Speaking of Psychology - Harnessing the healing power of music, with Renée Fleming and Aniruddh Patel, PhD

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

Today, music therapies are being used to help treat mental and physical health conditions as diverse as chronic pain, Parkinson's disease and stroke. Renowned soprano Renée Fleming, editor of a new book on music, the arts and health, joins music cognition researcher Aniruddh Patel, PhD, to talk about the connections between music, mind and body, whether humans evolved to be an inherently musical species, the science behind some of the most effective music therapies and promising directions for future research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. For centuries, people have used music to soothe and to heal, but it's only in recent decades that scientists have begun to study and understand how music affects our minds and our bodies. Armed with new research tools, scientists have been learning more about how our brains process music and exploring how music can be used to improve health and well-being in areas

as diverse as chronic pain, Parkinson's disease, and stroke recovery. Today we're going to talk about this latest research in the field with a world-renowned musician who has become a leading proponent of research on the connection between music, the arts, and health, and a scientist who studies the cognition and evolutionary origins of music. Some of the questions we hope to tackle are, did humans evolve to be an inherently musical species? How can understanding the evolutionary origins of music help us develop more effective music therapies? What are some of the music therapies being used today, what are the biggest challenges remaining in the field? And what is the most promising research direction for the future? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of

the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. As I said, we have two guests today. The first will need no introduction for music lovers. Soprano Renee Fleming is one of the most celebrated musicians of our time, sometimes called People's Diva. She's performed on the world's leading opera stages and concert halls and appeared with all the major orchestras of Europe and North America. Among her many awards are the National Medal of the Arts and Five Grammys. In recent years, she's become a leading advocate for research on the science of music and how the arts can be used in health and healing. As artistic advisor to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, she leads the

Sound Health Initiative in partnership with the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Arts. She's given presentations with scientists and practitioners around the world and is editor of a new book called Music and Mind, harnessing the arts for health and wellness, which includes contributions from eminent scientists, musicians, and other artists on the intersection of science, health, music, and arts. My second guest is one of the contributors to this book. Dr. Anurutz Patel is a professor of psychology at Tufts University where he researches the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of musicality. Most recently, he's been studying how other animals process music as a window into how

human musicality evolved. He's author of the 2008 book Music, Language, and the Brain, which won the ASCAPDEMS Taylor Award and is working on a new book about the evolution of human musicality to be published by Princeton University Press. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. Now, Renee, if I may call you by your first name.

Yes, please. Let's start with you. How did you first become interested in the connection between music and health and the brain? What led you to do this work and put this book together? Well, I had performing anxiety that manifested in unusual ways. And one of them was pain. So pain was a distraction from the performance anxiety, from the pressure of performance. I was not an innate or natural performer at all.

I love music and I loved studying music and being in a practice room, but I wasn't kind of a gregarious outgoing kid. And so in trying to figure that out, I did a lot of reading on the mind-body connection. Dr. Sona was, his work was very helpful to me. And along the way, I discovered that researchers were studying music. And when I met Dr. Francis Collins at a dinner party in 2015, I asked him why. And because I had just been appointed advisor to the Kennedy Center, I said, do you think the NIH and the Kennedy Center could work together to provide a platform for science with the public?

Because I think the public would be as interested as I am in the work that's happening at this intersection of health and art. And he said yes, and we've been passionately sharing this information ever since. Dr. Patel, is it okay if I call you, Annie? Please. Your chapter of the book is called Are We an Inherently Musical Species? Can you talk about what it means to be an inherently musical species and why this is an important question to ask? So this is one of the big questions about human nature that's unresolved and were there major thinkers on taking opposite viewpoints.

