How to Use Music to Boost Motivation, Mood & Improve Learning

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.300 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.460 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.780 | Today, we are discussing music and your brain.

00:00:18.820 | However, this episode could have just as easily

00:00:21.340 | been entitled Music is Your Brain or Your Brain is Music.

00:00:25.560 | And that's because music, believe it or not,

00:00:28.040 | is a neurological phenomenon.

00:00:30.300 | Most of us think of music as something

00:00:31.760 | that happens outside of us.

00:00:33.440 | The sounds we hear, the lyrics we hear, their meaning,

00:00:36.920 | how they anchor us to pieces of our history,

00:00:39.740 | both emotional or social.

00:00:41.960 | It turns out that when we listen to music,

00:00:45.120 | it activates nearly every piece of our brain.

00:00:48.320 | Moreover, when we listen to music,

00:00:50.920 | it activates our brain in ways that our brain itself,

00:00:54.280 | and indeed our body as well, help to create that music

00:00:58.140 | at the level of so-called neural ensembles,

00:01:01.080 | that is the firing of neurons.

00:01:03.060 | In other words, when we listen to music,

00:01:05.240 | our brain and our body become part of the instrument

00:01:08.500 | that contributes to our perception of that music.

00:01:11.200 | Today, I'm going to make clear how all of that happens.

00:01:13.640 | We will also discuss how music can be leveraged

00:01:16.320 | towards shifting our brain states and our bodily states.

00:01:19.240 | For instance, what sorts of music to listen to

00:01:21.720 | in order to make ourselves happy.

00:01:23.480 | Yes, studies have been done on that,

00:01:25.400 | as well as how long to listen to music

00:01:27.420 | in order to shift our mood or our overall bodily state,

00:01:30.760 | including how to process feelings of sadness.

00:01:33.360 | Many of you are probably familiar with particular songs

00:01:36.640 | that anchor us to particular times in our history

00:01:39.220 | or people in our history.

00:01:40.760 | And there's an age-old question really

00:01:42.320 | as to whether or not listening to sad music

00:01:44.460 | can help us process our feelings of sadness

00:01:46.440 | or whether or not they drive us further down the spiral

00:01:48.620 | of sadness and despair.

00:01:50.240 | And indeed, studies have explored this as well.

00:01:52.880 | So today I will explain how music,

00:01:55.040 | indeed how different types of music,

00:01:57.300 | activate different neural circuits in your brain

00:01:59.440 | to create different brain and bodily states,

00:02:02.660 | how we can leverage music

00:02:04.500 | toward things like emotional processing,

00:02:06.440 | shifting our emotions,

00:02:07.940 | as well as to enhance learning and memory.

00:02:10.560 | And we will also talk about the use of music

00:02:12.760 | to enhance brain plasticity,

00:02:14.440 | that is your brain's ability to change

00:02:16.620 | in response to experience,

00:02:18.040 | not just in response to that music,

00:02:20.320 | but rather using music as a tool

00:02:23.440 | to expand our capacity for neuroplasticity,

00:02:27.320 | giving us the ability to learn far more

00:02:29.400 | in other contexts and areas of life.

00:02:31.800 | I confess that in researching this episode,

00:02:33.980 | I found myself continually delighted as to,

00:02:37.280 | first of all, how impressive the science

00:02:40.180 | of the study of music in the brain is,

00:02:42.160 | and secondly, how fundamental music is to all of our lives.

00:02:46.040 | And this is true whether or not

00:02:47.160 | you're somebody who listens to music often

00:02:49.000 | or you're somebody that really prefers silence.

00:02:51.200 | Indeed, we will talk about whether or not

00:02:52.720 | it's better to listen to music or remain in silence

00:02:55.600 | when you perform certain kinds of work.

00:02:57.320 | It turns out that there's a very clear answer to that.

00:02:59.720 | If you want a little bit of a hint,

00:03:01.440 | it is best to listen to music in between bouts of work

00:03:04.800 | or during brief rest periods,

00:03:07.320 | as opposed to listening to music while you work.

00:03:09.440 | And for those of you that listen to music while you work

00:03:11.520 | and thoroughly enjoy listening to music while you work,

00:03:14.320 | we will also discuss what that means

00:03:16.020 | about your brain in particular,

00:03:17.380 | because it's likely that it got wired up that way

00:03:19.880 | at a particular phase of development.

00:03:21.840 | And each and all of you can learn today

00:03:24.540 | how to best leverage music toward productivity,

00:03:26.740 | but perhaps equally important,

00:03:29.100 | how to leverage music for enrichment and enjoyment of life.

00:03:32.940 | I'm pleased to announce that we will be hosting

00:03:34.740 | three live events in Australia.

00:03:37.380 | All three events will cover science

00:03:38.940 | and science-related tools for mental health,

00:03:41.060 | physical health, and performance.

00:03:42.680 | There will also be a live question and answer session.

00:03:45.680 | The first live event will take place on February 10th

00:03:48.180 | in Melbourne at the Plenary Theater.

00:03:50.900 | The second live event will take place

00:03:52.520 | on February 17th in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House.

00:03:56.240 | And the third event will take place on February 23rd

00:03:58.880 | in Brisbane at the Great Hall.

00:04:00.940 | To access tickets to any of these events,

00:04:02.620 | simply go to Hubermanlab.com/tour

00:04:05.440 | and use the code Huberman.

00:04:07.240 | I hope to see you there.

00:04:08.560 | And last, but certainly not least,

00:04:10.540 | thank you for your interest in science.

00:04:12.340 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize

00:04:14.280 | that this podcast is separate from my teaching

00:04:16.300 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:04:17.940 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:04:20.240 | to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:04:22.220 | about science and science-related tools

00:04:24.140 | to the general public.

00:04:25.540 | In keeping with that theme,

00:04:26.700 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:04:48.260 | is to make sure that your body temperature drops

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00:04:56.880 | As well, in order to wake up in the morning

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00:07:10.060 | Okay, let's talk about music and your brain.

00:07:13.380 | And to start off, I just want to take a step back

00:07:15.380 | and acknowledge something

00:07:16.260 | that is absolutely remarkable about music,

00:07:20.320 | which is if you think about language,

00:07:23.740 | I could describe to you a glass,

00:07:26.500 | I could describe to you an apple,

00:07:28.020 | I could describe to you a story,

00:07:29.740 | I could describe to you a face,

00:07:32.060 | I could describe to you any number of different things

00:07:33.980 | and you could do the same for me.

00:07:35.980 | Language is essentially infinite in the number of things

00:07:38.700 | that it can explain and the ways that it can explain it.

00:07:42.060 | And yet, if you think about music,

00:07:44.700 | music provided there are no lyrics in that music,

00:07:48.400 | can't explain how a glass is shaped.

00:07:51.580 | It can't even tell you that there's a glass present

00:07:53.660 | in the room or on a table.

00:07:55.280 | It can't tell you what a face looks like.

00:07:57.180 | It can't tell you what that person

00:07:59.500 | who owns that face did or is doing.

00:08:02.340 | So in some ways you might think, wow,

00:08:04.940 | music is fairly diminished in terms of its qualitative depth

00:08:09.460 | compared to language.

00:08:11.700 | And yet, if you take a step back

00:08:12.980 | and think about what music can do, it's astonishing

00:08:16.340 | and it actually overwhelms what language can do.

00:08:19.220 | What can music do?

00:08:20.380 | Well, even in the absence of any lyrics,

00:08:22.500 | any words put to music, music can describe an emotion.

00:08:27.220 | In fact, music can describe numerous types of emotions

00:08:30.180 | and it can do it with a lot of nuance.

00:08:33.060 | So not just displaying for us happy or sad,

00:08:37.020 | but rather different degrees of happiness,

00:08:39.360 | different degrees of sadness.

00:08:40.780 | Music can be used to convey a sense of longing,

00:08:43.600 | a sense of nostalgia, a sense of delight,

00:08:46.660 | a sense of awe and on and on.

00:08:50.060 | So whereas music can't describe nouns very well,

00:08:53.680 | it can beautifully describe emotions.

00:08:56.940 | And not only can music describe emotions

00:08:59.300 | with a tremendous degree of nuance,

00:09:01.340 | music can evoke emotions

00:09:03.820 | with a tremendous degree of nuance.

00:09:06.660 | Now, this is spectacular and it's not only spectacular,

00:09:09.740 | it is important because as we move through today's episode,

00:09:13.180 | you'll soon come to realize that it's very likely,

00:09:16.880 | and indeed we have a lot of scientific evidence

00:09:18.940 | to support the fact that music evolved

00:09:21.900 | prior to spoken language.

00:09:24.060 | Moreover, it's very likely that singing evolved

00:09:26.760 | prior to spoken language and that music, singing and dance

00:09:31.220 | together evolved prior to language,

00:09:34.080 | making music as well as singing and dance,

00:09:36.740 | but really just music even on its own

00:09:38.740 | in the absence of any lyrics or any bodily movement

00:09:41.700 | as the fundamental form of human communication.

00:09:45.000 | Indeed, music can evoke empathy.

00:09:47.100 | Again, we're talking about music

00:09:48.380 | in the absence of any lyrics.

00:09:50.220 | And when I say music can evoke empathy,

00:09:52.600 | I'm not talking about the sort of empathy

00:09:54.480 | where you look at somebody and nod and understand

00:09:56.740 | so-called cognitive empathy,

00:09:57.860 | which is important by the way in relational dynamics,

00:10:00.940 | or emotional empathy where you're actually feeling

00:10:03.580 | what the other person is feeling,

00:10:04.860 | but of course you never really know

00:10:06.420 | what somebody else is feeling, how could you?

00:10:08.500 | You can only have a sense of what they might be feeling

00:10:11.220 | and you have a sense of what you're feeling,

00:10:12.560 | but let's be honest, as one of our prior guests

00:10:15.340 | on the Huberman Lab podcast, Dr. Carl Deisseroth,

00:10:18.400 | so aptly noted, rarely do we ever understand

00:10:21.400 | how anyone else truly feels because indeed rarely

00:10:24.280 | do we ever understand how we ourselves truly feel.

00:10:27.740 | And certainly with language,

00:10:29.160 | it's very hard to explain our feelings with words

00:10:32.900 | in a way that can convey the way that we feel

00:10:35.600 | with the kind of nuance that represents our own reality.

00:10:39.760 | Even in a state of extreme happiness or extreme sadness,

00:10:44.220 | words fall short of explaining how we feel inside.

00:10:48.080 | And yet, as I mentioned earlier,

00:10:49.480 | music not only can describe emotions,

00:10:51.980 | it can evoke emotions within us.

00:10:54.220 | And in doing so, it can evoke emotions

00:10:56.920 | that give us a sense of empathy for the person

00:10:59.660 | playing the music or simply for others in the world.

00:11:02.800 | And music can do that so powerfully

00:11:05.220 | because not only does music come in through our ears,

00:11:08.420 | and we'll talk about the process of how sound is converted

00:11:10.820 | into what we perceive as music in a little bit,

00:11:13.140 | because indeed it comes in through our ears

00:11:15.340 | and we can hear that music, of course,

00:11:18.040 | but the nerve cells, the neurons in your brain,

00:11:20.860 | as well as the nerve cells in your body

00:11:23.280 | can become activated by music in a way

00:11:25.940 | that the firing of those neurons,

00:11:28.540 | literally the frequency of those neural impulses

00:11:32.060 | comes to match the frequency of the sounds

00:11:34.880 | that you're hearing in your outside environment.

