Science Friday - UFO Report, Animal Play, Alzheimers and Music. June 25, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

Is The Truth About UFOs Out There? Over the past several years, U.S. Navy pilots have reported several instances of ”unexplained aerial phenomena” while in flight. They’ve recorded videos that show shapes that appear to move in unusual ways, zooming and turning in ways  beyond the capabilities of our own aircraft. After several members of Congress requested an explanation for the videos, the government put together a report on the phenomena.   The report, however, doesn’t definitively answer the question of what the observations show. While it does say that the observations aren’t of secret U.S. technology, it has no conclusions on whether the reports show foreign technology, camera artifacts, or something else—like alien technology. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, spends his time searching for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. He says that while he does believe intelligent alien life exists—and may even be discovered within the next 20 years or so—he does not think the sightings included in the government report indicate alien visitors. He shares his reasons for skepticism with host Sophie Bushwick, as well as talks about people’s desire to believe in extraterrestrials.  Rats Learn To Hide And Seek  One of the most wonderful things about the internet is how you could spend years watching videos of animals at play. There’s the classic cat-playing-with-a-box genre. You can also watch a dog playing jenga. And you can type in pretty much any combination of animals, along with the word “playing,” and find adorable videos—like a baby deer, rough-housing with a lemur. Incredible stuff.  Neuroscientist Juan Ignacio Sanguinetti of the Humboldt University of Berlin gets inspiration for his work by watching home videos like that. And in his latest work, in the journal Science, he describes playing hide-and-seek—with rats. Making Music To Sharpen Aging Brains While research continues on drugs that can slow or reverse the- damage of Alzheimer’s disease, there is already evidence for a lower-tech intervention: music. Research on the benefits of listening to music has found some evidence that it can activate regions of the brain not damaged by disease progression, soothe emotional disturbances, and promote some cognitive improvement in later stages of Alzheimer’s. A new analysis in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society earlier this year looked at a different question. Can making music, whether by playing a musical instrument or singing, have an effect on the brains of people in the early stages of cognitive decline? The team focused specifically on people experiencing ‘mild cognitive decline,’ which can be the first step in a progression toward Alzheimer’s disease or more serious dementia. The researchers found evidence from 21 studies, involving more than 1,400 participants around the world, that yes, playing musical instruments, singing, or otherwise participating in making music can have a small but consistent benefit in recall, and other measures of brain health. Lead author Jennie Dorris, a professional percussionist turned PhD student studying rehabilitation sciences, talks to guest host Sophie Bushwick about the evidence for cognitive improvement, and what questions still remain about the effects of active music participation on the brain. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick, sitting in for Ira Flato. Later in the hour, some new research into music therapy. But first, what summer would be complete without a big blockbuster featuring aliens? And there's one expected for release this week. But it's not coming from Hollywood. It's a long-awaited government report on UFOs. Of course, in government style, the report isn't about UFOs, but what it calls UAP's unidentified aerial phenomena, and it includes some videos of strange things moving in strange ways in the sky. The report doesn't say that these objects are the result of aliens, but it does leave that possibility open. Joining me now to talk about the report and what it might mean is Seth Shostak, he's senior astronomer at the

SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Thanks for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be here, Sophie. So where did this report come from? What's the origin story here? Well, there have been lots of interesting videos that have been appearing in the newspapers since, well, 2017. And I think that that's the direct impulse for this report. People want to know what these things are.

You look at these videos and it looks like there's something in front of the aircraft that made the videos that's doing funny maneuvers. And this sort of feeds into a situation that has been developing probably for the last five to ten years in the UFO community, which, by the way, it includes one-third of the population

of the United States. One-third of the population thinks that some of these things seen in the sky are actually alien craft. And they've been waiting for the government to come clean about what they know. So that's the real impetus for the report. Some of the videos do look strange. So what's your take on them?