So Charles Darwin in his book on Human Evolution about 150 years ago, argue that we are inherently musical. We are musical today because our ancestors evolved. Musical behavior, which had some functional value for our ancestors, and that laid the foundation for our musicality today. William James, his contemporary, very much disagreed, and he loved music. He loved Darwin. But he thought music was a purely cultural invention, something that we were fortunate to figure out how to do and enriches human life, but not something we specifically evolved to do. And perhaps I can give you an analogy to help clarify the difference. Neuroscientists today. completely agree that we evolved to speak and use language. Our brains have specialized circuits for

that, an ability that is part of our human nature. We have to learn it. Babies have to learn how to speak, but we have predisposed to learn that skill by evolutionary biology. They also agree that we didn't evolve to read and write. Reading and writing is a purely cultural invention, takes advantage of the fact that we have language, so we have good visual perception and good attention and good motor control. We put all those things together to create written language, which is a hugely important part of our life. Nobody would dispute that language writing is enormously valuable to our society and our culture. And so it's not a question about the value of music.

If music is a purely cultural invention like writing, it could still be very valuable for health, for culture, for social reasons, but not something we specifically evolved to do. So I think it's an important question because it's unresolved and also because we're finally at a turning point where after 150 years, we might be able to start to answer this question with some. science using data from fields like brain imaging, genetics, studies of other species, studies of child development, studies of cross-cultural studies and so forth. And so it's exciting time to be

studying this question. To follow up, your recent research has tried to answer the question about musicality by looking at musicality in other species, including dogs and parrots. What can we learn about music and humans by studying other animals? One thing we can learn is, to some extent, We don't have a time machine. We can't go back and figure out how music began in our species. So what comparative biologists do, evolutionary biologists, we look at other species to get clues. So, for example, take beat, our sense of beat in music, which is something we see all over the world. Every culture has some form of music with a beat.

Often people use it for dancing and so forth. And children learn how to move to a beat and synchronize their movements to a beat without any special instruction. They pick it up from watching others and socializing and so forth. And for many people, this is the most primal aspect of music. And they think, okay, if there's one aspect of music that we might share with other animals, it's going to be beat and our sense of beat and our ability to move to the beat. Well, actually, it turns out that our closest living relatives, apes and monkeys don't seem to have a sense of beat like we do.

They don't seem to synchronize to beats spontaneously when they hear beat-based rhythms, when you try to train them. Monkeys do it very differently. A fundamental aspect of how we deal with beat is we predict the beat. When you perceive a beat, you automatically start to predict when the next beat is coming very accurately, and that's how you can clap right on time or dance right on time with a beat. If you try to train a monkey to tap to a beat, they wait for the beat, and then they react. They don't predict, and it takes a lot of special training to get them to predict.

So their brains just deal with beat in a very different way. So why do we have this ability that seems so simple and yet is not shared with our close living relatives? It's usually biological things that are simple are shared, like the way your kidney works, or I'm not saying the kidney is simple. but things that, you know, there's a lot of shared biology between us and our close cousins and shared things like visual perception abilities. I theorized at one point that maybe there's something about only certain kinds of animal brains can acquire this ability spontaneously to move to a beat.

And those are brains that have the ability to learn complex sounds, what's called complex vocal learning. Listening and imitating sounds is how you acquire your sound repertoire. And that's a rare ability. We're the only primate with that ability. Dogs don't have it, cats don't have it. The vast majority of animals don't have it. But there's a group of animals, three groups of birds that have it,

songbirds, hummingbirds, and parrots. And we showed that, so I hypothesized that maybe this ability helped lay the foundation for beat synchronization. And then we showed that actually a parrot could actually spontaneously move to the beat of music and keep the beat at different tempi and that was replicated by another group. And so now it looks like they're the only other species besides humans that do this spontaneously, which gives us some clues

about the origin of this ability in our own evolution. It seems like perhaps the ability to imitate complex sounds was one of the foundations from which beat synchronization emerged. So it's kind of a way of going back in time and thinking about what were the precursors to this ability in our own evolution without having a time machine. I want to talk more about animals at some point. But right now, Renee, I want to ask you, many chapters of the book are by practitioners and researchers looking at different music and creative arts interventions for the purposes of treating various mental and physical health issues. what are some of the well-supported music interventions that people are using today? I would say the strongest areas of research have supported what we call melodic intonation therapy, which takes advantage of the plasticity of the brain, to transfer speech from Broca's

area to the singing area of the brain, which is on the other side of the brain, the opposite side of the brain. But it's also, frankly, musical activities are in every known mapped area the brain. It's why it's so complex. It's why hearing, but especially engaging with music, playing an instrument, et cetera, singing, you know, as well because you're using language and in your finding pitches. So by hearing, so these are all so complex that this particular intervention enables people who have suffered a stroke or traumatic brain injury to speak again, sometimes after one session with music therapist by singing. So singing enables them to kind of recapture the words that they were trying to communicate.

