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many find themselves worlds apart, we choose to look so common ground. ah welcome to so think of visionaries, me filthy shevardnadze and art. a science and means of spiritual expression. music is all of the things. so how do mere vibrations of they are become such a powerful medium for us? well, we talk about the neuroscience of music with elizabeth margulies, head of the music cognition. laugh at christian university. elizabeth margulies had of the music cognition lab at princeton university. great to have you

with us and what a great topic were discussing today. welcome to our show. so happy to be here. so all right, in a nutshell, what happens in our brain when we hear music is there are some special musical region in the brain that gets activated. that's, that's a wonderful question. and i think it's the kind of intuition people had before we started getting in there and looking at what really happens. because it turns out, in fact, that rather than musical perception being consigned to one special area, it's really distributed throughout the brain and resides in areas that are more commonly used for many other kinds of phenomena. so ranging from, you know, emotional response to a motor response to and i think one of the most interesting kind of findings is

that even when you're passively listening to music though you're just sitting mary or. ready not even moving over the perhaps still there is activity that we can show on a brain scanner when you're in your motor. so the areas that serve motor control and, and movement. so there's the sense of kind of embodied sympathetic movement while you're listening to music, that seems pretty special. matter what kind of music we're listening to, i mean, will the same brain regions be effected? if i'm listening to say chopin, or if i'm listening to having metal stuff, i love that passion because actually one of the biggest myths in this area, it's kind of proven hard to retract centers around the mozart effect. which, where people have this kind of sense that science has decreed that listening to mozart especially would make you smarter. whereas in fact,

that is not true at all. and sort of the studies that initially seem to imply that proved to be a really just demonstrating and arousal effect. so the original study, people listened to some mozart and then they did a spatial reason past that where you have these kind of images that you're trying to rotate and identify which one was the correct rotation. and people didn't do a little better on that. if they'd listen to a motor piece 1st, but the comparison condition there was just silence. and it turned out that if she listened to anything moderately eat from whatever genre you get the same effects because it's really just a kind of effect from getting more alerts and aroused and into what's happening around you that we used you better performance on the test but how does our brain actually know that it is listening to music and not just, you know, some random sequence of random noise?

it's, is there is some filter and it that helps cow one from the other. yeah, it's a wonderful question. and it turns out that actually the boundaries between those different kinds of stimuli are less kind of hard then you might imagine. so there are lots of conditions under which something that you could hear as noise or you could hear as speech can actually end up being heard as music. most famously the speech to song allusion where you can take a short clip of speech repeated a number of times. and it sounds like it's being sung after the string of repetition. what's really great about those kinds of examples is we have been found sequence that is the same. nothing's changing about that is being repeated. but are the perceptual apparatus that we're bringing to it is transforming across those repetitions. and we can take advantage of that to try to understand what's happening when people hear something as music. but i mean, music is technically

a sequence of noises, right? err, vibrations coming into the brain case through the ear. how exactly does the brain turn air into doper means that releases in the brain when we hear something we like? i think that's the 1000000 dollar question. i think you've just pinpointed it right there. and basically, the way people go about tackling that is trying to understand the various stages, right? you started the ears periphery, you go through kind of the basic processing levels and up and up till the cortex. and you can kind of trace how different aspects of music are represented and you know, processed along the way. and i think one of the most surprising findings there is that some of the earliest processing stages at the level of the brain stem, for example, when really you just get this. what's called

a frequency following response, where you have neurons firing in, think to the frequency of the sounds that they're encountering, that that's actually valuable to experience. so when people have musical training that started early enough, this very, very, you know, early representation of sound is more accurate, more, more faithful. and, you know, after very kind of early stage is processing. and this is one of the hypothesis mechanisms for how musical training can impact things like language acquisition and reading skills. because if you're really tuning into the sounds more accurately, you could see how that could underlie lack of other kinds of skills and other domains. the young music can music, alter my brain for the best, even if i'm not a kid can help me with alzheimer's parkinson's. there's really

fascinating emerging research along those lines. and yeah, i think you highlighted there 2 of the best studies cases one that when, when people have dementia, often exposure to music can unlock memory abilities that seem to be dormant, otherwise. and the case of, of parkinson's, where when people are exposed to music while attempting to, to walk that the gate becomes more stable and regular. the 3rd kind of case that's, that's been quite well studied as cases of aphasia, where people lose the experience, the ability to speak. but often the ability to seeing is preserved and you can kind of scaffold on that to build back that capacity for spoken language. yeah,

i mean there was some like little famous video that went viral where at ballerina in her ninety's, who had, i believe, same or hearing the music to which the dance when she was a young girl, made her reconstruct the dance pattern. i don't know if you've seen that veto it was maybe like, haven't seen that one. yeah. yeah. i know of similar cases where it's you know, it's not just oh, this is so great. this person did you remember the song that's wonderful for that. i mean that is wonderful, but the fact that that can also kind of bring in their unlock other types of batteries makes it particularly powerful. can music actually amend our brain injuries? and i don't only mean emotional part, i mean on neural level, right. i mean, i guess in, in a way these examples from aphasia are, are like that,