00:11:37.200 | In other words, when you listen to music,

00:11:38.860 | not only is that music coming into your body

00:11:41.340 | through your sense organs, your hearing,

00:11:44.180 | but your body itself is an instrument

00:11:48.600 | playing that music from within.

00:11:50.820 | So for instance, if you listen to a piece of music

00:11:53.360 | that has a lightness to it, that evokes a sense in you

00:11:56.140 | of the turning of the seasons from winter to spring,

00:11:59.460 | something that's common in certain classical music,

00:12:01.600 | but other forms of music as well.

00:12:04.060 | When you hear that music, indeed,

00:12:05.720 | it's coming in through your ears,

00:12:07.040 | but also the firing of the neurons in your brain and body

00:12:10.480 | responding to those particular frequencies of sound

00:12:13.500 | is such that your body itself is an instrument

00:12:17.320 | playing that sense of the turning of the seasons

00:12:20.640 | from winter to spring within you,

00:12:22.460 | which is why your body starts to feel lifted in some cases,

00:12:26.860 | or it starts to feel a lightness in some cases,

00:12:29.340 | and an entire set of emotions starts to be recruited

00:12:33.340 | that at least for you resemble the turning of the seasons

00:12:37.060 | from winter to spring.

00:12:39.140 | Now that may sound rather complex,

00:12:40.580 | but we're going to break that process down

00:12:42.120 | into its component parts.

00:12:43.220 | But what I essentially just said

00:12:45.200 | is that when you listen to music,

00:12:46.940 | not only are you hearing that music,

00:12:48.820 | but your body, that is your neurons,

00:12:51.220 | and indeed your hormones as well,

00:12:53.260 | things like oxytocin and some other hormones

00:12:55.340 | in your brain and body that we'll discuss,

00:12:57.180 | are contributing to a symphony of emotion

00:13:00.980 | from within your body and brain.

00:13:03.660 | Okay, so while music can't explain objects,

00:13:06.520 | it can't describe them,

00:13:07.980 | it can explain in a very nuanced ways emotions,

00:13:10.940 | and it can evoke emotions within us.

00:13:13.740 | Now, if that's not amazing enough,

00:13:15.660 | music can not only describe and evoke emotions,

00:13:19.420 | it can also imply intent.

00:13:22.060 | Think for instance about drumming

00:13:23.780 | that you would hear off in the distance,

00:13:25.340 | and we're not talking about,

00:13:26.180 | [imitates drumming]

00:13:27.980 | we're talking drumming of this sort.

00:13:29.920 | [imitates drumming]

00:13:33.920 | And perhaps the cadence of that drumming changes

00:13:37.520 | such that as it's approaching,

00:13:39.420 | it gets more and more frequent.

00:13:42.180 | [imitates drumming]

00:13:44.340 | What is the intent being implied?

00:13:45.720 | Well, we know from numerous studies

00:13:49.020 | and you know from numerous movies that you've seen and heard

00:13:53.780 | that that sort of low frequency drumming

00:13:57.720 | of increasing cadence as it approaches

00:14:00.860 | is implying the intent of aggression or war,

00:14:04.900 | or at least is implying that something serious

00:14:07.740 | is going to happen.

00:14:08.980 | Now contrast that with a different frequency of sound

00:14:11.740 | played at a higher cadence.

00:14:13.300 | [imitates drumming]

00:14:17.100 | Now, the second set of tones,

00:14:20.140 | [imitates drumming]

00:14:22.620 | are far less clear in terms of what they mean,

00:14:25.420 | what their intent is.

00:14:27.100 | But if we contrast them with,

00:14:30.180 | let's just call them what they're typically called

00:14:32.020 | the war drums or the drums that convey a sense

00:14:35.180 | of aggressive intent.

00:14:37.020 | [imitates drumming]

00:14:39.980 | What we create then is a juxtaposition

00:14:43.380 | of two different emotional states in you perhaps,

00:14:46.780 | or maybe you don't respond to those

00:14:48.080 | with any robust emotional shift,

00:14:50.460 | but we are conveying two separate

00:14:53.120 | or distinct sets of intent.

00:14:55.720 | Now of course, spoken language can convey intent.

00:14:58.620 | I could say, for instance, you know, I'm going to help you.

00:15:01.460 | How can I help you today?

00:15:02.540 | Or I could say, I'm going to hurt you, right?

00:15:05.180 | Of course, with spoken language, you could do that

00:15:06.900 | and you could change the intonation of that language,

00:15:09.020 | you could change the frequency.

00:15:10.380 | So if I were to say, I'm going to hurt you,

00:15:12.740 | it's very different than if I say, I'm going to hurt you.

00:15:15.760 | Okay, or if I put it as a question, I'm going to hurt you.

00:15:19.060 | Okay, so with language, of course,

00:15:21.500 | there's also the opportunity for a lot of nuance,

00:15:23.640 | depending on where the inflections,

00:15:25.160 | where the accents are on a particular phrase,

00:15:27.780 | even a particular word.

00:15:29.580 | But with music, as you recall,

00:15:31.960 | when we convey a sense of intent,

00:15:35.040 | we are also conveying that sense of intent

00:15:37.140 | through the body of the listener,

00:15:39.160 | not just bringing it in through their ears.

00:15:42.020 | And so when we do that,

00:15:43.300 | what we do is we start to recruit a huge number

00:15:46.440 | of neural circuits that are involved,

00:15:48.440 | not just in understanding or a sense of empathy

00:15:52.560 | for an emotion, but rather that can recruit movement

00:15:56.500 | or what we call pre-motor circuits in the body.

00:15:58.720 | Pre-motor circuits are the neurons that start to fire

00:16:01.580 | before a particular pattern of action is generated.

00:16:05.020 | And so when we hear music that conveys emotion,

00:16:08.400 | that evokes emotion, and especially when we hear music

00:16:11.740 | that conveys a sense of intent from the outside,

00:16:14.940 | we too start to feel as if we need to move

00:16:18.560 | or respond to that music in a particular way.

00:16:21.780 | Now, what I just described to you

00:16:23.220 | is not something that's learned.

00:16:24.780 | In fact, it is innate.

00:16:26.260 | How do we know that?

00:16:27.220 | Well, there are some beautiful studies

00:16:29.380 | that have explored how babies respond to music,

00:16:32.840 | indeed, how babies respond to specific types of music,

00:16:36.140 | specific frequencies of sound,

00:16:38.080 | spacing between particular notes, and on and on.

00:16:42.180 | It's been demonstrated, for instance,

00:16:44.000 | that babies as young as three months old

00:16:46.960 | respond to music very differently than they respond

00:16:50.100 | to just other forms of sound scrambled in time.

00:16:53.340 | Now, of course, babies that are three months old

00:16:55.120 | aren't speaking, so you could ask them,

00:16:57.740 | does that sound like music?

00:16:58.920 | How does it make you feel, et cetera?

00:17:00.360 | They're not going to answer,

00:17:01.200 | at least not with any coherence,

00:17:03.600 | because they don't have spoken language yet.

00:17:05.780 | But despite their absence of language,

00:17:08.040 | we know that babies as young as three months old

00:17:10.300 | respond to music because they do so

00:17:13.840 | with rhythmic movements of their bodily limbs

00:17:16.780 | and actually their torso as well.

00:17:19.700 | Now, a little bit later, we will touch on this issue

00:17:21.640 | of what types of music evoke movement of the torso

00:17:24.980 | versus movement of the limbs

00:17:26.460 | versus movement of the torso and limbs.

00:17:28.540 | No, I'm not going to dance for you during this podcast.

00:17:31.180 | However, there's a really interesting story there

00:17:33.640 | that relates to how primitive or evolved

00:17:37.260 | the motor neurons,

00:17:38.600 | the neurons that actually move the musculature are

00:17:41.520 | and how primitive or evolved the music

00:17:45.260 | that one listens to is.

00:17:46.900 | But just to give you a sense of where that's headed,

00:17:49.680 | in this study where they examined the responses

00:17:51.840 | of very young babies to music,

00:17:53.840 | what they found is that certain frequencies of sound

00:17:56.240 | evoked movements in those babies that were rhythmic,

00:17:59.060 | where it was mostly their torso moving back and forth

00:18:01.440 | and maybe their head a little bit,

00:18:03.200 | whereas other patterns of sound,

00:18:04.920 | different frequencies in different arrangements,

00:18:07.420 | evoked movement of their limbs more than their torso

00:18:11.440 | and still other patterns of sounds

00:18:14.260 | evoked movement of their torso, limbs and head.

00:18:17.560 | In other words, babies dancing.

00:18:19.740 | And if you've ever been to a wedding or a party

00:18:21.800 | or been out dancing,

00:18:23.180 | you will see people who include more torso versus limb

00:18:27.220 | versus limb and torso movement when they dance.

00:18:29.900 | And yes, of course,

00:18:31.520 | some of this relates to proficiency in dancing

00:18:34.880 | or comfort on the dance floor, et cetera,

00:18:37.640 | but there are some universal rules out there

00:18:39.520 | about how certain frequencies and patterns of sound,

00:18:42.240 | AKA music, evokes different types of bodily movements.

00:18:46.480 | So starting from a very young age,

00:18:48.360 | prior to any instruction in terms of how to dance

00:18:52.040 | or what music is, babies are dancing to music.

00:18:56.200 | And that highlights an important point

00:18:57.540 | that we will return to again and again

00:18:59.480 | throughout today's episode,

00:19:00.540 | which is that the systems of the brain

00:19:03.280 | that respond specifically to movement, not just sound,

00:19:06.280 | but specifically to musical sounds

00:19:08.880 | are intimately tied to the neural circuits of the body

00:19:12.240 | that generate movement.

00:19:13.440 | And this is especially important to understand

00:19:15.720 | when we get into our discussion about music

00:19:17.720 | and our sense of motivation.

00:19:19.400 | Okay, so the list of incredible things

00:19:21.600 | that music can evoke within us

00:19:23.580 | by way of how it activates our nervous system and body

00:19:26.480 | is starting to grow.

00:19:27.760 | We've talked about how music can convey emotion,

00:19:30.640 | how music can evoke emotion,

00:19:32.600 | and how music can convey a sense of intent,

00:19:35.640 | as well now as how music can generate action within us.

00:19:40.420 | This is a pretty spectacular list if you think about it.

00:19:43.520 | In addition, music causes changes

00:19:47.720 | within our bodily physiology

00:19:49.780 | that extends beyond the nervous system,

00:19:51.480 | although it has a relationship to the nervous system.

00:19:54.160 | In particular, there've been a lot of studies

00:19:56.300 | that have explored how music changes things

00:19:58.640 | like our blood pressure

00:19:59.960 | or how fast our heart is beating,

00:20:01.600 | our so-called resting heart rate.

00:20:03.720 | And here we've made some important discoveries

00:20:06.200 | in recent years.

00:20:07.040 | And when I say we, I don't mean my laboratory,

00:20:08.720 | I mean laboratories that focus on the relationship

00:20:11.460 | between music and our bodily physiology,

00:20:14.100 | because we've long known

00:20:15.720 | that music can change various health metrics.

00:20:18.340 | There are some really nice studies,

00:20:19.720 | and I'll link to one or two of the meta-analyses

00:20:21.600 | of these studies in the show note captions,

00:20:23.720 | that have showed that if people listen

00:20:25.960 | to anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes of music per day,

00:20:29.400 | and by the way, the selection of music in these studies

00:20:31.980 | ranged everything from rock and roll,

00:20:34.540 | to classical music, to country music,

00:20:37.100 | typically these studies would ask subjects

00:20:39.720 | what their favorite music is,

00:20:41.160 | and then they would have them listen

00:20:42.400 | to that particular genre of music

00:20:44.520 | for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per day.