So that's one area. Movement disorders are the other hugely strong area of research that's been supported. And that's for Parkinson's, for MS, for people who have difficulty moving. And again, taking advantage of plasticity of the brain to stop the freezing and the shuffling and enable people to move more fluidly and gracefully. And in fact, recent study actually, we found this in December, discovered that even just imagining a song, imagining the beat of a song, like when the saints go marching in,

can enable somebody who's having those difficulties to walk fluidly across the street and feel safe. I've been using it to exercise because it keeps my tempo up. And I can even carry on a conversation and hear something in the background in my mind's ear. And then there are some other. Certainly, memory is powerful for Alzheimer's. The memory is, music memory is the last memory to go in a patient with dementia in many cases.

And so scientists are studying that like crazy to try and figure out where it comes from. And I'm sure Annie knows more about all of these things than I do, but I find it just so fascinating. Pain is another powerful area of study that's not only is it working, but it's being legalized, consistently. I mean, I had a friend who had a brain breed, I believe, recently, and just terrible. She was an excruciating pain. She couldn't look at screens. She couldn't do it. No activities, dark room, all of that. And I said you could listen to music. And she discovered by chance that only Jimmy Hendricks, as loud as she could play it, would offer any relief to her. And the minute the volume went down or the music turned off, the pain came flooding back. So for obvious reasons, our opioid epidemic,

especially this is a strong area of research. Any, anything you would add to that? Any other areas? Yes, so there's also music in stroke recovery. I was just at the Neurosciences and Music Conference in Finland. There's now a conference dedicated to this field since going about every three years since about 2000. And there's some wonderful work being done there

on actual randomized control trials comparing music listening to audiobook listening to no additional therapy. with patients that have had all the standards post-stroke therapies to look at cognitive and neural recovery, and they're finding benefits of music listening, self-selected music listening on both cognition and emotion recovery from stroke. And the neat thing about this group is they're also doing brain imaging to look at the underlying mechanisms.

And this is what's neat. I think that Renee can certainly speak to this is, we're at this exciting time where the clinical work is kind of beginning to dovetail with the basic science work and understanding what's going on in the brain. who it works for, who it doesn't work for as well and why. And that's really an amazing step forward. That's amazing. That's very exciting about stroke. I do know that stroke choirs are phenomenal for people.

Yes, yes, that's right. And both for social reasons, because a lot of what happens with neurological damage is isolation. Like the dance for Parkinson's that was started by the Mark Morris Group and David Leventhal, who has a wonderful chapter in your book, Renee. There's a fantastic film about it called Capturing Grace, and they show it's not just the music and what it does for movement. It's bringing people together and breaking that isolation that is so powerful for neurological patients. So is music more therapeutic if you create it, participate in it, or if you merely listen to it?

Do we know, is there a difference? Well, engaging with music is certainly very powerful. It utilizes so many more skills. For childhood development, there have been wonderful studies. That's another strong area of research showing that there are lasting changes in the brain after just two years of studying a musical instrument. And the same group at USC has just started now to study singers. So choir singing for children.

And so I'm very anxiously awaiting the results of that study. But go ahead, Any, I'm sure you have other responses as well. Oh, no, I think that's right. And I think listening and actively singing or playing music can both be. beneficial depends on the circumstances. So for example, for pain management, there's exciting work happening with music. And as Renee touched on how it can help with pain. And Yoko Brat, who has a chapter in the book, has been doing interesting research on that. I think she's in Philadelphia. And their music listening can be quite effective, like Renee's story with the Jimmy Hendricks.

