a trail ah, when so many find themselves worlds apart, we choose to look for common ground. was diagnosed with cancer in 2000 when the doctors told me the cancer was incurable . i knew i had to make a change. so i decided to travel to one of the most toxic places in america, florida. one of florida is biggest industries and best kept secrets, is fostering one and the biggest layer is $85000000000.00 industry. is mosaic, and i, there are reports of millions of gallons of contaminated water now flowing into the florida aquifer name from there's a chronic i don't want to hear that word polar thing, but that's what it is. i'm in 2013 my all our family dog, my brother, who was 21 years old,

myself and my father were all diane. rob did they brought a black hole and the good plan. right. yeah, yeah. maybe they'll actually learn that more. know is more important than welcome to so think of visionaries, me sophie shevardnadze and art assign and means of spiritual expression. music is all things. so how do mere vibrations of they are become such a powerful media for us? well, we talk about the newer science of music with elizabeth margulies, head of the music cognition, laughter,

christian university elizabeth margulies had of the music cognition lab at princeton university. great to have you with us and what a great topic we're discussing today. welcome to our show. thanks so happy to be here. so all right, in a nutshell, what happens in our brain when we hear music? is there 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, so you're just sitting mary or not even moving over the perhaps still there is activity that we can show on a brain scanner when you are in your motor agents. 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, show pad or if i'm listening to having metal stuff. i love that question because actually one of the biggest myths in this area, it's kind of proven hard to retract centers around the most artifact 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 special reason past that. 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 she listened to anything moderately up 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 tell one from the other. yeah, it's a wonderful question. and it turns out that actually the boundaries between the 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 is noise or you could hear is 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 repetitions. 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? or reparations 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. busy like i think that's the $1000000.00 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 that frequency of the sounds that they're encountering, that that's actually valuable to experience. so when people have musical training but started early enough, this very, very, you know, early representation found is more accurate, more, more faithful. and, you know, act is 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 lots of other kinds of skills and other domains. young music can music, alter my brain for the best, even if i'm not a kid?

can i help me with alzheimer's? parkinson there's really fascinating emerging research along those lines. and yeah, i think you highlighted there 2 of the best that you 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 spend quite well studied as cases of aphasia, where people lose the experience, the ability to speak. but often the ability to sing is preserved and you can kind

of scaffold on that to build back that capacity for spoken language. yeah, i mean there was like little famous video that went viral where at ballerina in her ninety's, who had, i believe the same or hearing the music to which she 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, i 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, do you remember these songs? 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 a way these examples from aphasia are, are like that, right? because those are cases where the, the part of the brain that 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 to really 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 are kind of brain areas when you're listening or playing music can develop and how quickly i so one of the most kind of easy to, to see changes in the brains of people who spent

a lot of time playing and instrument or making music or singing are 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 in 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 when we're back, we'll continue talking till is a bit more google is had the music cognition laugh at princeton university, talking about what music really means to us on near scientific level, day with ah ah, working room or should she popped in? she said, well, i'm getting ready to go shopping for christmas. and when we say

there was a going to buy another shooting another safe part of american life shattered by violence. the gunman was armed with an a ar 15, semi automatic rifle. when the issue comes home, it's time to act when we're silent on this issue, the other side wins by default, lady that lived over there. i was walking one of the dogs, which is why do you wear again where you skin doesn't take it off it. i think the people need to take responsibility in their own and be prepared if those kinds of weapons who are less available. we wouldn't have a lot of the shootings that we certainly wouldn't have. the number of s l look forward to talking to you all. that technology should work for people. a robot must obey the orders given by human beings, except where such order that conflict with the 1st law show your identification. we

should be very careful about our personal intelligence at the point, obviously is to place trust, rather than fear i would like to take on various jobs with artificial intelligence . real summoning with a robot must protect its own existence with her so her back was elizabeth margulies handles and music initial lab at princeton university. elizabeth hair is like a $1000000.00 question. why is music exclusively a humans thing?

i mean, 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 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, so 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 that there is really out, and there are very real disagreements in the field about the extent to which

various non human animals are or dod musical. so when you look at it, right, everyone is musical. everyone listens to some kind of music. someone listens to having metal like with that. so all this is to rep someone listen to jazz. so i will listen to classic with everyone. listen to music and anyone pretty much can learn how to sing. going to how to plan instruments. if there is the will, why is it like it 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 show, this is irene b. these are some, some very key questions and i think it can help to think about the way that culture and biology really are a co constituent of in some ways. so, ah, right, we're in, people look at may say, okay,

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 the pitch contours, you can get the baby to stare. you with these adoring curious eyes. so people do that, right? there's a special kind of infant directed speech that people often use. it's 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 in a proclivity to, you know, a musical kind of kind of interaction. and it is true that in any culture that has been studied and 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 developed musically? their ear is naturally developed than others. and others the, she need to train really hard to get where this people are from birth. at what is it really what, what defines this like as a special place in a brain genes? something else? right. i mean, don't, most of the studies that look at the effects of musical training on the brain are correlational in nature. and that's because it's not ethical, right? to at birth say, you know, i'm going to randomly find this group of baby used to have the benefit of musical

trinity. and these ones didn't have any musical training for 20 years. and then we'll check out what their brains are like once they're adults. so we don't have, you know, rightfully studies like that. rather, there is studies as an ok. here's a group of people that have had a lot of training. here's we try to match as well possible demographic character. 6 of these kids who have not had musical training, but i mean, it will say, okay, well, the brains of the kids have had training. look different in x, y, z the 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 exist . letter brent, 1st thing, or 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, power of repetition and 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 in many other kind of similar domains. and i think one of the things that's going on there is that 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 you 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 or for listeners. so 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 acts is going to happen. and you know, why happens instead that kind of distinctive brain responses and gauge that are relevant to you, how we experience, reward and pleasure. while listening to some people look at this is 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 have musical pleasure, but it's kind of one of you know, opportune options in this tool box of award making music somehow helping us perceive sound because we used 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 is not so important necessarily in speech, right, where we're just kind of trying to listen through. did you sing chronic pronunciation or something that somebody's using to get to the meeting behind the word? whereas the music, it's sort of resist it's. there's not this 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, helps 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 speed 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 kind of rhythms you're mentioning like the heartbeat or the rhythm of, 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 mean, what number of studies showing bad, linguistic rhythm, 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 a 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 trip. 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 fmr i scanner, asking them to, to bring their self selected, the most powerful chills, inducing new music. and it was really cool about this design of because you know, what causes you chills when listening might be really different from what does that leave 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 sex or illicit drugs is online and much the same way when people are having highly pleasurable musical experiences. how does music get 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 a 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. but i think it really speaks to the way this is kind of blurring. in the representation of, 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 listing 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. good to talk with you.

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