00:20:47.040 | And if you look at the meta-analyses of those studies,

00:20:49.500 | what you find is that almost all of them

00:20:51.720 | see some sort of significant effect,

00:20:53.960 | that is some statistically significant shift

00:20:56.560 | in the bodily physiology of people

00:20:58.440 | that deliberately listen to music

00:20:59.980 | for 10 to 30 minutes per day.

00:21:02.460 | Not while doing anything else,

00:21:03.660 | but just listening to that music.

00:21:05.560 | They find, for instance,

00:21:06.620 | that their resting heart rate is reduced,

00:21:08.740 | if not during the period

00:21:10.480 | in which they're listening to the music,

00:21:11.560 | then after the time in which they're listening to the music,

00:21:14.880 | they find that their so-called heart rate variability

00:21:18.120 | tends to increase.

00:21:19.280 | For those of you that aren't familiar

00:21:20.360 | with heart rate variability,

00:21:21.640 | having increased heart rate variability is a good thing,

00:21:24.440 | and that's because heart rate variability

00:21:26.840 | reflects the sort of push and pull,

00:21:29.640 | or the balance, rather,

00:21:31.080 | of the activation of the so-called sympathetic nervous system

00:21:34.240 | which is the one sometimes called the fight or flight system,

00:21:36.560 | although I don't really like that nomenclature.

00:21:38.700 | The sympathetic nervous system,

00:21:40.280 | by the way, is not about emotional sympathy,

00:21:41.840 | it's what drives your heart rate higher,

00:21:43.600 | it tends to put us into activated states

00:21:45.840 | where we favor movement and motion and makes us alert,

00:21:49.500 | whereas the parasympathetic aspect of our nervous system

00:21:53.400 | is the portion of our autonomic nervous system,

00:21:55.880 | sometimes called the rest and digest system,

00:21:57.680 | the parasympathetic nervous system

00:21:59.160 | drives states of deeper relaxation, of calm.

00:22:01.800 | In any event, heart rate variability

00:22:04.320 | reflects a periodic breaking,

00:22:07.040 | a slowing down of heart rate and breathing

00:22:09.960 | and other aspects of our neural system function

00:22:12.780 | that works alongside with sympathetic activation.

00:22:17.160 | Think of sympathetic activation as an accelerator,

00:22:19.420 | parasympathetic activation as a break,

00:22:21.360 | and when heart rate variability is higher,

00:22:23.740 | it reflects the fact that our parasympathetic nervous system

00:22:26.260 | is periodically engaging, it's getting activated

00:22:29.180 | and slowing our heart rate, slowing our breathing down.

00:22:32.340 | Music seems to have the effect

00:22:34.140 | of activating that parasympathetic aspect

00:22:36.300 | of our nervous system,

00:22:37.380 | and so we are pumping the brake every once in a while,

00:22:39.940 | slowing down our heart rate, slowing down our breathing.

00:22:43.100 | In other words, when people listen to music

00:22:45.700 | for a dedicated period of time each day

00:22:47.500 | of about 10 to 30 minutes,

00:22:48.820 | some studies looked at as much as 60 minutes,

00:22:51.080 | but typically 10 to 30 minutes,

00:22:53.120 | what one finds is that heart rate variability increases,

00:22:56.720 | not just during the period

00:22:58.080 | when they're listening to the music, this is very important,

00:23:00.360 | but also heart rate variability is increased

00:23:02.780 | around the clock in those subjects, even during sleep,

00:23:06.480 | making listening to 10 to 30 minutes

00:23:08.440 | of your favorite music each day,

00:23:10.200 | not just what I would think to be a enjoyable protocol,

00:23:14.080 | if you could even call it a protocol,

00:23:15.320 | it's so enjoyable to listen to your favorite music

00:23:17.720 | that it feels almost inappropriate to call it a protocol

00:23:20.600 | because protocol sounds kind of rigid,

00:23:22.080 | like you're imposing that on yourself,

00:23:23.480 | but if you need an excuse to listen to your favorite music

00:23:26.280 | for 10 to 30, maybe 60 minutes per day,

00:23:28.860 | and just attending to that music,

00:23:30.960 | not while doing anything else,

00:23:32.200 | which is what these studies had subjects do,

00:23:34.480 | well, indeed that's been shown

00:23:35.800 | to increase heart rate variability around the clock,

00:23:37.880 | which we know is beneficial

00:23:38.920 | for your mental and physical health more generally.

00:23:41.120 | Okay, so there are dozens, if not hundreds of studies

00:23:43.320 | that have explored how music impacts our physiology,

00:23:46.400 | and as I just mentioned,

00:23:48.480 | it seems that if we listen to music that we like

00:23:50.880 | for 10 to 30, maybe 60 minutes a day,

00:23:53.240 | our physiology, certain health metrics,

00:23:55.640 | heart rate variability in particular, improve.

00:23:58.300 | Now, in light of the positive effects

00:23:59.720 | of listening to music on one's health,

00:24:01.680 | there's a recent meta-analysis

00:24:03.280 | that I found particularly interesting.

00:24:05.200 | The title of this meta-analysis

00:24:06.880 | is effects of music on the cardiovascular system,

00:24:09.640 | and it was published in "Trends in Cardiovascular Medicine."

00:24:12.660 | Now, from the title of this paper,

00:24:14.640 | "Effects of Music on the Cardiovascular System,"

00:24:16.920 | you might think that it's just yet another meta-analysis

00:24:19.640 | exploring how music impacts heart rate variability

00:24:22.100 | and things of that sort.

00:24:23.600 | But what's interesting about this study

00:24:25.440 | is that it identifies that the way

00:24:28.200 | in which listening to one's favorite music

00:24:30.640 | positively impacts the cardiovascular system

00:24:32.900 | and other aspects of our physiology

00:24:34.880 | is very likely not through direct changes on our heart rate

00:24:39.880 | simply by listening to music,

00:24:42.140 | but rather through changes in our breathing.

00:24:45.040 | And this is true

00:24:46.360 | even if people were not singing along with the music,

00:24:48.840 | by the way.

00:24:49.980 | Now, the relationship between breathing and heart rate

00:24:52.820 | is something that I've touched on before,

00:24:54.400 | but if you haven't heard me discuss this,

00:24:56.200 | I'm just going to briefly tell you the relationship

00:24:58.440 | in two or three sentences,

00:24:59.680 | and then I'll explain the mechanism

00:25:01.240 | also in about two to three sentences.

00:25:02.720 | So if you have a background in biology,

00:25:04.140 | or even if you don't,

00:25:05.180 | this will all be very simple and very clear.

00:25:07.860 | When you deliberately inhale with a lot of vigor,

00:25:12.740 | or you deliberately make your inhale longer

00:25:16.440 | than you naturally would,

00:25:17.840 | so for instance, if I breathe in very vigorously

00:25:21.480 | through my nose,

00:25:23.200 | something very specific happens to your heart rate,

00:25:26.180 | it increases,

00:25:27.360 | whereas when you deliberately exhale,

00:25:29.920 | meaning when you exhale

00:25:32.840 | and deliberately make that exhale longer,

00:25:35.240 | or you deliberately add vigor to that exhale,

00:25:38.960 | or even a shorter, deliberate, more vigorous exhale,

00:25:44.080 | you slow down your heart rate.

00:25:47.200 | And that's because of a phenomenon

00:25:48.520 | called respiratory sinus arrhythmia,

00:25:50.860 | which because it includes the word arrhythmia,

00:25:53.260 | sounds like a bad thing,

00:25:54.200 | but it's actually a wonderful thing.

00:25:56.200 | And it has to do with the relationship

00:25:57.400 | between a particular muscle in your body

00:25:58.960 | called the diaphragm,

00:26:00.620 | which when you inhale, our lungs fill with air,

00:26:03.720 | our diaphragm moves down,

00:26:06.040 | and our heart therefore has a little bit more space.

00:26:08.800 | It actually gets bigger,

00:26:10.460 | temporarily bigger, but bigger.

00:26:12.640 | And when it does that,

00:26:13.880 | whatever volume of blood is in the heart

00:26:16.080 | is now moving through a larger space.

00:26:18.300 | So it's the same amount of blood

00:26:19.880 | moving through a larger space,

00:26:21.480 | and the nervous system registers that

00:26:24.400 | as the blood moving more slowly

00:26:27.380 | through that temporarily enlarged heart.

00:26:30.320 | And as a consequence,

00:26:31.160 | there's a signal sent through various stations

00:26:33.360 | of the nervous system to the heart to speed the heart up.

00:26:36.280 | In other words, just as I said before,

00:26:37.920 | when we inhale, our heart rate speeds up.

00:26:41.360 | Conversely, when we exhale, our lungs empty out some air,

00:26:46.360 | our diaphragm moves up.

00:26:48.360 | And as a consequence of that,

00:26:49.760 | there's less space for the heart.

00:26:52.200 | And so our heart temporarily becomes smaller.

00:26:54.840 | And when that happens,

00:26:56.100 | the volume of blood within that smaller heart

00:26:57.960 | moves more quickly.

00:26:59.520 | And that's detected by the nervous system,

00:27:01.520 | which then triggers a neural signal

00:27:03.760 | from the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system,

00:27:07.080 | which is just fancy nerd speak

00:27:08.440 | for a neural signal is sent to your heart.

00:27:11.320 | Every time you exhale to slow your heart down.

00:27:14.520 | So the well-established effects

00:27:16.080 | of listening to your favorite music,

00:27:18.480 | increasing your heart rate variability

00:27:20.860 | is not a direct interaction

00:27:23.300 | between the sounds coming in through your ears

00:27:25.780 | and changes in your heart rate

00:27:27.360 | while you're listening to the music.

00:27:28.980 | That's actually what I would have thought happened.

00:27:30.780 | But this more recent meta-analysis

00:27:32.640 | pulls apart the variables in these different studies,

00:27:35.800 | really illustrates that when we are listening to music,

00:27:39.120 | we are subconsciously, most of the time subconsciously,

00:27:42.680 | changing our patterns of breathing.

00:27:44.780 | We are inhaling an anticipation

00:27:47.080 | of certain things happening in the music.

00:27:49.180 | We're exhaling when we feel a relief of tension.

00:27:52.020 | We get excited, we may get sad, we may get happy.

00:27:55.580 | We may even just be listening to music

00:27:57.260 | that we don't think is impacting our physiology

00:27:59.940 | at such a core level, but indeed it is.

00:28:02.280 | Music is able to route into our nervous system

00:28:04.680 | at levels below our conscious awareness

00:28:07.160 | and literally turn the various knobs, if you will,

00:28:10.660 | of our cardiovascular system, of our breathing apparatus,

00:28:13.940 | the diaphragm, the lungs.

00:28:15.200 | It can evoke respiratory sinus arrhythmia,

00:28:17.840 | which again, sounds like a terrible thing,

00:28:19.240 | but is actually the reflection

00:28:20.400 | of a healthy nervous system and heart.

00:28:22.680 | And in doing so, yes, it increases heart rate variability,

00:28:25.760 | something that is beneficial to all of us,

00:28:28.200 | but it's doing so by changing our patterns of breathing.