But in other cases, especially if you're looking at how musical engagement can change and improve brain function in other areas like speech. There it looks like active participation, singing, playing an instrument is important for making those plastic changes that are lasting and benefiting other cognitive functions. Have you ever rearranged your furniture and discovered the carpet underneath looks brand new while the rest of it looks, well, not so new? It's time for a carpet upgrade. At the Home Depot, we have stylish choices at simple prices from all the top brands. Best of all, we can install it for you, starting at only 49 cents per square foot. So all you have to do is pick your perfect floor.

Start your carpet project today at the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Exclusions apply for licenses. See home depoteper.com slash license numbers. So given what we already know about music's effect on our health and well-being, what are the prospects for music therapy to become a standard health care practice? I mean, do you foresee insurers covering it beyond what they're doing right now? And Renee, I want to ask, is this something that you're actively working toward?

Yeah, there are 12 states that now have licensure for music therapists. We need all of the states to bring this into view. Texas is working on it right now. It is a total bipartisan effort because everybody cares about health care and they also care about health and wellness. We have a mental health crisis that's around the world. I'm also an ambassador to the World Health Organization and Dr. Tegras said he's incredibly concerned. that depression is up by 30% around the world. So that's another wonderful statistic from a study is that 45 minutes of engagement with any kind

of art activity and especially listening to music can reduce anxiety by 25%. It's just a brief amount of time. So it makes sense, you know, but you have to have the science that supports it. So I'm working hard to create a stronger pipeline for research. I have Investigator Awards. We just offered our first seven and we'll double them next year. And I'm working with the Aspen Institute of the neural arts blueprint on this. But it's taking a postdoc student who has access to a lab, who was working with an artist or is an artist.

And the panel who chose the winners is incredibly highly esteemed scientific panel and academic panel. And then the NIH is following up with fellowships. So they're working on that now, which we'll hope to have them this year. So I'm hoping that we can get at least 10 fellowships around the country. So we need support for that. That needs financial support. It's a public-private partnership. And then I would love to art care to succeed,

which would be allowing people to connect to existing arts and health initiatives in the areas where they live, because I know personally that most performing arts venues, offer all kinds of initiatives for children with special needs or caregivers and the people that they take care of and et cetera. Even the Musique Fadine in Vienna, the hallowed hall of the Vienna Philharmonic now has a caregiver's initiative. And that news went around the world because, you know, the fact that all of the performing arts are saying, hey, we have something to offer you that can improve your health and well-being and take care of those of you who are more

fragile. So I have a lot of hope. Now, we need policy changes as well. We really need. But ultimately, the goal is to have art embedded in health care altogether. It's low-cost. It's not pharmaceutical and it's not, it's not invasive. Every children's hospital should already have this in just a creative art studio. It helps reduce some pain medication and and it makes everybody much more comfortable. So we're working towards it, but it's baby steps. It's all just beginning. The fact that the NIH has spent $40 million funding research is a huge validation for the

work for people in Rome. And they're going to keep spending, you know, integrative medicine. Everybody understands how important it is now. So I think we'll get there. Let's talk for a minute about music education. Again, given what we know about how music affects brain development, and can improve learning in other areas. Should music be a requirement in all schools?

Why isn't it? So the arts should be in our schools altogether. I mean, for so many different reasons. I mean, I was at Chicago Lyric Opera as an advisor before this, and we put the arts back in elementary schools there in the city through volunteers, teacher volunteers. And superintendents actually quickly realized how beneficial it was. and they started paying for it.

So for one thing, and even in later age students, they discovered, I talked to somebody who was the president of the Board of Education there who said, truancy is one of the biggest problems we have in the country right now. I know in D.C. it's a huge problem, and it's contributing to teen violence and all manner of mental health issues. And to have young people engage in something they love, it gives them a sense of themselves. is important.

