0:56:45 SC: But you can learn. I remember an interview with Lady Gaga where the interviewer was asking about the fact that when she was young, she was in a Led Zeppelin cover band. [laughter] She was belting out Rock And Roll and Misty Mountain Hop. And so, they said, “Doesn’t that hurt your throat if you sing that all night long?” And she’s like, “Not if you know how to sing.”

[chuckle]

0:57:04 IV: That’s right, not if you know how to do it, exactly. And so, yeah, when opera singers try to sing musical theater without knowing what they’re doing, they will hurt themselves, even though they have this apparently really great technique. But musical theater singers, who then turn around and try to sing opera, again, they can hurt themselves. But if they… But not if they’re doing what they’ve been trained to do.

0:57:21 SC: Can you pinpoint what the difference is between singing in musical theater and singing in opera?

0:57:25 IV: Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, it’s sort of belting. So essentially, it’s where you’re putting most of your timbre. And remember in the musical theater you’re largely amplified.

0:57:36 SC: Right.

0:57:37 IV: So you don’t have to project as much. And so, essentially the way that you… How much pressure you put through your vocal cords and that is different, right? If you want to…

0:57:48 SC: Okay.

0:57:49 IV: Put it down to that, you know, the way you use your resonance and the way you control your breath is going to be slightly different.

0:57:55 SC: And what about the other way around? We can learn music and there’s the claim that music helps us learn. There’s the Mozart effect. And this was actually based on something scientific and then it got a little bit out of control.

0:58:07 IV: Yeah, I mean, something scientific in the sense that it was literally a one-page paper from 1993, [chuckle] from UC Irvine…

0:58:13 SC: That’s all it takes.

0:58:13 IV: Yeah, of like 30 undergraduates. What it was is people had… The scientists had three conditions, they had these undergraduates perform ultimately a bunch of the IQ tests, the subtests like the spatial reasoning subtests. Where like, here’s a picture of a geometric shape, here are some blocks, make the blocks look like the picture, that kinda thing. So, they had three conditions, the first condition was where they played Mozart’s piano sonata, I believe, for 15 minutes before they were asked to do these tests, or they sat in silence or they listened to relaxation tapes. Now, which of those three conditions do you think is more arousing?

0:58:54 SC: Music?

[laughter]

0:58:55 IV: Yes, yes, so they were probably slightly more awake…

0:59:00 SC: Yep.

0:59:00 IV: Slightly more engaged.

0:59:00 SC: More engaged.

0:59:01 IV: And they performed better slightly on these tests. If you had given them a shot of espresso or in subsequent replications of this kind of work, reading a Stephen King chapter was just as arousing, Blur was just as arousing.

0:59:15 SC: Yeah. And we’re using arousing just in the sense of heightened sense?

0:59:18 IV: Oh, yes, I mean, just more awake, right?

0:59:19 SC: Right.

0:59:20 IV: I don’t mean sexually.

[laughter]

0:59:21 SC: Right. Maybe that too, but okay, depending on the songs.

0:59:22 IV: Just that, yeah… I mean, maybe, right? [chuckle] Yeah. But certainly in terms of just your general whether or not you’re awake or asleep, your general arousal level of your brain.

0:59:30 SC: Yeah.

0:59:32 IV: So, yeah, so that was the original Mozart effect and that led into this whole Baby Einstein, play music for your baby it’ll be… Give them better IQ, which most of it is totally not supported by the research. But if you look at sort of musical training, there is a relationship between the extent of musical training and ultimately academic success, if that’s really what you’re interested in, or performance on IQ tests, which we all know are an imperfect measure of intelligence.

1:00:00 SC: Sure.

1:00:01 IV: But what we see is that kids who have three years or more of individual music lessons, tend to show higher IQs or a higher academic achievement than kids who on average don’t have that kind of exposure. Now, you’ve got a compound here potentially of socio-economic status, because on average kids that can afford to go to have music lessons are going to be on average richer than kids who can’t. But there are a couple of nice control studies, like there’s one study in particular out of Boston public schools where they randomly assign kids to two groups. One was an instrumental music group, one was kind of just group music classes and they did start seeing changes in the brain after only 15 months of musical training that map on to what we would have expected. Now, they didn’t see changes in IQ or changes in parts of the brain that we think are really responsible for higher intelligence. But that’s because I think it just wasn’t enough time.

1:00:58 SC: Yeah.

1:01:00 IV: So I do think…

1:01:00 SC: Practical limitations of the study get in the way at some point.

