Instant Genius - The science of learning music, with Adriana Barton

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

Picking up an instrument is something we’ve all done, or thought about doing. But what is actually going on in our brains when we do? We talk to health writer and cellist Adriana Barton about her book: Wired for Music – A search for health and joy through the science of sound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So, and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Jason Gucher, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Playing an instrument is something most of us would have done at some point, or at least thought about doing, but what's actually going on in our brains when we play? Is musical talent I late? Should we all be playing instruments as children?

And is it ever too late to start? We talked to cellist's turn to health writer Adriana Barton about her book, Wired for Music, a search for health and joy through the science of sound. I thought a nice way to kick off would be by you telling me a bit about your background and how you came to be where you are now, because I think it's quite an interesting story and quite an interesting path. I started cello at five, which isn't the youngest age.

I think Yo-Yo Ma started at three, but it's still quite a young age for such a large instrument. And at the time, not very many people played the cello, and not everybody knew what a cello was. It was the early 70s. And I was brought immediately to a very formal and I would say a strict classical music conservatory in Quebec that was based on the Paris system that has a very long history. And there was sort of a Faustian bargain. I wasn't aware at the time that in exchange for free training and by training not just the cello lessons but theory,

Sulfege orchestra at a very young age, many hours a week. I was to dedicate my life to becoming a professional musician. So this path was sort of chosen for me by the conservatory and probably my mom as well without my knowledge at the time of what I was getting into. But I was a child who wanted to please, and I dedicated myself as I was expected to in this pursuit for 17 years. And I think I internalized a lot of the perfectionism embedded in this system and became quite a OCD about practicing, I would say, and I became injured in my arms, and I would say psychologically too. And eventually at 22, I walked away from it all. And it was quite a devastating time in my life. Yeah, so you mentioned that,

I'm starting, I mean, Yo-Yo Ma is Yo-Yom-R, I guess, but five still quite early to start learning an instrument. So what do you know about? So a lot of people talk about, um, so a lot of people talk people having innate musical talent. Where do you stand on that, having had your experiences and done your research for writing this book? Well, having looked into the very deep evolutionary roots of music in our species, they're so striking that I now believe that we all have some innate talent for music, because our ability to perceive rhythm and pitch are unlike that of most other species. So that's sort of where I stand on it. And of course, not everyone performs like Yo-Yo Ma and the performers we love to see. But a lot of that comes from very early exposure,

the right training, the right cultural background, being surrounded by music from a young age, and lots and lots of practice. So you mentioned that that humans differ in their appreciation and ability to make music from other animals. But there's still some evidence that this habit or this tendency exists in animals. That's true. We've seen cockatoos that can move to a beat at will, which is really striking. And that blew music cognition specialists away because before they had never seen an animal that could do that.

So the ability to clap to a beat is quite rare in animals. but quite common in humans. That's one. So we might see traces and elements of what we'd call musical behavior in other animals, but the degree to which we have it is striking in the animal kingdom, I would say. So what do we know then about, for want of a better word, musicality in the human brain? You know, from reading you up, I understand it starts very early. It does start.

So it's a combination of what we have at birth. and then what we acquire through our environment and human behavior in general. What I found absolutely stunning is that a sleeping newborn baby's brain will show responses to the downbeat, which is the strong beat in a musical rhythm. The baby is asleep. Its brain shows signals where the downbeat should be. And when researchers take that downbeat out, the brain shows signal. the brain shows signals where it should be at birth, which is incredible, and it's not found in

macaques, for instance. This was done using EEG, so electrodes on the scalp. It was non-invasive, and they were able to record this same ability in newborn babies as we find in adults. So rhythm is obviously a large part of music, but then we also have pitch and tone or other elements. So what do we know about what goes on in our brains in terms of, of these sort of things. So why do we find certain intervals more satisfying than others or certain cadences or resolutions or chord progressions more satisfying? There are two parts to that question, and I'll start with the pitch part. So here's another area where we seem to have a way of hearing pitches is how high or how low a sound is. We have a way of hearing this that we don't find in

other primates. So any sound, for instance, Middle C on a piano, in fact, has many, many frequencies in it oscillations per second. Humans hear the very lowest frequency as the main sound. But that's happening in our heads. Another animal might hear the whole range of frequency as one mass of sounds. We hear the lowest one, the fundamental, and we sort of ignore or tune out the overtones. We have a need to hear distinct sounds, and it probably comes from our need to understand language. So that's one part of the question. I think the other part was why we find certain intervals more pleasing. That seems to be a cultural phenomenon. So they've done comparative studies and found that in South America, some groups can hear the difference between consonant and dissonant sounds,

but they don't rate one as more pleasing than the other. So they perceive the different. but they don't have a cultural leaning towards a certain interval. We believe that some of that now comes from the music system that you are raised in, not so much one interval inherently being more pleasing than another. So when we're studying this sort of thing, the responses to music in the brain, how do we do that? Do we attach people to brain scanners and play the music and then see what's going on? Well, I think it depends on what you're measuring. So if you're measuring brain waves, EEG is an effective way of doing that.

If you're measuring how someone responds to music training in the brain, so if you want to measure brain structure, you would use MRI. And if you want to measure how the brain is functioning in relation to music, you would use functional MRI, fMRI. So the answer really depends on what you're trying to look at. So you mentioned music training. And a lot of people say that it's very valuable. and healthy thing to do for your brain.