Bessel Finder Coulke's book, The Body Keeps the Score, which has been on the bestseller list for a couple of years now. I was really stunned when I read his chapter about, you know, things that work and how theater, being involved in theater, saved his son, he feels. So there's no question that the art should be in schools. I've been trying to encourage Los Angeles and California to use some of the money that's the money that they have now for arts education to add creative arts therapists alongside arts educators.

Because on both fronts throughout the country, we don't have enough. We don't have enough teachers anymore who teach the arts because kids said, hey, you know what? They're kind of from school, so I'm going to do something else. And they certainly don't have enough creative arts therapists around the country. So this is an area that I'm encouraging young artists to think about. That's wonderful. In fact, I could just add something in Renee's book.

music in mind, there's a wonderful chapter about state-of-the-art national statistics on music in America's schools by Kenneth Elpis, which lays out just how much how we need more music in schools. And it's very uneven, which schools have it and which don't, or arts in general. And then there's several chapters about stories about like Renee was talking about how arts basically saved somebody from dropping out and brought them into the school and made them passionate about learning through the arts and then kept them there. And things like truancy is so interesting because you wouldn't think that that wouldn't be

the first thing I would think of is why we need arts in the schools. But I think it makes a lot of sense. You need reasons for people to want to be in school. And the arts are potentially a huge draw for people that otherwise feel sort of alienated. So the book is incredibly wide ranging with contributions from scientists, musicians like Roseanne Cash, even novelist Anne Patchett, playwright Anandt Veer Smith. Renee, how did you get all of these people to contribute? Well, I started, of course, with everybody that I know from the science side of things,

from the research side of things, and the institutions, really, to have, I didn't know anything about the NIH. I do nothing. So when I walked in that day to listen to scientists, present, including Annie, and some music therapist as well, I was stunned. And so I tried to kind of help the public who probably doesn't know anything either, know more about it. So this was kind of an idea of like a snapshot of the field as it is right now. In fact, Susan McSammon, who wrote your brain on art that was a bestseller last year, said, it's not a, it's not a, we're trying to grow a field, but she said it's actually a movement.

These people are very excited about this. And there's a whole grassroots understanding and desire and the part of normal people to bring the arts into their own lives, just to make it, to doodle or to do whatever it is that you enjoy. I'm a poster child this year. I knew it's a rough time in our history. And I said, I have to get off the news feed. And so I'm outside in nature and I'm reading one novel after another, and I'm going to concerts and plays, and I do something every single day. And I cannot tell you how much. I highly recommend it. Now, Renee, you've subjected yourself to some of this research as well. I mean, can you talk about your experience of singing in an MRI, the machine itself?

Yes, yes. It's so funny because I came up with a good joke, which is, you know, people are afraid of the MRI. They, you know, terrifies them. And I said, well, have you ever flown economy? You know, because it really, you know, it's very similar. and you at least get to lay down. So it was an experiment that was devised by a team at the NIH. It had me singing, speaking, and imagining singing. And they were very surprised by the outcome because imagining singing was by far the most powerful,

and had a much stronger effect on my brain than the other two. And after the fact, they said, well, you're a singer, so singing is easy for you and second nature. I said, that's true. Whereas imagining singing had me tuning out the noise and it had required a different level of focus, et cetera. So, yeah, I got to be a guinea pig in an experiment and understand a little bit about how this whole research field works.

I want to go back to talking about animals again, if that's okay, Annie. I'm just wondering, you know, a lot of animals make noise, but we don't call it music. For example, some people say the noise that whales make is singing. So the bigger question is, I mean, you talked about, beat as being intrinsic? Is that the only thing? I mean, how do we define music? How do we know it when we hear it? Oh my gosh, that is a thorny question because music as a cultural product just keeps changing. I mean, you think of Arnold Schenberg's music when it was first premiered. There were people

saying, that's not music, and now it's part of the canon, right? So music is an evolving cultural product. So what biologist study is what we call musicality, which is not the informal sense of just being good at music or, you know, having a lot of training in music. It's the really the building blocks of musical behavior, like the ability to keep time to a beat with your body or by singing the ability to very simple things, like the ability to hear a melody and be able to sing it back, you know, or to recognize it when it shifted up or down and pitch, things that seem so trivial and basic to us. It's only when we look at other species, we realize that's not so trivial and also in the brain.