Yeah, they do look strange. Now, mind you, this is coming from the military. The military actually made the videos, right? And the military has an obvious and direct interest in anything that's in the sky that they don't know about clearly, right? I mean, I don't know whether they think they might be aliens that have come to visit, but they do think that they might be craft from some other country and they need to know what their capabilities are and where they are, that kind of thing. So there are multiple motives. But from the standpoint of alien visits, which is, of course, what a lot of people are quite interested in, you know, you see these things in the videos where in one relatively well-known one, you see what looks like a black peanut right in the center of the field of view. And then that black peanut kind of twists and so forth. And, you know, what is this thing? And then it might leave the field of view altogether. So the conclusion that some people draw is that this thing is some sort of. craft that can move very quickly, can move around the sky very quickly, pulling, you know,

so many Gs that if you actually had a human in that thing, you know, their face would be the size of a pancake, or at least the dimensions of a pancake after making that maneuver, all these sorts of things feed into this, this need by the UFO folk to have the government come clean about what it knows. You mentioned they could be some sort of technology from another country. Yeah. I mean, it has been hypothesized that what they're actually photographing here are not Klingon craft, but they might be Chinese craft or a Russian craft or something like that.

Personally, I don't get that impression. I think that if indeed the Russians or the Chinese had craft that were able to sort of pace these Navy F-18 Hornets, we would already know about that because they do plenty of reconnaissance from satellites and stuff like that. We wouldn't have to wait until they showed up over the oceans off California to know about those things. Obviously, I don't know what these things are for sure. Nobody seems to know, even the Navy says they don't know what they are, but they look to me like artifacts from the cameras in most cases or very simple things. When you see a peanut like that, this is an infrared camera, it's sensitive to heat. You might just be looking up the tailpipes of a twin engine jet in front of you.

So do you think camera artifacts are the new explanation, the new swamp gas or weather balloon? Yeah, I think they might very well be. I mean, there are some very clever. analyses of these Navy videos in which they point out, look, what you're seeing here is the result of the camera gimbals, in other words, the way they keep objects centered in the field of view and camera artifacts. And anybody who has a camera know that there are all sorts of camera artifacts. I get emails every day about, you know, sightings, and not a small number of them actually are sending me photos that are the result of very well-known and almost trivial camera artifacts, but not everybody knows about internal reflections or diffraction patterns.

But those can look like aliens if you're inclined to believe they're aliens. Well, is there anything that's in this report that's not based on video that could be based on an eyewitness account where you can't blame it on an issue with the camera? Yes, there are plenty of eyewitness accounts. Actually, there's a reporting center in eastern Washington State that accepts reports of UFOs, because they were for such a long period of time called. Last year they got like between 7 and 8,000 reports. And the question is, well, what are all those, right?

I mean, eyewitness reports. And the people who report these things, they're not nuts or anything like that. They've seen something, but the question is what? And we don't know that. And I think the same is true here. Some of the Navy pilots have also claimed that they could see things, you know, with their own eyes that they didn't understand too. So you have a mix of the videos, but also eyewitness testimony.

But of course, Sophie, eyewitness testimony, it's not great evidence in a murder trial, and it's even less great evidence when you're talking about science. And from what we've been told, the government report is pretty noncommittal. You know, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Why do you think they're being so careful? Well, it may be that, you know, there's a certain fraction of the videos that they have. I mean, all you're seeing is a very tiny fraction of the evidence they presumably have. They're probably making videos every time the plane takes off, right?

So they have a lot of material, but this seems to be, you know, special because it's interesting and it's showing something they don't understand. That is the nature of all UFO investigations. And there were plenty of them in the 1950s, right? And how did they work? Well, there were things seen that people didn't understand, and they would bring together are usually a bunch of academics and people who knew about effects in the atmosphere and aviation and stuff like that.

And they'd say, okay, let's look at the 100 best cases. And the report eventually would say, well, 90 of those 100, we could explain. But there are these 10 that we can't explain. And so there'll be members of the public who say, see, those 10, those are the ones. The aliens are in that sample. And that's really, really very strange. It's like saying, you know, well, the local police department solved 90% of the homicides in the city, and they were all committed by humans. But what about those other 10, you know, or 10%? Maybe they're committed by aliens.

Maybe it doesn't seem to be a very reasonable conclusion. And we should note that the main report is unclassified, but there's apparently a classified appendix. So do you think that's something that those people who really want to believe in the 10% that the 10% are caused by aliens? Do you think that's going to be something UFO fans are going to latch on to? You betcha. Of course, this report is not going to shift the goalposts or convince anybody. I mean, the skeptics are going to say, look, you didn't find any convincing proof of extraterrestrials. And that's such an important thing to know.