1:01:01 IV: Yeah. I mean, I do think it’s compelling, if you’re only studying music to make yourself smarter, I think, probably you’re going to burn out eventually, but I think music is something that is enjoyable and stretches you and puts you out of your comfort zone. And one of the great statistics that I love to quote is that it makes you more likely to go to school. So in LA, for example, there have been a number of studies of kids who are at risk, who don’t generally… Are not expected to attend school very often. If you put a school music program in, they’re more likely to show up…

1:01:33 SC: Interesting.

1:01:33 IV: ‘Cause they want to play in the band, they like it. It’s more fun to go to school. Now, you keep kids in school and off the streets, they’re less likely to commit crimes and end up in juvie or ultimately in jail. Now, you take one child and you turn them around, so they don’t end up going to jail, that pays for 10 years of a music teacher salary, right? So…

1:01:52 SC: There you go, yeah.

[chuckle]

1:01:53 IV: Right? So I think that in that sense, it can make us all smarter, because it can make us… Make school more enjoyable. It can make us attend school more, and ultimately help society.

1:02:04 SC: But that learning an instrument or being trained in music, you said earlier, if I’m remembering correctly, that being exposed to classical music when you’re young will affect you later in the sense it will make you more likely to appreciate classical music, when you’re older…

1:02:17 IV: Yeah.

1:02:17 SC: But you’re saying it doesn’t help you with any higher cognitive capacities, but maybe being trained as a musician does.

1:02:23 IV: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I don’t know that listening to Mozart growing up is going to make you smarter. I think that if you listen to Mozart growing up, you probably have a family that already has…

1:02:32 SC: They had a headstart already.

1:02:33 IV: Yeah, the heredity and yes, that’ll put you there. And I can’t say that that’s… The actual listening to music is a bigger factor than those other huge factors.

1:02:43 SC: Yeah, and then there’s the final section of your book, which is fascinating about the social aspects of music. I mean, you make the point, which is a good one, but one I had never thought about that most music is truly social unless you are all by yourself performing a piece of music that you wrote yourself, right?

[laughter]

1:03:00 IV: Right, right, right.

1:03:01 SC: Other than that.

[chuckle]

1:03:02 IV: Right. And even then, you still have… You probably still have the idea that there is a listener, maybe somewhere, but yes, I mean, I was like truly trying to see, is there any exceptional…

1:03:09 SC: Even if it’s just a volleyball that they had written on it.

[chuckle]

1:03:11 IV: Right, exactly.

1:03:12 SC: Yeah. And that plays out in a million different ways. I mean, your book is about how music makes the world better. So how does music in this sort of social aspect help us make the world better?

1:03:24 IV: Well, I think in the most simplest way I think it engenders empathy. I think it allows us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes to experience someone else’s humanity in a way that maybe we wouldn’t have in another medium. And therefore, feel merciful towards them or feel connected to them or… And somehow understand them a little bit better. So if you think about the kind of music… It gives people an outlet. Like sometimes I think about the turntable culture of the 1970s in New York, where… This is where this was invented and it was invented because people needed to get out of their homes, ’cause they didn’t really love where they lived, and they wanted to be social together, go out into the streets and they’d have these dance parties and they just wanted to keep dancing, and so, they created this two turntable technique, where you can essentially keep the rhythm going. It doesn’t have to stop.

1:04:14 SC: The song doesn’t end.

1:04:15 IV: The song doesn’t end, right? You can keep dancing forever, right? And so anyway, and then you add on to that spoken word and an outlet for people to express themselves and so forth. And so, all of a sudden you can see that how this kind of genre of music evolved out of a sense of trying to engage with your community, trying to make your own situation better.

1:04:38 SC: And of course, there’s a flip side, right, like we already said, there are fight songs, and fight songs can be good if it’s just my sports team versus your sports team, but there’s also martial music, and you can stir up the emotions of a populace using music.

1:04:50 IV: That’s right, exactly. And even in the book I mention Bono, who was my favorite artist growing up, he was basically not wanting to sing Sunday Bloody Sunday, because he was worried it was going to incite more violence. I mean, this is like, he was genuinely worried about this. [laughter] And…

1:05:06 SC: Well, maybe he’s not crazy.

1:05:08 IV: Yeah, I don’t think he is, right? I think that there are times when you can exactly stir up people’s emotions enough where they go out and then they riot. I mean, you do the same thing with for some reason, sports, ball games, right?

[laughter]

1:05:21 SC: Yeah.

1:05:21 IV: I can’t understand that either. But I think part of it… I mean, imagine a sports event without music.