00:28:31.640 | So if you've ever wondered why music can change

00:28:33.680 | how you feel so robustly,

00:28:35.640 | well, it's doing that at a deep foundational level

00:28:39.160 | of your nervous system.

00:28:40.200 | Indeed, at the levels of your nervous system

00:28:41.960 | that typically are not in your conscious awareness,

00:28:44.560 | because I have to imagine that most of you

00:28:46.120 | are probably not listening to music and thinking,

00:28:47.600 | oh, here comes that one chorus,

00:28:49.500 | or here comes that one melody,

00:28:50.760 | and this is where I always exhale,

00:28:52.560 | or this is where I always hold my breath,

00:28:54.720 | this sort of thing.

00:28:55.540 | No, most people are just listening to music.

00:28:57.420 | It's coming in through their ears.

00:28:59.100 | They're experiencing some bodily sensations.

00:29:00.740 | Maybe they're moving their torso, arms,

00:29:02.240 | maybe your arms and torso.

00:29:03.320 | Maybe you're not moving at all, no dancing.

00:29:05.840 | Maybe just listening within your head,

00:29:07.620 | or maybe it's just dropped into the background

00:29:10.500 | below your conscious awareness at all,

00:29:12.160 | and yet that music is communicating emotion.

00:29:14.460 | It's evoking emotion.

00:29:15.560 | It's communicating intent.

00:29:17.520 | It's activating those premotor circuits

00:29:20.200 | that would have you move if it could,

00:29:22.240 | and we'll talk about dance a little bit later,

00:29:24.280 | but even if you're not dancing,

00:29:25.680 | even if you're not swaying the tiniest bit,

00:29:28.440 | your patterns of breathing are changing,

00:29:30.440 | and through respiratory sinus arrhythmia,

00:29:33.480 | your heart rate is changing,

00:29:35.280 | and through changes in your heart rate,

00:29:37.560 | your heart rate variability is increasing.

00:29:39.960 | So if ever you wanted a tool or protocol

00:29:42.600 | that was easy to use but could positively impact

00:29:45.760 | your mental and physical health,

00:29:47.680 | well, listening to your favorite music

00:29:49.480 | for 10 to 30, maybe 60 minutes, maybe more per day

00:29:53.080 | is that protocol.

00:29:54.560 | As many of you know,

00:29:55.480 | I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012,

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00:30:03.760 | all of your foundational nutrition needs.

00:30:05.980 | Now, of course, I try to get enough servings

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00:30:09.900 | that include vegetables and fruits every day,

00:30:12.160 | but oftentimes I simply can't get enough servings,

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00:30:32.160 | if you could take just one supplement, what would it be?

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00:30:50.960 | So hopefully it's becoming clear

00:30:52.300 | just how absolutely powerful music is

00:30:54.860 | at evoking different physiological responses within you,

00:30:58.180 | that is within your brain and body.

00:31:00.340 | But there's an additional one

00:31:02.180 | that I find particularly interesting

00:31:04.840 | because it addresses and indeed answers

00:31:07.020 | one of the most common questions that I receive all the time,

00:31:10.660 | which is how can I get more motivated?

00:31:13.440 | Not how I, Andrew, can get more motivated,

00:31:15.900 | although of course I ask myself that question

00:31:18.020 | from time to time,

00:31:19.140 | although admittedly most of the time I'm wondering

00:31:21.100 | how I'm just going to get everything

00:31:22.060 | that I need to get done done,

00:31:24.180 | but I often get the question,

00:31:28.000 | how can I feel more motivated

00:31:29.480 | or what can I do to sustain my motivation over time?

00:31:32.060 | And we hear a lot of different strategies

00:31:35.080 | about how to do that.

00:31:36.480 | We hear about the quote unquote, just do it strategy,

00:31:39.540 | the incredible slogan that Nike created

00:31:42.740 | and that persists to this day

00:31:45.060 | has become commonplace in culture.

00:31:47.700 | And indeed the just do it form of advice can be a good one,

00:31:52.200 | but for a lot of people just hearing just do it

00:31:55.420 | or telling themselves just do it

00:31:57.260 | is not something that can evoke action in them.

00:32:00.700 | Other people will listen to motivational speeches,

00:32:04.020 | they'll look at motivational videos,

00:32:05.720 | they'll read motivational books,

00:32:08.060 | they may even hire coaches.

00:32:09.780 | In other words, people invest a ton of time, energy,

00:32:12.240 | and money into trying to be more motivated.

00:32:15.060 | And indeed a number of episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:32:17.780 | have focused on the relationship between say motivation,

00:32:21.020 | drive and the neuromodulator dopamine.

00:32:23.400 | And we have several episodes about that

00:32:24.880 | as well as a toolkit,

00:32:25.960 | all of which are available at zero cost at hubermanlab.com.

00:32:28.760 | You can access those easily by putting motivation

00:32:31.700 | into the search function at hubermanlab.com.

00:32:33.580 | All of that will come up timestamped, et cetera.

00:32:36.140 | But perhaps surprisingly today's conversation about music

00:32:38.680 | offers us a particularly potent tool to increase motivation.

00:32:42.600 | And that's because one of the fundamental properties

00:32:45.940 | of listening to music is that it evokes activation

00:32:49.820 | of these pre-motor and motor circuits

00:32:52.200 | within our brain and body.

00:32:53.260 | That is the neural circuits whose specific job

00:32:56.860 | is to mobilize our body from its current position and state

00:33:01.020 | to a new position and state.

00:33:03.980 | So for those of you that listen to music while you work out

00:33:07.440 | or prior to when you work out,

00:33:09.100 | you are definitely onto something.

00:33:10.340 | For those of you that don't, that's fine too.

00:33:12.260 | What I'm going to describe now

00:33:13.580 | are the specific sets of neural circuits

00:33:15.760 | that listening to music activates.

00:33:18.160 | As I mentioned earlier, listening to music

00:33:20.100 | activates so many circuits throughout the brain and body

00:33:23.480 | that really one can take a step back

00:33:25.540 | from the scientific literature on this and say,

00:33:27.700 | anytime someone has done a study

00:33:29.560 | where human beings listen to music

00:33:31.420 | and people record from a particular brain area,

00:33:34.560 | believe it or not, even from the olfactory system,

00:33:36.600 | from the system and the brain responsible for smell,

00:33:39.560 | there seems to be some significant shift

00:33:41.920 | in terms of the neural firing there

00:33:43.580 | or the release of neural chemicals,

00:33:46.020 | which on the one hand might lead you to conclude

00:33:48.140 | that listening to music is just sort of a non-specific,

00:33:50.700 | generalized activator of nervous system function.

00:33:53.140 | It's just kind of like turning all the lights on,

00:33:55.140 | but that's not the case.

00:33:57.240 | Music in fact is activating different neural circuits

00:33:59.880 | differently in time and space

00:34:02.180 | to evoke a whole set of specific reactions

00:34:05.060 | in your brain and body,

00:34:06.340 | but not the least of which is the propensity for you to move.

00:34:10.160 | And this is something that you can leverage

00:34:11.740 | and indeed I'll describe a protocol

00:34:13.100 | by which you can leverage music

00:34:14.640 | in order to greatly increase your state of motivation.

00:34:17.800 | Okay, so this is the portion of today's episode

00:34:19.740 | where we're going to discuss some specific neural circuits,

00:34:22.520 | but I want to assure you that if you're a neurobiologist,

00:34:26.180 | you can understand this.

00:34:27.260 | If you are not a neurobiologist,

00:34:29.000 | in fact, if you took no biology ever in your life,

00:34:32.860 | I'm going to make it clear and easy for you to understand.

00:34:35.900 | As I mentioned before, when we hear music,

00:34:37.580 | it activates many, many circuits

00:34:39.480 | throughout the brain and body.

00:34:40.420 | When I say circuits, I mean neurons,

00:34:41.900 | nerve cells that communicate with one another

00:34:43.860 | and sort of chains of reactions.

00:34:45.980 | When I say respond to one another,

00:34:47.880 | what I mean is when neurons are quote unquote activated,

00:34:51.800 | they release chemicals.

00:34:53.660 | Those chemicals are called neurotransmitters,

00:34:56.060 | things like glutamate, GABA.

00:34:57.980 | They're also called neuromodulators,

00:35:00.240 | things like dopamine, serotonin.

00:35:02.200 | The names don't really matter for sake of today's discussion,

00:35:05.020 | but what those things do is they influence the likelihood

00:35:08.180 | that the next neuron will be active or less active, okay?

00:35:11.600 | So neurons speak the language, if you will, of electricity,

00:35:15.380 | 'cause that's how they evoke release of these chemicals

00:35:18.740 | and chemistry, they vomit out these chemicals.

00:35:22.000 | Those chemicals then bind to little parking spots

00:35:25.060 | on the next neuron called receptors,

00:35:27.240 | and then the next neuron gets activated electrically

00:35:30.220 | and then to the next neuron and next neuron and so on.

00:35:32.920 | It's a chain of electrochemical reactions, okay?

00:35:36.620 | So there's your neuroscience 101 lesson for today.

00:35:41.280 | When people listen to music,

00:35:43.020 | there is heightened activation

00:35:44.940 | of the so-called frontal cortex, the area of your brain,

00:35:47.580 | which is on the surface below your skull,

00:35:49.960 | but just behind your forehead, more or less.

00:35:52.100 | And that area of your brain is involved

00:35:53.840 | in a lot of different things.

00:35:55.100 | It's involved in understanding context,

00:35:57.200 | what sorts of behaviors and thoughts and actions

00:35:59.380 | are appropriate for a given environment.

00:36:01.700 | By the way, if any of you have ever been in an environment

00:36:04.820 | where everyone was really quiet and you thought,

00:36:06.340 | oh my gosh, what's keeping me from just blurting out

00:36:08.820 | my name right now or saying something totally inappropriate,

00:36:12.020 | your frontal cortex is the one providing the shh,

00:36:14.820 | the so-called top-down inhibition on that impulse

00:36:17.700 | to blurt something inappropriate out.

00:36:19.420 | And by the way, your thoughts about that impulse

00:36:22.260 | are perfectly normal.

00:36:23.420 | They actually reflect a heightened sense of normalcy

00:36:27.060 | because it means that your brain is thinking about

00:36:29.880 | how it's not going to do that,

00:36:31.840 | and so therefore you're not going to do that.

00:36:33.500 | Likewise, if you are ever at the edge of a high bridge,

00:36:36.680 | please stay on the safe side of the railing.

00:36:38.940 | But if you think, oh my goodness,

00:36:39.920 | what's keeping me from just jumping off the bridge right now,

00:36:42.440 | what's keeping you from doing that is your frontal cortex.

00:36:44.520 | It's suppressing certain actions in a context-dependent way,

00:36:48.620 | in particular actions that are dangerous to you socially,

00:36:51.120 | physically, dangerous to others socially,

00:36:53.160 | physically, et cetera.

00:36:54.880 | Now, the frontal cortex in order to do that

00:36:57.720 | also has an incredible ability to make predictions.

00:37:01.000 | So this is the function of the frontal cortex

00:37:02.720 | that I want to focus on for the moment.

00:37:04.600 | Your frontal cortex is great at doing the,

00:37:07.940 | if this, then that type of analysis.

00:37:10.480 | If I say this, everyone will be offended.

00:37:12.720 | Or if I say this, maybe they'll laugh.

00:37:14.560 | Or if I don't say this, I'll be safe.

00:37:16.760 | If I do say that, I won't be safe, this kind of thing.