You know, if you didn't find convincing proof, you know, you haven't moved the ball down the field. And the UFO folk will say, look, see, they couldn't say categorically that none of these were alien crafts. So everybody's happy. Right. And you are at the SETI Institute. So your job is in large part searching for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Do you believe that they're out there somewhere? Well, of course.

Yeah. Yeah, we wouldn't do our experiment if we didn't think they were out there somewhere. But I think we have a slight edge in this because to begin with, there are a lot of opportunities for aliens that, you know, might not be in our airspace. They're like a trillion planets in our own galaxy. A trillion, that's a lot. And, you know, most of those planets are not so interesting, but it said that something like one in 10 or one in 100, it doesn't matter.

Even if it's one in a thousand or even one in a million, that still leaves a lot of planets where you could have, you know, the evolution of life and maybe intelligence. So, yeah, we do think that they're out there. But there's another difference, which I think is important. If we were to pick up a signal, for example, coming from another star system that you thought, you know, this is somebody's transmitter, we would be able to very,

verify that, you know, have other people look at it. And that's a little different from the UFO situation where verification is very difficult. Speaking of that kind of signal, how long do you think it might be before we actually find one? You know, I bet everybody a cup of coffee that will find them in the next 10 or 20 years. Not more than a cup of coffee. You want to make that clear. But the reason is simply that because of some private funding for SETI, there will be more than a million star systems that will be checked out for signals. That's what we do, just like in the movie Contact, you know, in the next 15 years or so. And after that, it'll be more millions.

And it just seems to me that if you look at a million star systems, your chances of finding a signal are not zero. So that's why I'm willing to bet that cup of coffee. You've talked about why you think that there are aliens, but you're still skeptical of reports like this one. Yeah. You could make arguments that actually have nothing to do with the data, just is this reasonable. Why would the aliens, for example, decide to visit the Earth now when we can photograph them with this kind of equipment? Maybe they've been here all time. But if they were here all the time, you know, we would have seen them.

I mean, amateur astronomers are looking at the skies all the time. You know, every clear night, there's some amateur astronomers looking up at the sky. And they're very good at recognizing things that are, you know, not Jupiter means or anything. like that. And they don't report these things. There are more than 700 satellites in orbit around the Earth that can see things. Well, we go on Google Earth. You can see your car in the driveway. I mean, they can at least see something that size. And I'm sure many of them can do much better. And they don't see these things. And you say, well, they do see them. But the government's covering up. But yeah, not all these satellites belong to the U.S. government. So you have to assume that

there's a big cabal of, you know, some of secret agreement that all countries with satellites agree not to report the UFOs. And it doesn't really make sense to me. What would it take to convince you that one of these videos is actually a video of alien activity? So what sort of evidence do you think that even skeptics might want to be on the lookout for? You notice that back in the 50s and 60s, there were photos made of UFOs and films and so forth. The objects were always rather far away. So you didn't see any detail. And that's important. Now, cameras have gotten better, and now everybody has a camera in their pockets, right? But somehow the photos haven't gotten any better. The aliens have continued to distance themselves based on

your photographic capability. That doesn't make any sense, but that seems to be what's happened. So I think what it would take to convince me is either physical evidence, you know, one of these things lands on the sidewalk and you kind of snare it and you take it to the local lab and open it up, that would be pretty convincing. Or if they just make a photo close enough that you, You could see the rivets or little green faces behind the windows or whatever. You could see something with that. You could say unambiguously, this is not, you know, from Earth. I mean, it shouldn't be so hard to recognize that.

Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer with the SETI Institute. Thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure. When we come back, delving into the question of whether animals play, stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. For you pet owners, you might have a favorite. game that you play with your dog. Or maybe you spent hours teaching your cat to chase a laser beam.

But what is happening in the brain of the animal during those games? In this next conversation from 2019, Ira spoke with a neuroscientist who investigated this by studying play in rats. One of the most popular things about the internet is spending hours, days, maybe even years, watching videos of animals at play. play. You know how many videos of animals there are and you have watched? Just amazing. You've got the classic cat playing with a box genre, but you can also watch a dog playing jenga. Seriously, Google it. And you can type in pretty much any combination of animals and the word playing, and you find adorable little videos like a baby deer, roughhousing with a lemur. Incredible stuff out there. So why am I telling you this? Well, because my next guest, a neuroscientist,

actually gets inspiration for his work by watching those home videos. Ideas about how to study animals, interacting, and playing with other animals and humans. He describes playing hide and seek with rats. Yes, we have that for you.