1:05:26 SC: Right.

1:05:27 IV: Right? Take all the chanting and music playing and all that out of it and do you still have the same reaction? I don’t know.

1:05:36 SC: Well, I mean, it goes… I presume that there’s a long-standing relationship between having a football game and having a marching band at half-time, you know?

1:05:43 IV: Well, yeah, even the taunts and the shouts and, we will we… You know, whatever, or like…

1:05:49 SC: Ole, ole, ole, ole…

1:05:49 IV: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yankees sucks, sorry. [laughter] I’m a Yankees fan, so I can say that.

[chuckle]

1:05:54 SC: And the… What I… The example I think of when this topic comes up are soundtracks for movies and TV, right, which always… Which are really important and a little manipulative. I feel like I’m being manipulated.

1:06:05 IV: Oh, totally manipulative. Yeah, I mean, imagine the Psycho scene with like pleasant… You know, the Wheels on the Bus, [laughter] right, and not scary at all.

[laughter]

1:06:12 SC: Right, right, right. I mean, how much have you studied the neuroscience of that? Are there people who…

1:06:17 IV: It’s being more and more studied. And it’s fascinating now, because now we have it in certain places these kind of theaters that are built to study people’s physiology while they’re experiencing concerts or films, where you can look at galvanic skin response, which is a measure of how sweaty your palms are, your breath rate, respiration rate, your heart rate, etcetera. So we can actually see, we can track people’s emotional… At least the physiology of their emotions as they’re looking at films or listening to concerts. And so, yeah, it’s essentially what you think we would find which is that these things are very powerful. And you can look at different aspects of music pacing, the types of instrumentation used, etcetera, that can dictate what kinds of expectations people will start to have, right, like you have an ominous theme and what you see is a rowboat on a lake and it’s foggy, right?

1:07:07 SC: You know something’s going to happen.

1:07:08 IV: Something’s in the water. But if it was a calm pleasant kind of like you’re about to have a spa day music, then you think, oh, it’s just calming.

1:07:17 SC: Because the brain wants to predict things…

1:07:18 IV: That’s right.

1:07:18 SC: And that’s a very good clue for predicting things what’s going to happen…

1:07:20 IV: Exactly.

1:07:20 SC: Yeah. Speaking of the neuroscience of it, forget about just sports or soundtracks, do composers know about the neuroscience? I mean, I joked about Led Zeppelin before, is that a frontier where people are knowingly manipulating our nuclei?

[laughter]

1:07:36 IV: I mean, I’m sure there are, but I also think that in some ways this is an example of the artist’s knowing the neuroscience before the neuroscientists know the neuroscience, right, like Proust was a neuroscientist, that idea, right? So yeah, this is actually why I sort of turned the whole for Cadence, my podcast, and for this book in particular too, turned the idea on its head. I don’t want to use science to reduce music and to take out all the mystery and wonder of it. I want to use music to help me understand the brain, humanity. That’s much more interesting to me, because I feel like musicians and other artists have been studying these aspects of human behavior for so long that we can learn so much from their observations of what is successful and what is not about ourselves and then those make great… We can easily publishable neuroscience research where you say, “Oh, look, here’s this thing that artists have known for 100 years.”

1:08:30 IV: I think it’s really important to actually look to artists. So when people say how do you define music? And my answer is, “Ask your favorite artist, ask your favorite musician,” because they will have a much better idea of what it means to have soul, an idea of what it means to create a good track versus a mediocre track because they know it better than we do. And so I think, to me, we can… The neuroscience can maybe add a little bit, but more importantly, I think that the art can help direct the neuroscience.

1:09:00 SC: I completely agree, but just to be nitpicking there, I do think that sometimes people know it, broadly construed, but can’t say it.

1:09:07 IV: For sure, for sure.

1:09:08 SC: That’s a whole another skillset.

1:09:09 IV: Exactly. And for me, it wasn’t until I actually saw the activation maps of the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens that I understood what my singing teacher was saying to me for five years, which is, “Indre, it’s not the high note that matters, it’s all the notes leading up to the high note.” And I was like, “You’re wrong. If I mess the high note, I’m not going to get paid.” But she was exactly right. Because if the high note comes out of nowhere, first of all, technically that’s really hard and it’s not going to get as great a high note. And two, the audiences doesn’t expect it and they don’t care about it, it just sounds weird.

1:09:39 SC: It’s the journey, not the destination.