00:37:19.460 | Frontal cortex is activated when we listen to music

00:37:22.820 | because within music, there are some regularities.

00:37:27.340 | Sometimes these are described as motifs

00:37:30.560 | or melodies or choruses.

00:37:32.700 | Again, this is the entire landscape of discussion

00:37:35.260 | that we could have and we will have with an expert guest

00:37:37.620 | about how the mathematics of music

00:37:39.460 | impacts the electrochemical signaling within the brain

00:37:42.060 | and the coding that is the mathematics of brain function,

00:37:46.020 | which leads us to predict that certain things,

00:37:48.140 | because they just happened,

00:37:49.060 | are likely to happen again or not happen again.

00:37:51.220 | But let's set all that aside for the moment

00:37:53.080 | and just state the simple fact,

00:37:55.480 | which is that when you listen to music,

00:37:56.880 | your frontal cortex increases in activation

00:38:00.420 | because it is predicting what you're going to hear next

00:38:03.780 | based on what you're currently hearing

00:38:05.520 | and what you heard before.

00:38:07.100 | Now, I am from the generation

00:38:09.300 | that we didn't have iPods when I was a kid.

00:38:12.140 | We did have CDs, we did have tapes,

00:38:14.380 | but you had to fast forward or rewind a cassette tape,

00:38:18.060 | or you had to skip on the CD

00:38:20.180 | in order to move about the album in time.

00:38:22.980 | Nowadays, you can cue up different songs

00:38:26.260 | in different order really easily,

00:38:28.580 | but if you are somebody who listens

00:38:31.140 | to albums start to finish,

00:38:32.580 | or if you're like me and you grew up listening

00:38:34.020 | to albums start to finish,

00:38:35.620 | maybe occasionally skipping a song,

00:38:37.500 | but you will be very familiar with this phenomenon,

00:38:41.100 | which is that right as a given song ends,

00:38:44.380 | if you're familiar with that album,

00:38:46.500 | you already anticipate the start

00:38:48.500 | of the next song in your head.

00:38:50.060 | And that just speaks to the predictive function

00:38:52.580 | that the frontal cortex plays.

00:38:54.420 | So if you have a mix tape with a bunch of different songs,

00:38:57.300 | sure, you don't expect one song of a given artist

00:38:59.860 | to lead into the next,

00:39:01.020 | but if you're somebody who's listened

00:39:02.060 | to that mix tape a lot,

00:39:03.100 | so you're familiar with what song comes next,

00:39:04.680 | or if you're listening to a given album start to finish

00:39:07.500 | and you're very familiar with it,

00:39:08.940 | well, then you'll immediately resonate

00:39:10.340 | with what I'm saying here,

00:39:11.180 | which is that your frontal cortex is always anticipating

00:39:13.700 | what sound is likely to come next.

00:39:15.960 | And this is very important

00:39:17.220 | because one of the key things about music

00:39:19.620 | and its ability to evoke our sense of surprise or delight

00:39:23.620 | through the release of a neuromodulator called dopamine,

00:39:26.220 | we'll get to this a bit more later,

00:39:27.940 | is because that prediction machinery is thinking,

00:39:30.540 | oh, I heard that set of chords a moment ago,

00:39:33.660 | I'm going to hear it again.

00:39:34.680 | And then when it changes up, your brain goes,

00:39:36.340 | oh, whoa, hold on.

00:39:38.040 | That wasn't what I expected.

00:39:39.260 | And it sometimes does that with a sense of delight,

00:39:41.720 | like, oh yes.

00:39:42.980 | And sometimes it hears that and it goes,

00:39:45.180 | oh wait, what's this?

00:39:46.180 | I don't really like this that much.

00:39:47.380 | I like the opener of that song,

00:39:48.860 | but I don't really like the rest.

00:39:50.100 | I think of that as, you know,

00:39:51.620 | there's certain pastries, muffins in particular,

00:39:54.040 | where I really like the top.

00:39:55.360 | It's got the little crumbs,

00:39:56.480 | it's got the berries and stuff,

00:39:57.720 | and then you like get down past the top.

00:39:59.440 | And then you get to the middle of the thing and you're like,

00:40:01.240 | oh, well, this thing's not that good.

00:40:03.340 | Okay, there's certain songs like that for me.

00:40:04.980 | So I always thought of those as muffin songs

00:40:07.400 | because the top of the muffin is always the best.

00:40:09.480 | Whereas a donut is great the whole way through.

00:40:11.420 | And now I'm going on a tangent

00:40:12.680 | 'cause I'm thinking about muffins and donuts.

00:40:14.160 | So I'm going to take us back to music.

00:40:15.780 | But the point is relevant nonetheless,

00:40:17.700 | which is that your frontal cortex is making predictions.

00:40:19.940 | And when those predictions are broken,

00:40:21.840 | that's a sense of novelty.

00:40:23.880 | And when that novelty is something that you like, okay?

00:40:26.700 | So it evokes a sense of, yes, I like that.

00:40:28.900 | Well, then dopamine is deployed.

00:40:30.440 | And when that novelty is something you don't like,

00:40:32.720 | typically there's a reduction in the amount of dopamine

00:40:35.200 | released in a separate set of brain circuits

00:40:37.320 | below whatever level of dopamine happened to be there prior,

00:40:40.280 | your so-called baseline level of dopamine, okay?

00:40:42.640 | So when you listen to music,

00:40:43.880 | there's a strong activation of the prediction machinery

00:40:47.560 | in your brain.

00:40:48.640 | There's also activation of the circuits in your brain

00:40:50.380 | that register novelty.

00:40:51.440 | What are those circuits?

00:40:52.760 | These are things like the ventral tegmental area

00:40:55.000 | and the nucleus accumbens.

00:40:56.920 | I've talked about these before on the podcast.

00:40:58.960 | Again, you don't need to know those names.

00:41:00.480 | Those are the names given to certain brain areas

00:41:02.880 | that control the release of dopamine in time

00:41:07.040 | according to whatever you happen to be experiencing

00:41:09.040 | in that moment, okay?

00:41:10.120 | So the mesolimbic reward pathway

00:41:12.600 | could perhaps better be called

00:41:14.760 | the mesolimbic reinforcement pathway.

00:41:17.280 | So for those of you out there shouting,

00:41:18.600 | wait, the mesolimbic pathway does a bunch of other things.

00:41:20.620 | It's not just dopamine.

00:41:21.840 | I agree, it's also serotonin.

00:41:23.240 | It's a bunch of other things.

00:41:24.080 | But for today's discussion,

00:41:25.400 | we're thinking about the mesolimbic pathway

00:41:27.240 | as deploying dopamine,

00:41:28.480 | which it does when we hear something novel,

00:41:31.880 | meaning not what we predicted and we like what we hear.

00:41:35.840 | And then there are a bunch of other brain centers

00:41:37.420 | and circuits that listening to music activates.

00:41:39.920 | I'll just list off a few.

00:41:41.120 | Again, this isn't intended to confuse anybody

00:41:43.860 | or add a lot of useless nomenclature,

00:41:45.600 | but since I am a neuroscientist

00:41:47.620 | and this is a science and science-informed tools podcast,

00:41:51.640 | I'd be remiss if I didn't mention

00:41:53.080 | that we get strong activation of a brain structure.

00:41:56.160 | You actually have two of them,

00:41:57.000 | one on each side of the brain called the amygdala.

00:41:59.480 | This is a brain area that's part of a larger set of circuits

00:42:02.020 | that's associated with arousal, okay?

00:42:04.840 | Meaning becoming more alert,

00:42:06.940 | becoming more aware of our surroundings

00:42:09.200 | and the particular sensory stimuli that are coming in

00:42:11.640 | at the particular time,

00:42:12.920 | such as the notes of the music

00:42:14.320 | or a particular set of lyrics.

00:42:16.800 | And music also activates areas of the brain,

00:42:18.700 | such as the parahippocampal formation,

00:42:21.160 | the cortex and the hippocampus itself,

00:42:23.220 | brain areas that encode and store memories.

00:42:26.400 | And this is something that I think

00:42:27.660 | everyone will be familiar with.

00:42:29.280 | When you hear certain songs

00:42:31.200 | or even songs that sound like certain songs

00:42:33.920 | or even songs that you swear you've never heard before,

00:42:37.400 | it can evoke a sense of nostalgia,

00:42:40.000 | of longing for something, of missing somebody,

00:42:42.680 | of sadness or of delight and happiness

00:42:46.120 | and positive memories of somebody or something.

00:42:49.080 | Indeed, I think it's fair to say

00:42:50.400 | that hearing particular pieces of music, particular songs,

00:42:54.780 | more than any other experience

00:42:57.540 | can activate a whole library of memory

00:43:00.200 | and emotions within us.

00:43:01.260 | And that's because of its ability to activate

00:43:03.240 | the parahippocampal regions of the brain,

00:43:05.200 | the cortex and the hippocampus itself.

00:43:07.160 | Again, several different brain areas,

00:43:09.280 | all which communicate with one another

00:43:10.800 | and other areas of the brain

00:43:12.260 | in order to encode our memories, our sense of self,

00:43:16.240 | our sense of others,

00:43:17.160 | our sense of history with those people and on and on.

00:43:19.880 | Now, rather than just make this

00:43:21.920 | a catalog of different brain areas that music evokes,

00:43:24.760 | what I'm trying to do is spell out

00:43:26.680 | how music activating these different brain areas

00:43:29.080 | is creating different components

00:43:31.240 | of what we are familiar with as our experience of music.

00:43:34.820 | So frontal cortex prediction,

00:43:36.440 | mesolimbic reward pathway, novelty, amygdala,

00:43:39.560 | a sense of emotion and arousal.

00:43:41.780 | Parahippocampal cortex and cortex and hippocampus,

00:43:45.920 | our memories, in particular,

00:43:47.920 | our emotional memories and our location memories

00:43:50.520 | associated with a particular piece of music, right?

00:43:52.480 | Haven't you ever heard a song from,

00:43:54.300 | let's say, a summer camp that you went to

00:43:55.640 | when you were a kid?

00:43:56.480 | And all of a sudden, you're remembering

00:43:57.680 | the smell of the grasses at that summer camp.

00:43:59.600 | You're remembering how some of the kids were really great

00:44:02.040 | and how some of the kids were really obnoxious.

00:44:03.800 | You're remembering some things that you did.

00:44:05.720 | You're remembering your counselors.

00:44:06.680 | I mean, there's just a whole landscape

00:44:09.120 | of neural information there,

00:44:10.880 | life information stored in your head

00:44:12.920 | that hearing a particular song that was sung

00:44:15.320 | when you were, what, eight years old, 10 years old,

00:44:17.440 | that camp just flips the lid on

00:44:19.600 | and it comes geysering out.

00:44:20.840 | Remarkable.

00:44:22.080 | Now, there are two other sets of brain circuits

00:44:23.800 | that are activated by music

00:44:25.880 | that deserve specific attention

00:44:28.480 | and deserve that specific attention now

00:44:30.840 | in the context of discussing motivation

00:44:33.120 | and music's ability to motivate us in particular ways.

00:44:37.100 | And those brain circuits are the basal ganglia, okay?

00:44:40.880 | So this is a set of circuits within the brain

00:44:43.280 | that are associated with action initiation,

00:44:45.820 | so-called go circuits,

00:44:47.240 | and withholding action, so-called no-go circuits.

00:44:50.000 | But basically the basal ganglia

00:44:51.840 | are involved in regulating movement.

00:44:54.480 | And the cerebellum.