My question for you, our audience is what games do you play with your pets? And how do you know when your pet is having fun? Here's what you told us on Science Friday Voxpop app. So I have a little Boston Terrier named Pablo, and this dog loves fetch. When he sees the ball, his eyes dilate. He's

obsessive. Every 10 or 12 throws, I have to hide the ball just so he can catch his breath. And I'm assuming he's having fun while doing it, because as long as you're willing to keep throwing the ball, he's willing to fetch it. When I do a partial water change in my aquarium, the Harlecoe Nuresbores, or three of them, will swim alternately up into the stream going against the current of the incoming water, and then they'll stop and get washed back down into the tank and then they'll come back up again kind of in rotation. It sure does look like they're playing. I have fun with my cat when she brings me toys and looks at me like she really, really wants me to throw them and I throw them and she gets all excited and bolts after it. Like, well, we call her NASCat as in NASCAR, NASCAR. Nascat.

Sound familiar to you. Do you play with your pet? So that was Kevin from Nevada. It's Steve from Pennsylvania, Tamara from Colorado. Juan Ignacio Nacho Sanguinetti is a neuroscientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin and one of the authors on that research published in science.

And we have a link to that and videos. You want to see the video, rat hide and seek and what animals are playing? Well, it's up there on our website, ScienceFriety.com slash Animal Games. ScienceFriety.com slash animal games. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Sanguennetti.

Thank you. Thank you, Ira. It's a pleasure talking to you. Were you really inspired to study animal play by the videos on the internet? Well, so in the lab, we've been looking into play behavior for a couple of years. A few years ago, a lab published research about tickling rats and how rats vocalize and create this joy laughters when they are tickled by a human experimenter. we've been looking for different ways of study play behavior in animals it is true that anybody who's had a pet before knows that you can play different things with your animals as some of your audience has described fetch is a classic game you play with a dog

and if you you teach a dog how to play fetch then you'll need to hide from him because he will come with the ball to you like all the time so we've been looking into different place and luckily youtube is a treasure trope of animal behavior The fact that anybody has a cell phone and a camera and their cell phone allows us to see so many different animals and so many different animal behaviors just by going into YouTube, you know? I want to get right to the rats playing the game. You mentioned that you could tickle them that and make certain sounds. We have a sample of these sounds modified so humans can hear them. Wow. What was that, Dr. Sanguinetti? What were we hearing there?

That is a rat being tickled and having this joy. vocalizations, which are these vocalizations in the ultrasound range, so humans can hear them and that are associated with positive emotions, with playful behaviors and playful encounter between rats. And that was part of the things that we found in our study when we tried to put now rats to play a more sophisticated form of play, the game known as hide-and-seek, a very old game, a game that is shared by many different cultures in the world. You know, I didn't really, until I looked at the video, it's up on our website at science friday.com slash animal games. I could not believe that anybody could play hide and seek with a rat until I saw this.

It's amazing. How did you get the rat to learn how to play this? So the first thing to point out is that you cannot grab any random rat in the lab and teach it how to play hide and seek. As you know, like old dogs don't learn new tricks. So you have to use rats that are very young. for example, because we know that play is something that animals do more when they're young and do less when they are adults, right? So the first thing you need to do is to really habituate the rats both to the experimenter

and to the room where it's going to play. And then slowly but surely you can teach the rat how to play the game. For example, in the game of Sikh, what we did, we had a starting box where the animal was placed to start the game. And then what Anika Reinholt, who was a master student running these experiments did, she would get far away from the rat, and then the rat would come close, and whenever the rat came close, she would tickle the rat and play with the rat and made the rat chase around her hand, and in some way giving the rat a social reward.

And then what she would do was to increase slowly the complexity and start hiding better and better from the rat until the point where we were able to close the starting box and then open the box remotely, and the rat would have to search in this 30-square-meter room for Annika. So the reward for the rat is not a pellet of food? It's getting tickled? Yes, exactly. There is no food reward, no water reward. It's just the social interaction with the experimenter. And we know that social interaction is a very rewarding thing. Like when you deal with children, they like to be to be cuddled, they like to be played with.