right? because those are cases where the, the part of the brain bad is devoted to language processing is damaged and or language production is damaged. but we're able, people are still able to produce song. and what you want to do is kind of build new circuitry in these areas that aren't damaged. and that capitalizes on these kinds of ability to sing the syllables and you know, develop or reconstruct this ability to speak in a non kind of things on way. so that you know that, that is this kind of repetitive phenomenon. and you know that these kinds of relationships between music and clinical practice. i haven't received quite the level of study that would allow really robust kind of treatment

interventions in some cases. and so there's, there's a big initiative right now from that age to kind of fund research that really brings together people in clinical medicine and people who study music and the brain to, to really get a better handle on all of this and how it can be used for good, so thoroughly positive, ongoing kind of initiative, a brain change because they're so flexible way. what if you're playing music, or if you're listening to music, what i kind of brain areas when you're listening or playing music can develop and how quickly i'm. so one of the most kind of easy to, to see changes in the brains of people who spent a lot of time playing an instrument or making music, or singing our brain regions devoted to motor control. because there's all this

kind of specialized, you know, experience with a finger movements that are relevant to a lot of instrument playing. and then i think the one that's maybe a little more surprising and possibly even a little more interesting is that the corpus callosum. so the part of the brain is really getting the 2 hemispheres to talk to one another is bigger and people who had a lot of experience playing an instrument. so this kind of a fancy interpretation of that might go something like ok, well maybe you know, because playing music draws on so many different parts of the brain, so many different capacities that experience doing it helps these kind of various parts really work together in, in a more general sense, elizabeth, we're going to take a short break right now and we'll, we're back. we'll continue talking to elizabeth margulies. had the music cognition

laugh at princeton university, talking about what music really means to us on near scientific level. stay with ah ah, and i make no certainly no borders line to nationalities and users. as a merge, we don't have authority. we don't have a back seat. worried, needs to be ready. people are judgment,

common crisis with we can do better, we should be better. everyone is contributing each in their own way, but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever. the challenge is great. the response has been met. so many good people are helping us. it makes us feel very proud that we are in it together. ah, our back was elizabeth margulies, had the music cognition lab at princeton university. it was a bit here is like a $1000000.00 question. why is music exclusively a humans?

thank and then why don't animals have music, for instance, right. there are so many different perspectives out there on this question because some people, i mean, so the way people go about kind of addressing that usually is trying to figure out ok, what are the individual components that we think are really essential to something we might want to call it so this could be something like, ok, synchronizing to beat. and then people go around actually starting sometimes from these viral youtube videos and you know, finding cockatoos who seem like they can do it. and then, you know, testing them and seeing whether it's really true that they can synchronize to be. and it's really about kind of pulling apart these individual capacities together. comprise something we might want to think about as, you know, music king. and i think the jury is really out and there are very real

disagreements in the field about the extent to which various non human animals are or are not musical. so when you look at it right, everyone is musical. everyone listens to some kind of music. someone listens to have a metal like with all this is to wrap someone listen to jazz. i will listen to classing, but everyone listening to music and anyone pretty much can learn how to sing. going to how to plan instruments. if there is a will. why is that like is, is everyone musical or why is everyone musical lesson more correct question? is that something innate that is coded into us? bray 8 i was. so this is the, i mean be, these are some, some very key questions and i think it can help to think about the way that culture and biology really are co constituent in some ways. so

i right where people look at me say ok, well babies respond preferential, really tiny babies, respond preferentially to song from their parents. right? you can really many people have the experience you're trying to kind of see the baby and you're talking to them. and if you just kind of slow your speech down as a exaggerate pinch contours, you can get the baby to stare. you at these adoring curious eyes. so people do that, right? there's a special kind of infant directed speech that people often use it. this kind of quietly music lives version of, of speech or even, you know, singing to infants. and sometimes people say, okay, well that's some kind of evidence of this innate proclivity to, you know, a musical kind of kind of interaction. and it is true that in any culture that has been studied,

him is known about that people do something bad is you know, thought about by researchers anyway, as, as music and all these things kind of point to this, having some kind of fundamental role in human human life, why does some people are, you know, more develop musically? their ear is naturally developed than others. and others listening to train really hard to get where this people are from birth at what does it really what, what defines this like as a special place and a brain genes something else? right. i mean, most of the studies that look at the effect of musical training on the brain are correlational in nature. and that's because it's not ethical rights to add burst.