1:09:41 IV: It’s the journey. And it wasn’t until I literally saw this beautiful graph in a paper that showed how the dopamine is tracked in the caudate first, and then gives this shoot in the nucleus accumbens.

1:09:52 SC: That might just be you.

1:09:54 IV: Okay.

1:09:54 SC: There might be other people using other methods. We all get to the destination in different ways. So I guess just the final idea that I wanted to ask about is the future of music/the brain. One idea that I’ve been fascinated by is that we as a culture stopped individually producing music because we got recordings instead. We got records and we got radio and now we have CDs and… We don’t have CDs anymore. We used to have CDs. Now we have…

1:10:27 IV: Just digital versions. MP3s…

1:10:29 SC: Whatever they are. ITunes is the word I was looking for there. But I get the impression that technology is making it more possible to create music in some interesting ways.

1:10:41 IV: Yeah, I think we’re at a pivotal point, and maybe everybody says that about every decade. But I actually do feel like we are at a pivotal point. I think that we are in danger of losing the amateur musician, which I think would be really tragic, because I think we gain the most out of actually participating in music making. We see that from babies as early as six months and people as old as 95 who come alive in the nursing home when they get to make music.

1:11:07 IV: But the other side of it is that you’re right that our lives are so busy. We don’t have time to devote 10,000 hours to learning to play the violin, but we can create music with our computers and in these ways and it’s easier than ever. And maybe with technologies like neuro stimulation we’ll even be able to enhance the ability to learn a new musical instrument. I don’t know. That’s still a big question mark. But I do think that we need to really be thoughtful about how we approach music making, but I think this is something that’s happening all over in terms of content creation everywhere. Like you started your own podcast.

1:11:46 SC: Yeah, there you go.

1:11:47 IV: There are lots of people who create videos on YouTube. And so you have this seemingly endless amount of content that now is accessible to everyone, and so curation becomes really important. But also I think that we can be participatory in terms of how we curate music, maybe, and maybe being a DJ is exactly that, curating sound and creating new sound out of it, as opposed to creating your own sound kind of, maybe some DJs will get mad at me for that. But they’re not playing instruments in the same way.

1:12:19 SC: But content creation comes in many forms and I think everyone thinks they can talk…

1:12:22 IV: That’s right.

1:12:24 SC: Anyone can point a camera, but I think that there is a barrier, and maybe it’s just mental, maybe we should try to overcome it, to either performing or composing new music.

1:12:33 IV: Yeah, again, I think it depends on how you and how society defines the musician. And I think up until now, we’ve kind of gotten too far down the line of you need to be a professional musician, otherwise you shouldn’t even bother. And I think that’s really unfortunate because I think in much of human history that wasn’t the case.

1:12:52 SC: Certainly, in Jane Austen novels, someone was playing the piano every night.

1:12:56 IV: All the time. It was part of your education and if you think about it, like 10,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago, if you were going to make music it was around the fire, presumably. Everybody was a part of it. And I think that if we lose that, it’s going to be harder to feel connected to each other in a kind of small way.

1:13:15 SC: I saw a software demonstration of this thing that would basically… A computer program that would help you write a song. And it actually sort of came up with random things and you would pick the ones that sounded good and it would mix them together in a pleasant way.

1:13:27 IV: Cool, but then it has to still be social. Sitting in your basement and creating music with a computer, I think is just not ultimately as powerful or motivating as playing a garage band. And I think that we have to… I think people are going to realize that. Look, we’re adaptive as a species. When things go to swing… The pendulum swings too far in one direction we go somewhere else. So, in terms of how we use social media, if it’s making us sad, we’re going to stop using it in ways that makes us sad. So if we really miss making music together, we’re going to stop sitting in our computers by ourselves creating MP3 files and we’re going to go back into the garage and pick up an instrument.

1:14:01 SC: So what do you think 100 years from now will be the way that we appreciate music?

1:14:05 IV: Sean, sometimes I worry we’re not going to be here.

1:14:07 SC: Oh, there’s that. Conditionalized on survival of the species.

1:14:11 IV: Yeah, I think probably, I still suspect that we will somehow find ways of being physically in sync with each other to a kind of rhythm and that melody will still play a role and we’ll have time when… And then maybe because our robot overlords will allow us to just spend all our days making music.

1:14:30 SC: Okay, so now we’re going to fade out to a piece of music that was written by a friend of mine from graduate school who had a band and this is the theme music for Mindscape. So it’s a little bit of a reminder that we should all be creating a little bit of music as well as appreciating it. Indre Viskontas, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:14:46 IV: Thanks, Sean. It’s good to see you.