So this is the same for our pets and for our rats in our study. And so that's what you're really studying then is the social interaction feature. What do we learn about humans from that? Well, it's very important to study social interactions. We're still trying to figure out the social brain and how the brain conducts social interactions. between animals. So the play is one critical example of a type of interaction. There is this thing called social play

when an animal plays with another animal. And from studying these kind of things, we will get closer to understanding social interactions in human and how the brain controls social interactions in humans. And humans are an incredible case of social interaction. They are basically a species that has the... this incredible social network, right? We've evolved to have like this,

this big families, these big groups, and to have this big social networks around us. So to navigate those social networks, we need a brain that allows us to go from one place to another and to understand the people around us and how they behave, what the other people can do and what you can do with them. So this is a very important topic to understand

our brain and how our brain evolved. A lot of reaction from asking people how they play with their animals. I have a Claire who writes, I play Find It with my dogos. You hide the treats throughout the house while they wait into the bathroom. Afterwards, you let them out and say, find it. They then search, sniff for the treats. We had to be more obvious with the treats after we got a beagle to give the lab a chance. So I had a couple of dogs.

Let me go for a reaction to Melissa in State College, PA. Hi, Melissa. Hi, Iris. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Go ahead. Okay. I was saying earlier that my definition of play for an animal is when they initiate it, then you know they're into it, or when they return to it voluntarily, like a dog bringing you a ball is saying, play with me. Play with me now. It's not very ambiguous. Or when you're playing tug-of-war, the animal will tug if you let go and they hand it back to you.

So that's one, those are two clues. And the other is the body tension. If it's a stiff tension and the defensive, they're not having fun. But if it's a bouncy tension, they're full of, well, bounce, then I think they're playing. Yeah, I've seen that with dogs I play with also. It's the same kind of thing. You can really tell one when an animal is playing, can't you? Yeah, I think those things that the audience member mentioned are critical things.

For example, we know that rats, when they are in this playful state, she said something about this bouncy nature. So we described a type of behavior that rats do when they're playing that is called in German Freudensbrung, which is translates into joy jumps, which is the rats are jumping in place, basically with their four legs. So this is one kind of way to tell when the animal has some positive response. The other thing that the audience member mentioned, which is very interesting, is the willingness to continue the game, to continue playing. And that is something that we found in our paper that is that we found that rats not only cared about the social reward at the end of the game, but that sometimes they would even try to evade this reward so that they could continue playing. So sometimes if the rat was hiding and the experimenter would find the rat and would try to evade this reward so that they could continue playing. the rat and would try to introduce this social reward, the rat would leave and hide somewhere else

again. So they would really try to extend the game. Did you ever try to trick the rat, like play a joke on the rat? No. So that is something that I've been thinking about for many years since I'm also an amateur, improviser and comedian, but is how to try to surprise a rat into something that would be funny. So I've been thinking like very unprofessionally, but many years about how to. So my idea of a joke for a rat is that, so you train the rat to always run a maze, a normal maze, where the objective is to find cheese, let's say, right? So then you train the rat, and the rat is focused, it gets into the maze, it smells cheese and tries to find it, and then again and again and again,

until at some point what you do is to, you do the same thing, but then suddenly all the walls are made out of cheese. So then I imagine myself in the position of the rat, just running around, like trying to find the cheese, and then that moment when you realize, You know, that Eureka moment. So that's what I envision myself. But this is, of course, just my fantasy into one day trying to understand some of the basis of humor and surprise. Well, you say you're into the theater, you're into doing improv.

Do you think you could have an act with your rat on stage, you know, doing hide and seek? People would love to see that, I'll bet you. No, no, but I'm going to tell you something. I know some improvisers in New York that have shown. shows for dogs. So they pretend to be dogs and dogs are the audience. So it's not that far away that you could try to do performance with animals themselves. But it's a very interesting topic because how one plays a role and how animals play roles in their natural lives in the animal kingdom,

whether they're in the role of a prey or a prey. accidentally, or if they're in other kind of social situations, that there is a relationship of status and hierarchy. These are very interesting questions that neuroscience is starting to tackle. You're about 30 years too late for Ed Sullivan. You could have done it. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

You know, you have to be of a certain age to remember Ed Sullivan show. No, no, no. I got it. I didn't know if I was allowed to laugh. Oh, wait, I never laugh on this show. You'll notice. So where do you go from here? What else can you do?