So one example, songbirds who sing and people consider quite musical, they can learn to recognize a human melody perfectly well. You can take them in a lab and show that they will recognize when you play this melody. However, if you transpose that melody up or down, they just don't know what it is anymore. They don't recognize it. Whereas babies do that effortlessly all over the world. It's just part of how our brain works. And when you look in the brain, it turns out it's not simple. What's happening when we recognize it a transposed melody is not just the hearing centers of the brain.

is the hearing centers collaborating with distant other regions, including regions in the parietal cortex that are normally involved in visual spatial perception. So somehow evolution has wired up our brains to make this seemingly trivial aspect of music come very easily to us. It's only when we look at other species when we realize it's not that trivial. It's actually a sophisticated piece of cognition.

So what we study in biology is musicality, and also affect the ability to derive pleasure for music is a big area. And Robert Zetore, who's a big expert in that has a chapter in Renee's book, about all the brain circuitry that goes into this feeling of pleasure we get when we listen to music. And it's very complex. It's interesting from an evolutionary standpoint.

Why all this complexity for this aspect of communication that we have? Is it there because we evolved it, because humans evolved to be musical? Annie, did you find that dogs, how long dogs can transpose or not yet? Yes, we actually are just analyzing that data now. And it looks like we've done a study to see if dogs change the average pitch of their howling when the music that they like to howl to is transposed up or down. And yeah, the results are in. And it looks like the ancient breed, we focus on dogs that are more closely related to wolves

because wolves are thought to shift their pitches when they howl with other wolves. They actually detune from each other to sound like a larger pack. So it seems like wolves evolved this ability for a functional reason to listen to what's happening with other voices and adjust their voice. And that's fundamental to human singing. but how did it evolve? And so we decided to see if dogs, which are related to wolves, can do this kind of tuning and detuning.

And it looks like ancient breed dogs actually do this. So it's kind of neat because it suggests this ability to change your voice pitch in relation to other voices may have emerged very early in human evolution long before we had the ability to imitate complex sounds because dogs and wolves are not complex vocal learners. They don't learn complex sounds by listening and imitating the way birds do. But they may have this ability to shift pitch. maybe that was one of the first steps towards learning how to imitate sounds and becoming a singing species.

Sess, that's fascinating. That's amazing. So, by the way, Ani gave me a way into all of this because even when I sat there and listened to the research on that first day in 2015, I still didn't understand why music was a point of reference or worth studying. And it was really when he presented on evolution that I got it, the bell went on. So that's why his chapter is so early in the book because I really wanted people to hear from him. He's also an amazingly articulate writer and speaker. So, Renee, what are your hopes for the future of the field?

Where would you like to see the study of music in mind in the next 10 or 15 years? Well, I just had this conversation with Francis Collins. And, you know, the first order of is to strengthen the research and to continue to build on what's there. And there are neurosurgeons who can perform, especially if they're doing, you know, complex seizure testing for epilepsy patients, that they can kind of test for other things while they're waiting and if patients agree. And so they're learning a lot about circuitry, about, you know, the predictive power of pitch and, and all this basic science requires real brain research. So it's not easy and it will take a long time.

But in the meantime, Dan Levitin suggests that there is a lot that works right now and we should be doing it right now. In fact, Julie Gerberting, the new head of the Foundation for the NIH, through a day and a half of lectures in December when we had another convening, our second convening, and she, in her off-the-cuff comments said, we have a moral imperative to be doing this right now because there's so much that already works. And when you think about PTSD and trauma and pain and so many things that people are suffering from, you know, chronic pain in particular, if there are things that work, then we need to kind of

add them to the toolbox of what it is that people do. In the meantime, we're building the research so that we can actually make a case for embedding this financially in health care. Right now, it's mostly philanthropically supported. And Ani from your end, what are you working on? What are the next big questions that you hope to answer through your research? Yeah, so I'll tell you a couple. Before I started working on animals and music, my primary research was on the relationship between music and language in the brain.