00:44:57.200 | The cerebellum is sometimes referred to as the mini brain.

00:45:00.080 | It looks like a little mini brain

00:45:01.300 | in the bottom back of the human brain.

00:45:03.880 | In some species, the cerebellum is much larger

00:45:05.880 | relative to the rest of the brain,

00:45:06.960 | but in humans, it's like this little piece in the back

00:45:08.920 | that looks like a little mini brain,

00:45:10.040 | like you're carrying a second brain back there.

00:45:11.360 | That's why I call it mini brain, cerebellum.

00:45:13.320 | It's involved in a lot of things,

00:45:14.960 | but one of its primary functions

00:45:16.820 | is to encode rhythmic timing and processing.

00:45:19.800 | And along with its outputs to some deeper brainstem areas,

00:45:23.840 | things like the vestibular and cochlear nuclei,

00:45:26.580 | we'll talk about this, the parabrachial nucleus.

00:45:28.400 | Again, you don't need to know these names.

00:45:30.000 | It, meaning the cerebellum, along with the basal ganglia,

00:45:33.380 | creates patterns of activity in our brain

00:45:36.040 | that cascade down to particular circuits in our body.

00:45:40.080 | So these are so-called pre-motor circuits and motor circuits

00:45:43.660 | that generate the sense that we not only can move,

00:45:46.520 | but that we want to move

00:45:47.820 | and that we want to move in particular ways.

00:45:50.300 | So if you internalize nothing from the last five minutes

00:45:52.660 | or so in which I've been describing

00:45:54.060 | how music impacts different neural circuits in the brain,

00:45:56.580 | please do take away this important point,

00:45:59.120 | which is that when we listen to music,

00:46:01.580 | we think of that as an auditory experience,

00:46:03.580 | but now you know that it's also an emotional experience.

00:46:06.920 | And, and this is a very important and,

00:46:10.360 | when we listen to music,

00:46:12.100 | it is programming a specific set of motor actions

00:46:15.840 | that are more likely to occur.

00:46:17.880 | Put differently, when we listen to music,

00:46:19.960 | we are more likely to move our body and not just dance,

00:46:24.680 | not just move our torso, our limbs,

00:46:26.920 | or our limbs and torso together in concert with the music,

00:46:29.820 | but rather move our body from its current position

00:46:32.800 | to another position.

00:46:34.180 | And this is one of the most important things

00:46:35.920 | to understand about music.

00:46:37.420 | Music, despite being an auditory stimulus

00:46:39.980 | coming in through our ears,

00:46:41.520 | evokes the activation of neural circuits in our brain

00:46:44.640 | that creates a sort of inertia.

00:46:46.560 | It creates a propensity for action across our entire body.

00:46:50.520 | So now that you understand that listening to music

00:46:52.440 | activates lots of different brain circuits,

00:46:54.160 | of course, the circuits that respond to auditory stimuli,

00:46:57.740 | so-called primary auditory cortex,

00:46:59.400 | is powerfully activated by listening to music,

00:47:01.720 | but also circuits associated with novelty, anticipation.

00:47:05.340 | We talked about circuits in the brain associated with memory,

00:47:08.280 | but also circuits in the brain

00:47:09.400 | that are associated with generating movement,

00:47:11.120 | and not just movement that is in sync with

00:47:14.440 | or corresponds to the music that we're listening to,

00:47:17.440 | but all forms of movement.

00:47:19.040 | But when we listen to music

00:47:20.100 | that has a relatively fast cadence,

00:47:21.840 | and we can actually define what that cadence needs to be,

00:47:24.400 | and we'll do that in a moment,

00:47:26.200 | when we do that, so-called premotor circuitry,

00:47:29.000 | the circuitry that's going to initiate

00:47:30.720 | that kind of inertia or that pressure for movement

00:47:33.580 | within the neural circuits that actually evoke movement,

00:47:36.240 | are all activated.

00:47:38.140 | So for those of you that like to listen to music

00:47:40.200 | while you exercise,

00:47:41.800 | you're familiar with the fact that

00:47:43.300 | listening to great songs with a great beat,

00:47:46.380 | with particular lyrics,

00:47:47.620 | or that associate you with a particular time

00:47:50.260 | or place in your life can be very motivating.

00:47:53.280 | But there are data showing that when people listen to music

00:47:55.980 | that's faster than about 140 to 150 beats per minute,

00:48:00.640 | that it creates a heightened state of motivation

00:48:02.480 | in the body to move.

00:48:03.760 | And the way that it does that

00:48:05.460 | is by way of shifting the balance

00:48:08.160 | between those go circuits and no-go circuits

00:48:10.540 | of the basal ganglia.

00:48:11.380 | There's some other ways that it does it as well.

00:48:13.020 | For instance, music can evoke the release

00:48:15.040 | of certain neurochemicals called the catecholamines.

00:48:17.760 | These include dopamine,

00:48:18.720 | but also norepinephrine and epinephrine

00:48:20.600 | from centers in the brain and body,

00:48:22.240 | glands in the body like the adrenal gland,

00:48:24.240 | that shift the body toward a predisposition

00:48:26.340 | of being more likely to move.

00:48:27.980 | So if we want to distill all this out

00:48:29.480 | to a simple actionable takeaway, simply know this.

00:48:33.420 | Listening to music, relatively faster music,

00:48:36.520 | predisposes you to be more motivated to move.

00:48:39.560 | And that is independent, is what I find so cool.

00:48:42.220 | It's independent of whether or not

00:48:44.080 | you're familiar with the song,

00:48:45.140 | independent of whether or not the lyrics of the song

00:48:47.440 | are motivating lyrics.

00:48:49.080 | If they are, that's just going to layer on top

00:48:51.120 | of the faster cadence,

00:48:52.640 | which is going to predispose you to move.

00:48:54.680 | But what's remarkable is that just listening

00:48:56.400 | to that faster cadence music

00:48:58.480 | is creating a neuronal resonance, if you will,

00:49:02.000 | a pattern of neuronal firing within you

00:49:04.240 | that is going to essentially take your,

00:49:06.440 | and here I'm using metaphor,

00:49:08.540 | is going to put your state of motivation

00:49:10.240 | from either back on your heels to being flat-footed,

00:49:12.400 | or let's say you're mildly motivated,

00:49:14.400 | so I'll call that flat-footed,

00:49:15.560 | to being forward center of mass.

00:49:17.420 | So for any of you that are suffering

00:49:18.920 | from lack of motivation in particular to exercise,

00:49:21.720 | but believe it or not, also to do cognitive work

00:49:24.080 | where you're going to be still

00:49:25.360 | and you're going to sit down and you're going to read

00:49:26.600 | or learn or practice something,

00:49:28.360 | listening to music for 10 to 15 minutes

00:49:31.460 | prior to doing that work, prior to doing that exercise,

00:49:35.320 | is one of the best ways to get motivated

00:49:37.320 | in order to engage in that work or engage in that exercise.

00:49:40.000 | That's been demonstrated in the data very conclusively

00:49:42.300 | using a variety of different types of music.

00:49:44.380 | And again, there are multiple mechanisms

00:49:47.380 | that converge to create that heightened state of motivation.

00:49:49.660 | Some of those mechanisms are neurochemical,

00:49:51.520 | like the release of the so-called catecholamines,

00:49:53.320 | dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine.

00:49:55.180 | Some of them are strictly neural circuit-based,

00:49:57.000 | so activation of premotor circuitry,

00:49:59.120 | and those are going to combine with neural circuits

00:50:01.360 | that are going to narrow your field of vision.

00:50:03.520 | This is a good thing whenever you want to be motivated.

00:50:05.720 | They're going to literally constrict your field of vision

00:50:07.840 | to more of a tunnel type of vision

00:50:09.240 | as opposed to more panoramic vision.

00:50:11.040 | And that I described it as placing you

00:50:13.540 | into a forward center of mass.

00:50:15.120 | I don't necessarily mean literally a forward center of mass,

00:50:19.720 | unless perhaps you're exercising,

00:50:20.880 | like running, leaning slightly forward.

00:50:22.320 | What I'm talking about is using music

00:50:24.840 | as a way to deliberately shift your state of mind and body

00:50:28.320 | from one that is amotivated, not motivated,

00:50:31.500 | to more motivated.

00:50:32.520 | And it's a very simple protocol

00:50:34.420 | extracted from the peer-reviewed literature.

00:50:36.360 | You simply find some faster music,

00:50:38.300 | hopefully music that you like.

00:50:39.380 | It would be even better if it was music that had lyrics

00:50:41.840 | that you find motivating,

00:50:43.360 | and listening to that for 10 to 15 minutes

00:50:45.840 | prior to engaging in whatever that work may be,

00:50:48.340 | physical or cognitive.

00:50:50.040 | On the topic of cognitive work,

00:50:51.540 | one of the most common questions I get is,

00:50:53.980 | what sorts of sounds or music should I listen to

00:50:57.380 | in order to increase my state of productivity,

00:51:00.560 | motivation, concentration, et cetera?

00:51:03.240 | On previous podcasts related to focus and motivation,

00:51:06.440 | I touched on the use of so-called binaural beats,

00:51:09.000 | which are different frequencies of beats

00:51:11.220 | presented to one or the other ear.

00:51:13.980 | This is best accomplished with headphones.

00:51:15.980 | And there are a lot of different frequencies

00:51:17.640 | of binaural beats that you can get out there.

00:51:20.100 | If you want to get detailed about this,

00:51:21.500 | binaural beats also involve the differential

00:51:25.120 | between the frequency of beats

00:51:26.200 | between the two, presented to the two ears.

00:51:28.780 | And then that difference then is heard

00:51:31.080 | by higher order processing centers in the brain.

00:51:33.300 | In any event, we don't have to get too technical about it.

00:51:35.640 | We can simply say that,

00:51:37.260 | yes, there are some decent peer reviewed studies

00:51:41.100 | demonstrating that when people listen to so-called 40 Hertz,

00:51:44.540 | it's a particular frequency of sound,

00:51:45.980 | 40 Hertz binaural beats,

00:51:47.860 | that it can enhance concentration and focus.

00:51:50.060 | However, and this is important,

00:51:51.860 | there are some recent studies that show that binaural beats

00:51:54.860 | sometimes can impede concentration and focus

00:51:58.220 | and thereby can impede cognitive performance

00:52:00.820 | on various tasks.

00:52:02.220 | However, the studies that show that binaural beats

00:52:05.300 | can be detrimental to performance on various cognitive tasks

00:52:09.060 | did not use 40 Hertz binaural beats specifically.

00:52:11.960 | So we are still awaiting more studies on binaural beats.

00:52:14.720 | Meanwhile, I'll just restate what I said before

00:52:16.820 | is that there is some evidence

00:52:18.520 | that listening to 40 Hertz binaural beats

00:52:20.240 | can enhance concentration and focus.

00:52:22.520 | There are also data showing that other frequencies

00:52:24.760 | of binaural beats might be detrimental to concentration

00:52:27.160 | and cognitive performance.

00:52:28.700 | And previously, I've also discussed studies showing

00:52:31.220 | that, for instance, if people listen to white noise

00:52:33.560 | in the background,

00:52:34.400 | you can do this on your computer or speakers in the room

00:52:36.140 | or headphones or so-called brown noise,

00:52:38.040 | which is essentially like white noise,

00:52:39.800 | shh, all frequencies of sound

00:52:41.680 | or most frequencies of sound combined,

00:52:43.880 | but with particular frequencies of sounds

00:52:45.680 | that are accentuated and others are notched out

00:52:47.860 | as it's called, so-called brown noise.