Do you want to teach the rat to do other things or another game or something else to further study it? Or you just keep following this maze, so to speak? So there are several things. The first thing that we like to point out is that we think this paradigm of playing with the rats and playing hide-and-seek with the rats allows us to probe some of the rat's cognitive capabilities. Like, we want to figure out, like, when the rat is making decisions and when the rat is choosing to hide in a certain location or in another location, or, for example,

where is the rat choosing to search for the experimenter? So these are very interesting, it's a very interesting paradigm to tackle questions like decision-making, motivation, when is the rat motivated truly to play, for example. So that, on one hand, and on the other hand, of course, We're still looking for inspiration and games to try to teach animals to use those games as a way to, in a very naturalistic way, probe for understanding the brain at play. Right. I have a tweet coming from Skip who says, I lived for a time with a crow named Hugin. If I was on the phone too long, she would go to the modular plug at the baseboard and unplug the phone.

Now, birds would seem, we've talked about birds recently, how smart they are. You say you're looking for other animals to play with? How about a bird? Think about working with birds. Crows are also known to play. In fact, I will challenge the audience to go to YouTube and try to find videos of crows playing in the snow.

There are some videos where crows use the snow on a windshield of a car to slide down. and then they would just go up and slide down again. And they also use roofs for things like this. So crows are very interesting animals indeed. But you're sticking with your rats for now. Or are you branching out? We will see.

We will see. I still have to decide what my future holds in neuroscience. I just finished my PhD here, and I'm trying to find new topics. So I'm very excited about that. So improv is not a day job. I can't fall back with your improv career. No, no, no, no, no.

I have a serious science career with a side of improv addiction. But it must help you think creatively, I would think, you know. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I think like it's a very creative endeavor, and I treat it in some ways in a very similar way as I do all my other work, because I do take it seriously, and I think it's incredibly interesting,

and it's a very, very interesting way of also figuring out things about the brain, I think. Because it's in a way the social brain, the human brain gone wild. It's taking all the skills that we have to navigate social situations and using them in make-believe social situations. We wish you great luck, Dr. Sanguinetti, Juan Ignacio Nacho Sanguetti, neuroscientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Thanks for joining us. I'll hang to his paper and I'll tell you the video of the rats playing hide and seek will make your day, ScienceFriety.com slash animal games.

That was Ira Flato in an interview recorded in 2019. After the break, we've talked about how listening to music affects memory in patients with Alzheimer's. But what about making music? More after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. Alzheimer's disease remains a devastating illness for those it touches. While the FDA has approved the first new medication to reduce symptoms in nearly two decades, evidence of its effectiveness

remains to be seen. But in the meantime, even the Mayo Clinic and the Alzheimer's Association recommend the therapeutic use of music to soothe agitation and even trigger positive memories for those in the middle and late stages of the disease. But can music work wonders for people in earlier stages of Alzheimer's? Specifically, can playing music have therapeutic effects. That was my next guest, University of Pittsburgh Ph.D. student Jenny Doris. She's a professional percussion player who's working on her doctorate in rehabilitation science, and she coaches one of many groups focused on making music as a brain training exercise for older adults. She went looking for evidence and gathered studies involving more than 1,400 participants around the world.

They pointed to a small but meaningful improvement in brain function for adults with mild cognitive impairment. That's a very early stage of Alzheimer's, who participated in making music in programs like hers. Her work appeared in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society earlier this year. Here to talk more about this work is Jenny Doris. Welcome, Jenny. Thanks for having me. Let's start with the research you did. You went looking at a very specific kind of music therapy program. What did you find? Sure. When we were reading research, so often you would see so much music mixed together, whether people were listening or whether they were actively participating. And I thought, what would happen if we only looked at active participation? What would we find? And what was so

surprising is seeing how this type of work is being done all over the world. You see so many different activities if you look at research being done in Italy versus research that's being done in Taiwan versus maybe research that's being done in France. And so we see a lot of different really beautiful cultural music programs happening. Can you give us some more examples of some of the specific music in each of those places? One of my favorites happens in Italy. And they, utilize Italian scat singing. So if you can imagine hearing Louis Armstrong kind of bopping around, but then hearing that in Italian, I think that is so genius. But if you can imagine having Alzheimer's, you might forget a word to a song. That doesn't matter if you're scat singing,