That's what my book was about. And I'm still very interested in that, in particular in the question of how musical training can improve speech and language processing and potentially children with certain developmental language disorders. So I'm developed, I've worked on hypotheses about why musical training would benefit speech processing in the brain. A hypothesis called the opera hypothesis, which resonates so nicely with Renee's cult career, but I named it before I met you, Renee, but I'm glad it worked out that way. It's my favorite. About why musical training would benefit speech processing, and so I'm doing work along those lines. And also on the animal front, so we've made. So we've made a

move from studying just the fact that birds can move to beat to looking at in the lab at birds in their brain circuitry as they perceive rhythms because we think they might be a good animal model for this fundamental aspect of beat processing which is when we perceive beat even if we're not moving or intending to move we brain imaging shows there's strong activations in motor planning regions of our brain parts of our brain that normally plan movement and we think those areas are actually involved in predicting the timing of beats through simulated movement in the brain. But it's hard to study that at the level of circuits and cells, but if birds do something like this when they hear rhythms, even if they're not moving to the beat,

if they're predicting the beat with their motor system, that would give us an animal model for how this works in the brain. And we could actually start to study this cross talk between the auditory and motor system and rhythm perception, which is really fundamental to why rhythm helps people with Parkinson's disease or other disorders. So I'm collaborating with a wonderful songbird neurobiologist at Tufts, Mimi Cow, Dr. Mimi Cow, in the biology department. And through NIH-supported work, we're looking at small songbirds and how they perceive rhythm as a way to look at the brain circuitry involved in how you predict the next beat and how the motor system is involved in that, hopefully illuminating things that will be of use for human clinical functions. Can you tell us about hummingbirds? I had no idea that hummingbirds also had rhythmic capabilities. Well, we don't know much about their rhythmic capabilities. The work that's been done on the rhythm and moving to the beat is with parrots.

hummingbirds are vocal learners. They're one of the three groups of birds that learn to produce complex sounds. And most people don't know that because they sing these squeaky little high songs that we can barely hear. If you slow them down and bring them into the human range, they're quite wonderful. And so hummingbirds are vocal learners. There's only three groups of birds that listen and imitate. And that's how they acquire their songs, parrots, hummingbirds and songbirds. So, Renee, what's next for you?

How are you keeping this issue in the moment? minds of the public? I work also at LA Opera. We have LA County Arts and Health Week every year, and so we're moving policy forward in the state, I hope, and definitely kind of bringing people together in a lot of networking that's important. So let me talk about the Sound Health Network, which is based at UCSF, because there seemed to be a need, something that we talked about early in this process, for a resource center that people could go to, both the public and science, scientists and people doing research to see what everyone else is doing. And so they're not repeating because there was a lot of repetition.

Everybody was siloed. The quality of the research wasn't necessarily high enough to be acceptable, certainly to an institution like the NIH. And then I created with the NIH a toolkit for research. So people are supposed to go to the NIH, especially if they're applying for NIH funding and see how to do it, how to submit a grant that has a chance of being acceptable. So that's been really important. So all of these initiatives will become stronger.

Now, the neural arts blueprint, I would suggest that people go to that website. They have a resource center that will open in September that is global. And as I said, it's much broader than just music. It's every aesthetic experience. And they're fascinating initiatives. I mean, there was a woman who presented with me in Savannah, Georgia, who said she's using VR in elder care facilities and invoking awe and transcendence. And imagine that you're stuck in a wheelchair

and you're stuck in a not very attractive space and you have that opportunity to get outside of yourself. Of course, it would invoke tremendous joy. So I said, so what are you showing them? What is in the VR? What's the content? She said, you're swimming with dolphins. I said, I would sign up for that.

So all of these initiatives have really had the chance of improving the quality of people's lives, and it's coming together and it's growing. Well, this has been a lovely conversation. I want to thank you both for joining me. It's been a real privilege to be able to talk to you both. Thank you. Real pleasure.

Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices

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