00:52:49.940 | Rather than understand all of this at a technical level,

00:52:52.080 | 'cause I've covered that before in previous podcasts,

00:52:54.440 | suffice to say, if you go to YouTube

00:52:56.060 | and you just put in white noise background

00:52:58.440 | for cognitive focus

00:52:59.440 | or brown noise background for cognitive focus,

00:53:01.640 | you can just try those if you like during a session

00:53:04.520 | in which you're trying to read or learn

00:53:06.060 | or do mathematics or music or any kind of cognitive work.

00:53:09.720 | If you don't like them, if they don't work for you,

00:53:11.560 | then there's certainly no obligation to use them.

00:53:14.660 | Likewise with 40 Hertz binaural beats.

00:53:17.040 | And for binaural beats,

00:53:17.960 | you can also find those as zero-cost YouTube scripts.

00:53:20.800 | There are a number of zero-cost apps

00:53:23.600 | that will allow you to listen to binaural beats.

00:53:25.960 | I've used the app Brainwave for some period of time now.

00:53:29.200 | To be honest,

00:53:30.040 | I've done this strict control experiment on myself

00:53:32.280 | of listening to the 40 Hertz binaural beats

00:53:35.160 | or not listening to 40 Hertz binaural beats

00:53:36.880 | doing the equivalent types of tasks.

00:53:38.560 | I can be fairly regimented with my work and behavior,

00:53:42.240 | but I haven't run a detailed controlled study

00:53:44.180 | on myself around this.

00:53:45.460 | Rather, if I want to heighten my level of focus

00:53:47.620 | or rule out distractions,

00:53:48.720 | what I will do is I will listen to either white noise

00:53:51.360 | or brown noise while I do work,

00:53:53.840 | or I will listen to 40 Hertz binaural beats

00:53:56.340 | while I do certain types of work.

00:53:58.480 | Or sometimes, frankly, I just work in silence.

00:54:01.280 | Other times, I will listen to classical music

00:54:03.740 | in the background.

00:54:04.580 | I'm a big fan of listening to classical piano.

00:54:07.160 | I particularly like Glenn Gould, the Bach variations.

00:54:09.960 | Those are very pleasant to me.

00:54:11.380 | But, and this is really important,

00:54:13.160 | in researching this episode about music and the brain,

00:54:16.680 | what I discovered was in the controlled studies

00:54:20.020 | that have been carried out

00:54:20.860 | as to whether or not people perform better

00:54:23.280 | on cognitive tasks that require a lot of focus,

00:54:26.400 | especially learning tasks that compared silence

00:54:29.040 | in the background to purely instrumental music

00:54:31.520 | in the background, to music with lyrics in the background,

00:54:35.100 | to one's favorite music with or without lyrics,

00:54:39.320 | the data are very clear.

00:54:41.800 | It's very clear that most people,

00:54:44.440 | that means statistically on average,

00:54:46.280 | people perform best on cognitive tasks

00:54:48.740 | or tasks that require a lot of focus to perform.

00:54:52.000 | Again, these are mental tasks, not physical tasks.

00:54:54.580 | When they are doing those tasks in complete silence.

00:54:59.120 | So that was somewhat surprising to me.

00:55:01.940 | Second best conditions are to do those tasks

00:55:05.700 | in the presence of instrumental music only.

00:55:08.920 | And in that case, there was a lot of variation

00:55:10.800 | as to whether or not people preferred faster cadence music.

00:55:13.720 | So 140 to 150 beats per minute or faster,

00:55:17.100 | or slower music, 60 beats per minute or slower.

00:55:20.980 | I'll get back to those specific numbers later

00:55:22.940 | because they represent thresholds for inducing

00:55:24.660 | different types of emotional states, either happy or sad.

00:55:27.240 | But meanwhile, it's very clear when people work in silence,

00:55:31.760 | they perform better than when they work

00:55:33.360 | with music instrumentals in the background.

00:55:36.440 | And they perform even less well when they listen to music

00:55:39.200 | with lyrics in the background.

00:55:41.080 | We'll talk about why that is the case in a moment.

00:55:43.440 | And then people perform especially poorly

00:55:47.000 | relative to their performance in silence

00:55:49.500 | or any of the other conditions I mentioned

00:55:51.240 | when they listen to their favorite music

00:55:53.320 | while doing cognitive work.

00:55:55.000 | And that to me was a bit surprising,

00:55:57.360 | especially since I spent a lot of my university years

00:56:00.140 | studying while listening to my favorite music

00:56:02.680 | in different forms.

00:56:03.520 | I'd listen to slower music than faster music

00:56:05.120 | and go back and forth.

00:56:06.120 | And then sometimes turn it off altogether

00:56:07.780 | and work in silence.

00:56:08.720 | But the center of mass of the literature around this issue

00:56:11.320 | of whether or not to listen to music while one studies

00:56:14.500 | or tries to learn something, the data are pretty clear.

00:56:17.400 | The data show that it's best to study and learn

00:56:19.780 | either in silence or with quiet instrumentals

00:56:23.000 | in the background.

00:56:24.000 | Now, I mentioned before that previous studies compared

00:56:26.620 | the effects of working in silence versus working

00:56:29.260 | with 40 Hertz binaural beats or white noise or brown noise

00:56:33.360 | in the background.

00:56:34.200 | And in those studies, it was found that the white noise,

00:56:37.860 | brown noise and 40 Hertz binaural beats background

00:56:40.600 | produced better levels of focus.

00:56:43.440 | I should say heightened levels of focus

00:56:45.280 | and cognitive performance and learning

00:56:46.880 | then working in silence.

00:56:49.040 | But I've not yet seen a study that compared 40 Hertz

00:56:52.440 | binaural beats, brown noise, white noise to music directly.

00:56:57.440 | Perhaps there's one out there.

00:56:58.960 | If there is, please send it to me.

00:57:00.120 | I'd be very curious to learn what the results of those are.

00:57:02.380 | Now that might seem like a lot of information,

00:57:03.980 | but the takeaways from it are very clear.

00:57:05.960 | And it's always nice when things are clear, right?

00:57:08.840 | It's clear that if we want to focus and learn

00:57:12.120 | that working in silence or with white noise or brown noise

00:57:16.760 | or 40 Hertz binaural beats is going to be preferable

00:57:19.360 | to working while listening to music.

00:57:20.860 | But if you're going to listen to music while you work,

00:57:23.520 | that is do cognitive work,

00:57:25.200 | then you're going to want to listen to music

00:57:26.840 | that is purely instrumental.

00:57:28.060 | And ideally the music would be somewhat faster

00:57:31.500 | than 140 to 150 beats per minute.

00:57:33.680 | Now, I do not expect you to go and measure the frequency

00:57:37.820 | of beats per minute in the music that you listen to.

00:57:40.200 | And of course the beats per minute are going to change,

00:57:42.560 | right, that's an average 140 to 150 beats per minute.

00:57:46.160 | I don't expect you to get super technical,

00:57:48.000 | break down the music that you're listening to.

00:57:49.480 | That is not my goal,

00:57:51.180 | nor is that really what this podcast is about.

00:57:52.940 | I think occasionally people think that, you know,

00:57:54.640 | the goal of a science and science-based protocols podcast

00:57:57.560 | is to optimize everything.

00:57:58.800 | In fact, I'm not such a fan of the word optimize

00:58:01.920 | because optimal really depends on the situation

00:58:04.280 | that you happen to be in.

00:58:05.400 | The point here is simply this,

00:58:07.180 | that many people out there, including myself,

00:58:10.200 | have been listening to some of our favorite music

00:58:11.980 | while working, but it's very clear as to why

00:58:14.320 | that degrades cognitive performance.

00:58:17.140 | We know, for instance, that when we read,

00:58:19.000 | we are creating a semantic narrative in our own head.

00:58:22.520 | And when we listen to music with lyrics,

00:58:24.080 | especially music with lyrics that we recognize,

00:58:27.020 | the semantic content of the song, the lyrics,

00:58:30.080 | competes with our comprehension of the narrative

00:58:33.100 | within our head from the material

00:58:34.860 | that we're supposed to be learning.

00:58:36.320 | So now it should be sort of obvious

00:58:37.760 | why listening to your favorite music that includes lyrics

00:58:40.560 | while trying to learn something else

00:58:41.800 | is going to impede learning.

00:58:43.240 | It's because you've got multiple scripts,

00:58:44.460 | multiple dialogues happening in your head.

00:58:46.960 | And in fact, this is an opportunity for me

00:58:48.760 | to take a slight tangent, but a relevant one,

00:58:51.580 | which is to say a lot of times people will ask me

00:58:54.400 | how I can retain a lot of information.

00:58:56.660 | I confess I never use a teleprompter for podcasting.

00:59:00.360 | I do have usually a short stack of notes,

00:59:03.200 | anywhere from one to six or seven pages

00:59:05.860 | of just bullet pointed notes that cue up things

00:59:09.480 | that I want to talk about

00:59:10.800 | and that I have researched in the literature.

00:59:12.440 | And then of course I'll refer to papers from time to time.

00:59:14.820 | But one of the things that's been very useful for me,

00:59:16.720 | which was taught to me, by the way,

00:59:17.800 | by a professor when I was in university

00:59:19.760 | to read and retain information that I've read by memory

00:59:24.360 | is that when I read, I'm trying to listen

00:59:27.160 | to the words being spoken in my head,

00:59:30.660 | typically in my own voice,

00:59:31.800 | although sometimes in someone else's voice,

00:59:33.840 | it doesn't really matter, I find.

00:59:35.640 | So when I'm reading, yes, it's a process of visual scanning,

00:59:38.080 | but I'm also listening to the words within my head

00:59:40.600 | as if they're being spoken.

00:59:41.920 | Some of you may be familiar with this because you do it,

00:59:43.940 | others of you perhaps might find this a bit more foreign.

00:59:46.240 | I'd be curious to know what your process of reading

00:59:48.360 | and retaining that information is,

00:59:49.900 | whether or not it includes an internal dialogue.

00:59:52.520 | But nonetheless, it should be very straightforward now

00:59:56.060 | to see why if you're listening to words

00:59:59.780 | that you're reading on a page,

01:00:01.480 | maybe even mumbling them a little bit,

01:00:03.840 | moving your lips a little bit while you read,

01:00:05.520 | which by the way, if you heard our episode

01:00:07.960 | on language and auditory processing with Dr. Eddie Chang,

01:00:11.320 | who's chair of neurosurgery at UCSF,

01:00:13.720 | he talked about the fact that when we read any material,

01:00:17.680 | that the brain is generating pre-motor activity,

01:00:21.160 | you now know what pre-motor activity is,

01:00:22.620 | pre-motor activity down to the muscles of the throat,

01:00:26.440 | larynx and pharynx, which would speak those words

01:00:30.880 | were those signals to get above a certain level,

01:00:33.600 | but that when we read typically,

01:00:35.720 | the signals that are getting sent

01:00:37.360 | through those pre-motor circuits

01:00:38.500 | are just below the threshold of what would have us

01:00:41.360 | actually speak those words.

01:00:43.120 | Put simply, when we read,

01:00:44.920 | we are just shy of saying what we are reading.

01:00:48.620 | And so when I say that when I read,

01:00:50.220 | I'm listening to the words in my head,

01:00:52.240 | that's what I'm referring to.