then you can sort of improvise over a song that you really love. We also saw some really beautiful work coming out of South Korea, where the design is to really have you reminisce about childhood songs. And you actually make a wind instrument to play along to a very popular childhood song from the area. So participants in that study weren't just playing music. They were making their own instruments. They were very physically involved in the making of music, yes. And all of these studies, did they all seem to indicate that people improved? That's right. We looked at a range of things, both cognitive functioning as well as emotional well-being, like your quality of life, your mood, anxiety, and depression. And that's what we saw so many different positive effects. The main thing that people are looking at is cognitive functioning. We were able to do a meta-analysis because so many different people were measuring it in a similar way. But we also saw that single studies were affecting mood, quality of life. There was a drum circle in Taiwan that had beautiful results in terms of affecting anxiety. And that was really

neat to see. And what do we know about what's happening in the brain as people are playing music? Why is it this specific thing that's affecting their cognition? It's a really cool process that happens in our brains when we start to play. If you can imagine yourself standing behind a drum, you have to coordinate your motor regions as you're coordinating which hand am I going to use or both, right? How am I going to play it? And then your motor region has to connect with your visual perception because there's some type of music in front of you and you're trying to remember what is that rhythm? How am I going to connect that with my motor? And then we have our sensory perception.

All of these sounds are happening around us and we're changing our motor to really match. and blend with those sounds. I've seen it called a full-body workout, and when you're in the middle of playing a song with a group of people, it really does feel that way for your brain. And why is mild cognitive impairment, this very early stage of Alzheimer's, an important stage for study? I think that's a stage where people want to be able to do anything they can to stimulate their brain. It's also a stage where we don't know if you're going to go on to get Alzheimer's. And we want to support you to do any type of activity that we know is good for brain health. And this particular research is different from research that just looks at listening.

You mentioned there's a ton of studies about that. So why for you was active music making such an important thing to study? Well, I used to lead a class for older adults with mild cognitive impairment that was a marimba band. And as I was leading this class, I did so for years, and I saw people able to learn a brand new instrument. They learned to read music's notation, and for anyone who knows about that, it's a very difficult skill. And they were able to memorize and recall songs. And I literally was thinking, am I seeing what I think I'm seeing here? Are people able to kind of build different memory muscles through the use of music?

And that's what led me to go back to school and get my PhD and really dive into the research. And can we get a little bit into what is changing for people who are doing this type of program? We talked about there being like a small effect, but just what does that mean in terms of a person's mental capacity? So what we were looking at is general thinking and memory. And so if you can imagine those cognitive tests that ask you what day it is to, remember a list of words, maybe to follow instructions. That's where we were seeing the difference in scores. Now, that can play out differently for different people, and we're still learning what does an improvement in scores look like for MCI versus maybe mild dementia? So we haven't quite normed that out,

but I think what it is is something that's hopeful. To be able to move the needle is really exciting to know these people want to support their cognition, and this might be one of the many activities that could do so. And is this something that it's possible to express in terms of a, say, percentage of improvement? Unfortunately, not yet. That's something we can kind of see how it might affect you if your scores decline, but I think something that'll be exciting is to see if you get better how it might feel in your everyday life. You've mentioned you teach a marimba class. Can you tell us a little bit more about what happens in your class, what it's like for the participants?

We taught marimba for many years leading up into that point. And these classes were really fun. We would start by working with a metronome. Something we wanted to work on is can we improve people's reaction time with their mallets? And so we'd set our metronome and maybe do a C major scale and then start cranking the speed and see if people could get quick. as they were negotiating those scales. We also had exercises and improvisation. So people learn different arpeggios and different keys, and we would play songs that changed keys, and that also had soloists and accompanists. We also had everyone compose, and we would write songs as a group. In each day, we'd write a melody, and it secretly was a memory exercise, because at the end, after we played the melody that we wrote together, we'd erase it from the board and see if we could remember it both right then and then again at the end

of class. And we were you really using chunking techniques to try to remember what notes went together. And finally, we would play repertoire. We learned how to read music and we would play songs, both songs that were familiar and brand new songs to the participants. Over the course of teaching this class, did you personally see some of the small improvements, the small effects that you described in your paper? And what did that look like? What I was able to see, particularly in the composition, is that people had a fluency and a confidence in the music itself, but then I was seeing them remember more music. I'd erase that melody, and people could play a longer and longer melody. And then I had people who were like, can I now try to demonstrate that for you at the end of class? So say 30 minutes later, I had one student who said, now I'm going to challenge myself. I'm going to come back here on Monday. I want to play that for you. And he'd have it ready to go. So I think something that music does it also motivates us. It's really fun. And so in trying to stimulate our memory, it's also a really