So can playing an instrument really change the physical structures of our brains? It absolutely can. And that is pretty incredible. There's a famous quote by Oliver Sack saying an anatomist wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a visual artist and a mathematician, somebody like that. But they would recognize the brain of a professional musician in an instant. And the reason is that people who are highly trained at a young age will have a thicker corpus callosum. That's the fibrous nerve bundle between the two brain hemispheres that helps send signals quickly between the two sides.

They will also have more gray matter in the auditory, sensory, and motor areas. But this is something that seems to only happen if the intensive music training occurs before the age of seven or nine. because you want to get the window of brain, synaptic pruning, I don't know if you're aware of that concept. The brain sort of cuts off circuitry that isn't really being used very much, the pathways that aren't being used. So if you use it more, it gets strengthened. And if you don't use it, you have certain windows in life where there's more of that

going on than others. And there seems to be a bit of a window to have that type of brain pattern later on. Whether that's useful and spills over in things, other areas of life, such as math ability or academic success, it so far is looking like it doesn't, although lots of study has been done. What we're seeing is that you can't directly translate that structure of a musician's brain to useful skills beyond playing an instrument. So with that said, there are quite a few studies that I've read investigating the possibility of playing music helping stave off mental decline in older age?

That is a really active area of study. And I agree with you. I too have seen studies that suggest that that type of workout for the brain could be extremely helpful. As are others, I mean, there's some evidence showing that learning a second language is also helpful. So music is one of many very intensive activities for the brain. And I know, for instance, there was a wonderful,

study in Florida of people 65 to 80 years old who had never played piano before and they were enrolled in piano lessons and asked to practice a few times a week. And after six months compared to those who hadn't taken the lessons for six months, they showed better scores and working memory tests and things like that. So that's promising. But a lot more research needs to be done to fully say, yes, this will help stave off cognitive decline. So often in, um, in studies and surveys that ask people, older people, let's say, what their biggest regrets are in life, many of them say either never starting to learn an instrument in the first place or giving up after just a few years and never being very proficient on it.

So, you know, would you say, is it ever too late? A lot of people ask, is it ever too late to start an instrument? It is absolutely not ever too late. And I spoke with people for my book research who took up the guitar. in their 60s because they wanted something to focus their attention on in retirement. And I read about people who started the cello after retirement, which is the pretty ambitious thing to do. And yet it gave them great pleasure and great satisfaction. And choir also is something people can join at any age that is incredibly helpful for

increasing a sense of belonging. Music has an ability to do that more so than other activities. and that's been studied heavily. So there are entry points for people at any level at any time. So I've also seen an area of studying and the sort of science of music in other therapeutical uses, such as for calming people down or even for numbing pain during operations and surgeries and that sort of thing. So how much do we know about that?

I know it's quite a new field. I would say it's not all that new. Music therapy really took off during the Second World War. So literally thousands of American veterans were given music interventions to help with all kinds of problems, ranging from motor, small motor difficulties to PTSD, essentially. And so it's been increasingly studied since the Second World War. But the music therapy tradition dates even centuries before that. And I did a lot of research on that. What we know is that one of the the most powerful effects of music can be understood through the brain's pleasure and reward circuitry. Music has a very strong effect on dopamine and other pleasure chemicals. And when you stimulate the pleasure rewards circuitry, you have a descending effect on the analgesic system, which is the pain relief system. So you can actually listen to music that you love. The more you love it, the better it works. And it can have an effect on pain relief, on stress.

on depression and other things. So sort of going back to your opening statement there that you said, you know, you got physical injuries and you found it in some ways a traumatic experience having this intense musical training when you're younger. So are there any sort of downsides, you think, associated with picking up a musical instrument? I think it all depends on how it's done and what kind of system you're in. because our brain also has a punishment circuitry.

And it appears that the brain's punishment, I'm not making this up, it's a legitimate area of the brain or system in the brain. And when you stimulate the punishment circuitry, you actually inhibit or short circuit the pleasure reward circuitry. So you could have the opposite of the intended benefits of music in how you do it. If you do it in a punishing, strict, self-flagellating way, then you're probably not going to get a lot of those wonderful benefits.

Another thing that's tangentially related to that, that I'm quite interested in, is stage fright and people's nerves getting the better of them, when they're, you know, not just music, but when they're performing music happens a lot, you know, people get the shakes or something. What's going on there? Why does it have such a strong emotional impact on us like this? Stage fright isn't something I looked into a lot for the book, but I would say that the whole notion of performing music, having a separation between performing and being a spectator is relatively new in our evolution. Through most of our evolution, music was a participatory experience. So even if someone was playing a flute, other people might be clapping along or dancing along or singing along. It wasn't one person. person up on stage and everyone else observing quietly in a chair. So I would say the whole

notion of performing in a formal way is antithetical to music making through our evolution. And that might explain why it feels frightening and unnerving for people. So you mentioned this type of collaborative process that was going on. But nowadays we know that we have so many different styles and genres of music. And, you know, people have different tastes, you know. Is there anything that we can say about how people's personalities are reflected in their tasting music? I think that we know more about how taste is formed through certain stages in our lives than we do about personality necessarily. Like someone who loves death metal isn't necessarily an aggressive, angry person. Some of them are quite loving and calm. And that

just happens to be the music they relate to or an outlet for some of their more negative feelings perhaps. We do know that in our teen years, we're very open to many forms of music and people tend to continue listening to music from their youth. Some people are more open-minded and branch out. But when they've done surveys, Nielsen surveys, etc., of music listening patterns, most people stick to the music they like for long periods of time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was health writer and cellist, Adriana Barton. If you want to know more about the fascinating science of music,

check out her book, Wired for Music, a search for health and joy through its science of sound. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines, or visit ScienceFocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals. Because we're built for what you're building.

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