say, you know, i'm going to randomly find this group of babies to have the benefit of musical training. and these ones have any musical training for 20 years. and i will check out what their brains are like once they're adults. and so we don't have, you know, rightfully studies like that. rather, there is studies as a ok, here's a group of people that have had a lot of training here. we try to match as well as possible demographic characteristics of these kids who have not had musical training. but i mean, it will say ok, well the brains of the kids have had training look different in x, y, z way. but of course, it's possible that those brain differences existed prior to the training, and in fact, are related to, you know, why this group pursued and stuck with training over this group. so it's really hard to kind of pull apart that question, given the methodological limitations that we list letter, brent birth thing, or it's who for me is like a definition of what

a musician should be like. whole encompassing sense. he said that music is mostly about establishing a repeating pattern of tones or beads and then breaking it. how does repetition in music work from a neural point of view? right. so i think there's a lot to say about repetition to me, repetitions especially interesting because it's so common, so prevalent in music and less so and many other kind of similar domains. and i think one of the things that's going on there is that repetition is really drawing us into a kind of participatory relationship with music. so once you've heard something a number of times, you feel like you can kind of sing along with it. like you're a part of it in some important way, but as he just mentioned there, it also sets up expectations that then the music can violate. and we know that violating expectations and that way can be a really pleasurable experience for,

for listeners. so it has been tracked really well through studies using a number of different methods that, you know, when you listen to a sequence of tones and you think x is going to happen. and, you know, why happens instead that kind of distinctive brain responses in gauge that are relevant to how we experience reward and pleasure. well, listening to some people look at this as a kind of music is a kind of choreographing of our expectations. and where, where a certain kind of surprise is the most valuable and pleasurable kind of experience . i think that's not the only way to how musical pleasure, but it's kind of one of, you know, opportunity options in this tool box. but neither can warren making music somehow helping us perceive sounds. because when you have to bring up an example of how,

if we repeat a word, a 1000000 times it's meaning will integrate and only sound will be left. yes. so right, that's a case where it seems particularly rewarding in the case of music to really listen to those basic kind of sonic attributes. and in a way that's not so important necessarily in speech, right, where we're just kind of trying to listen through. did you think chronic pronunciation or something that somebody's using to get to the meeting behind the word? whereas in music it's sort of resist it's. there's not the summary, this capacity for summarizing or paraphrasing what you just heard. it's really want to kind of get into the juiciness of what you're actually hearing. so the repetition, you know, help with that. is there rhythm that we're here in the womb, connected to the love of the repeating rhyme, or, you know, rhythm we have. why do like, i don't know heart speech in the same rhythm everywhere. but musical rhythms are

actually wildly different from culture to culture. imagine sort of a process musical kind of tradition or music culture building, where there are these kinds of rhythms that to which people tend to be exposed generally, right? so that's like through kind of rhythms you're mentioning like the heart beat or the rhythm of walking or what have you. but there are others that are kind of built up iteratively over time in terms of practice within a language. i'm either a number of studies showing bad linguistic rhythm that the linguistic environment that music is made in imprint on the rhythms that you find in the music of that place. so there's this kind of yeah, building up of certain rhythmic practices and conventions over time. similar to how

you end up getting, you know, languages that show such amazing variety around the world. you know, when people are having like a real musical tree. but i'm not talking, you know, listening to hold music on a phone, but like really getting into their favorites. bah, or beatles for a brief moment, everything just sort of, you know, disappears and you become one with the music. i'm sure you know that feeling. how does that work exactly. especially on a level of a brain. what causes the brain? yeah, people, people talk about this and study them these experiences as peak so called peak experiences of music. and one way they've been studying that, that's pretty interesting, actually is just surveying thousands of people and looking at the descriptions they provide up these experiences and trying to understand what they have in common from

person to person and place to place. and people also study them in terms of neuro imaging, right? so bringing people in to the m r i scanner asking them to, to bring their self selected, the most powerful chills, inducing new music. and it was really cool about this divine a because you know what causes you chills when listening might be really different from what does that for me then the, these, these kinds of studies will use the music i bring in as a control stimulus for you. so you're kind of balancing out the features of the music itself and just looking at these kind of extreme reactions and you find that reward circuitry, right? of the same kind that is relevant for other kinds of highly pleasurable experiences, like no food or sacs or illicit drugs is online and much the same way when people are having highly pleasurable musical experiences. how the music gets stuck in my

head. and i'm not only talking about like top 10 hits that you hear everywhere i'm talking about anything like and movie soundtrack, or someone not even singing, humming or not even humming. talking about marlon, brando and booms like a sequence from godfather, just pops into my hat. what happens there? what's the process behind that? so your worms are actually a pretty tantalizing, fascinating kind of window into how we process music in the brain. because this kind of stickiness doesn't seem to apply to other similar kinds of sounds. to me like, like it's much rare to get a little clips of speech, for example, stuck in your head. and it seems to be related to how repetitive music is. and in fact, that when to get stuck in our head, they tend to loop and repeat in

a way that, you know, sometimes people think is wonderful. and sometimes people are really annoyed by that. but i think it really speaks to the way this is kind of blurring in the representation of music between hearing something and doing something because it kind of feels like we're thinking it in our head. right. and this goes back to this idea that even when you're passively listening, that regions of your brain devoted to motor control are active. so there's something really a lot more participatory about musical listening and musical representation than other kinds of auditory perception. thank you so much for being with us today. listen, but it was one of the most fascinating talks i've had this season. thank you. i really appreciate it to talk with you.

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