fun way to do so. And does it seem to matter if people are playing in that big group or if they're playing alone? Can you see similar effects? I have seen other research that's been done that show more of the brain is activated when we play with others. I haven't done that research myself, but I have always found knowing that it's good to socialize as we get older, knowing that Alzheimer's can isolate us, I think it's always been in my mind to create interventions that bring people together as a group. You talked about there being a variety of genres, a variety of different kinds of music. Did you notice, does it seem to matter if a person is playing music with an instrument, you know, or even making an instrument like you mentioned in the South Korean study and

then using that versus just singing or doing sort of a self-guided participation in music making? Just how involved, how tactile does the teacher need to be? That's a great question. What we did was level the playing field and consider all of it equally. And so one of the fun results is to be able to say that yes, you can sing, yes, you can play an instrument, and they all have the same effect, because that's the way we ran our model. Now, I think that this is the direction that research is going to go. We're going to start really looking at, is it a certain instrument, is it a certain activity that could make more of a difference or not? But what our study found is that any type of active engagement in music means that you're supporting cognitive

functioning. Is music difficult to study because of that variety? Can you really standardize it from a scientific perspective? So that was one of our objectives. We found the work of another researcher who created these reporting guidelines for music-based interventions. And she did a lovely job categorizing music in a really smart way. So she has one category called recreating music. So that might be, if you're singing Amazing Grace with your choir. Now, she has another category that's improvisation. So that might be if you were doing scat singing over Amazing Grace and doing whatever you wanted in the moment.

And I think using this type of categorization system across our field could be really exciting because then we're getting at the different activities of music and seeing is one maybe a little more important than the other? do they work really well together? You know, what, and it also helps us compare very creative and different music interventions. How do we know if a marimba band in Pittsburgh is the same as a Taiwanese drum circle? This type of categorization and reporting, I think, can really help us.

There is so much we still don't seem to know about Alzheimer's and the brain. But is music itself special in some way? Or do you think some other activity that involved learning a new skill or being social or even just being creative would also help people's brains? I think all of those things are important. We know being social is so key. Physical activity is important. Sleep is important. Music can highlight a few of these things as well. And that's what makes me excited about it. It can be a social pursuit. It can activate many regions of our our brain at once as we're playing. There's a couple of things about music that I think make it special in particular for people with Alzheimer's. As I was working with people, the two big fears that people would express is that they were going to lose the memories that were so important to

them and that they wouldn't be able to express themselves. They hated it when they couldn't think of the word that they wanted at the end of the sentence, right? And I think about how music can help to support those two fears. If we think about playing songs that are important to your life, it's sort of like reinforcing your memories through the soundtrack of your life. And I've become really passionate now in interventions that I've been developing to have music that is important to the older adults so that we are really enforcing those memories. I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday for,

W.NYC Studios. So you mean like specific songs that are meaningful to the people playing the music? Exactly. We recently developed an intervention where young musicians, teenagers, came on Zoom, which we're on Zoom now, and they joined our members. And what we did was ask, members, what are your favorite songs? And these young musicians arranged them for their instruments and the older adults get such a kick out of hearing their favorite song on the clarinet or on the piano. I just think it's a beautiful empathy exercise for us as musicians to sort of bring forward your stories through our modality. And what's next? Do you think we could design a specific dose of music or something like that, like a prescription that might help

people maintain their routines while they're dealing with these early stages of Alzheimer's disease? You're really reading the mind of this field. There's an amazing initiative called the Sound Health Initiative that was started by Renee Fleming, and it brings together the NIH with the NEA. In this entire year, they're doing a series of workshops to look at how we can do better research as musicians and researchers and figure out the answers to those questions. Do you need 30 minutes? minutes a day? Do you need to be in a group? Do you need to be alone? Kind of figuring out what's best for people. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Jenny Doris is a PhD student in rehabilitation sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. If you missed any part of this program or would

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homegrown produce. That's on the Sigh-Fri Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. And to join us for a live taping of that segment, just go to ScienceFriady.com slash live stream to sign up. Say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or email us. The address is sifri at sciencefriad.com. Send feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover too. Ira will be back next week. Have a great weekend. In New York, I'm Sophie Bushwick.