01:00:53.580 | So we're starting to funnel in on some general principles

01:00:56.380 | of music and how it impacts the brain

01:00:58.380 | and how that can be leveraged toward better learning

01:01:00.660 | and better motivation,

01:01:02.280 | both in the context of physical and cognitive endeavors.

01:01:05.140 | Okay, so if you want to get motivated listening to music

01:01:07.280 | prior to doing something

01:01:08.680 | that you're trying to motivate to do is a good idea.

01:01:11.500 | That's what the data say.

01:01:12.520 | If you're trying to learn something that's cognitive,

01:01:15.860 | that requires reading, focus and concentration,

01:01:18.720 | silence, 40 Hertz binaural beats,

01:01:21.260 | white noise or brown noise is probably best.

01:01:23.680 | And if you are going to listen to music,

01:01:25.720 | listening to music that includes instrumentals,

01:01:28.640 | but not lyrics would be best.

01:01:30.480 | And listening to music that includes lyrics

01:01:33.260 | that you're very familiar with would be the worst condition.

01:01:37.160 | Now, with that said, there are nice studies.

01:01:40.060 | And by the way, I'm going to link to a number of reviews

01:01:42.180 | and primary studies in the show note captions

01:01:44.020 | that refer back to this point I'm about to tell you,

01:01:47.260 | which is that listening to music

01:01:48.620 | while trying to do cognitive tasks

01:01:50.300 | can be detrimental toward learning that material.

01:01:53.000 | Turns out that if you listen to music

01:01:56.880 | in the breaks between trying to learn certain material,

01:02:00.300 | you can actually heighten your level of cognition

01:02:03.120 | and focus and your ability to learn.

01:02:05.060 | So I find this particularly cool.

01:02:06.600 | It's not that music is bad

01:02:07.920 | for focusing cognition and learning.

01:02:09.860 | It's that listening to music,

01:02:11.400 | especially music that you're familiar with

01:02:13.420 | that includes lyrics at the same time

01:02:16.200 | as trying to learn something else is not a good idea.

01:02:19.560 | But listening to music with lyrics,

01:02:21.680 | especially music with lyrics that you're familiar with

01:02:24.220 | that you find particularly uplifting and motivating

01:02:27.360 | is a cognitive and performance enhancer

01:02:30.640 | when you go back to doing that work in silence

01:02:33.060 | or perhaps while listening to white noise,

01:02:35.820 | brown noise or 40 Hertz binaural beats.

01:02:38.140 | So like so many things, the answer is not black and white.

01:02:40.460 | It's not that silence is better than music

01:02:43.060 | or that music is bad for learning.

01:02:45.940 | It turns out that listening to music,

01:02:47.220 | even music with lyrics you're very familiar with

01:02:49.160 | can be highly beneficial for learning,

01:02:51.460 | but that you want to listen to that music

01:02:52.940 | in the breaks between these bouts of cognitive work.

01:02:56.420 | Now I've done previous podcasts that talk about

01:02:59.100 | how long a bout of cognitive work can or should be.

01:03:02.620 | Typically 90 minutes is going to be the upper limit

01:03:04.860 | before you take a break.

01:03:05.820 | Some people can't work for 90 minutes without a break.

01:03:09.860 | And by the way, folks, when I say without a break,

01:03:11.660 | I don't mean remaining in a deep trench of focus

01:03:14.220 | for 90 minutes.

01:03:15.060 | Nobody does that.

01:03:16.620 | Actually, I suppose there are a few folks

01:03:18.000 | that with neurochemical assistance

01:03:19.700 | or just by way of training can get themselves

01:03:22.620 | into a deep, deep trench of focus for 90 minutes or more.

01:03:25.680 | But most people are going to focus on something

01:03:27.460 | and then have their attention flip out of focus.

01:03:30.180 | And then they're going to have to draw their focus back

01:03:32.220 | to whatever it is they're doing.

01:03:33.100 | That's not just typical.

01:03:33.940 | That's absolutely normal and you shouldn't be concerned

01:03:36.900 | at all if you try and focus for three minutes

01:03:38.780 | and find your attention jumping around

01:03:40.740 | two or three times during that attempt.

01:03:43.460 | But if you're somebody who is going to do say a 90 minute

01:03:47.520 | or even 60 minute or even 30 minute bout of work

01:03:50.940 | and you are going to get up for a moment

01:03:53.100 | and use the restroom or you're going to take a break

01:03:55.940 | in between bouts of work.

01:03:57.040 | So maybe you work for 30 minutes,

01:03:58.360 | take 10 minutes or five minutes off or 90 minutes,

01:04:00.700 | take 30 minutes off, listening to music in those breaks,

01:04:04.220 | it seems can increase our ability to focus

01:04:07.380 | and to learn new material once we return

01:04:09.780 | to those bouts of cognitive focus.

01:04:11.980 | Now, when it comes to physical exertion,

01:04:14.780 | cardiovascular exercise, resistance training of any kind,

01:04:18.260 | many people including myself like to listen to music

01:04:20.980 | while performing that physical exercise

01:04:24.300 | or that physical exertion.

01:04:26.100 | The data on whether or not music improve

01:04:28.460 | physical performance is a bit mixed.

01:04:31.340 | Certainly you can find studies that show

01:04:32.980 | that it improves physical output.

01:04:35.060 | Other studies will say that it doesn't make a difference.

01:04:37.920 | Other studies will say that it reduces physical output.

01:04:42.140 | However, this is a very important however,

01:04:45.060 | the type of physical exercise is not very well matched

01:04:49.180 | between those different studies.

01:04:50.740 | So this is something that I believe

01:04:52.060 | is going to be highly individual.

01:04:53.380 | In accordance with the published data, I mix it up.

01:04:56.540 | There are times when I will head out for a run

01:04:58.620 | or I will do a resistance training session

01:05:00.820 | and I will listen to music,

01:05:02.040 | usually an album all the way through

01:05:03.640 | or a playlist all the way through.

01:05:05.500 | And that's because I don't want to be going

01:05:06.720 | onto my phone very often.

01:05:07.820 | In fact, these days I use an older separate phone

01:05:10.740 | that doesn't have any text messaging

01:05:12.460 | or communication to the outside world,

01:05:14.020 | but it has music loaded into it or onto it

01:05:17.980 | that allows me to just listen to music

01:05:19.380 | so that I don't run the risk of getting distracted texting

01:05:22.140 | and doing things like that.

01:05:23.020 | I just want to focus on my physical exercise.

01:05:25.780 | I should say that phone also has audio books,

01:05:28.140 | podcasts, things I've downloaded to it.

01:05:30.740 | So it's a place where I can listen to things,

01:05:33.120 | but not communicate with the outside world,

01:05:35.480 | at least while exercising.

01:05:37.980 | Some people do very well to listen to music,

01:05:39.960 | literally in between and during their sets

01:05:42.180 | of resistance training throughout their entire runs.

01:05:45.140 | It's going to be individual.

01:05:46.340 | You have to figure out what's best for you.

01:05:47.800 | However, one of the most interesting things

01:05:50.500 | about the scientific literature on this

01:05:52.300 | shows that if people listen to music,

01:05:54.180 | in particular music that tends to be faster, more upbeat,

01:05:57.620 | typically it's going to be in these studies,

01:05:59.340 | rock and roll music, as opposed to classical,

01:06:01.460 | although there are some studies that have explored classical

01:06:03.900 | and other forms of music as it relates to exercise,

01:06:06.680 | listening to that music in between bouts of exertion,

01:06:10.940 | so in the rest between sets of resistance training,

01:06:14.060 | or periodically during say a run or a bout of cycling,

01:06:19.060 | can indeed enhance performance in a way

01:06:23.100 | that at least by my read of the data exceeds

01:06:27.200 | that which is observed

01:06:28.640 | when people just listen to music throughout.

01:06:30.360 | In other words, if you find it useful to listen to music

01:06:32.660 | before, during and after your workouts, great, be my guest.

01:06:35.400 | However, what the data say is that switching up

01:06:38.060 | between silence and listening to music,

01:06:41.060 | and in this case, it would be listening to music

01:06:42.680 | that you're very familiar with

01:06:43.780 | and that can evoke a sense of motivation

01:06:46.660 | and desired action in you for whatever reason,

01:06:49.100 | the music, the beat, the memories that it draws you to, et cetera.

01:06:53.300 | Well, then that's going to be useful.

01:06:55.780 | So there really isn't one protocol

01:06:57.540 | for how to get the most out of music

01:06:59.380 | for sake of physical exertion,

01:07:01.060 | but if you're interested in playing

01:07:02.460 | with some of these variables

01:07:03.700 | as they've been examined within the peer reviewed literature,

01:07:06.420 | I find it interesting and indeed I found it useful

01:07:09.180 | to, for instance, do a workout where I only listen to music

01:07:11.780 | in between sets of resistance training,

01:07:13.940 | or to listen to music prior to going out for a run,

01:07:17.460 | and then oftentimes when I do that,

01:07:19.060 | the song or songs will be sort of on loop in my head.

01:07:22.500 | Although I confess that a lot of times nowadays,

01:07:24.660 | I listen to podcasts while I run or while I hike,

01:07:27.940 | and when I'm in the gym and I'm doing resistance training,

01:07:30.580 | I like to listen to music as opposed to content

01:07:32.620 | that requires that I really focus very heavily

01:07:34.680 | on that content, such as a podcast, such as a book.

01:07:37.780 | I'd like to take a quick break

01:07:38.900 | and acknowledge our sponsor, Inside Tracker.

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01:08:43.820 | Now I'd like to talk about the use of music

01:08:45.440 | to shift our mood and indeed,

01:08:47.540 | to get us out of states of anxiety.

01:08:50.020 | This is a really interesting scientific literature

01:08:52.180 | with some very specific actionable takeaways

01:08:54.760 | that I think everyone will find beneficial.

01:08:56.900 | I certainly did.

01:08:58.540 | However, I want to point out

01:09:00.340 | that we don't need a scientific study to illustrate for us

01:09:03.780 | the way that music can shift our mood.

01:09:05.660 | And you already know why it is that listening to a sad song

01:09:09.260 | can sometimes make us feel sad.

01:09:10.660 | Listening to happy music can make us feel happy.

01:09:13.180 | It's because when we listen to music,

01:09:16.020 | there are some fundamental components of that music,

01:09:19.540 | literally the mathematical structure of that music,

01:09:21.980 | including the frequency of sounds,

01:09:24.460 | the cadence of those sounds, as well as the lyrics,

01:09:28.340 | but even in the absence of lyrics

01:09:30.500 | that are activating brain circuits within us

01:09:33.220 | such that the frequencies of sound that we're hearing

01:09:36.420 | are evoking firing of neurons in the brain

01:09:39.260 | of the same frequency.

01:09:40.300 | In other words, your brain becomes a bit of a piano

01:09:43.440 | playing the same song that you're hearing inside your head.

01:09:48.120 | Now that's sort of a duh, right?

01:09:49.820 | You hear music in your head,

01:09:51.020 | even if you're listening to it from outside in the room.

01:09:53.220 | But when you understand that neurons speak the language

01:09:56.740 | of electrochemical communication,

01:09:59.160 | what we're talking about here is particular music

01:10:02.560 | evoking the release of neurochemicals in your brain

01:10:05.460 | at a particular frequency.

01:10:07.300 | So just think about that for a second.

01:10:09.220 | We know that neurochemicals such as dopamine, serotonin,

01:10:12.900 | some of the so-called endogenous opioids, right?

01:10:15.320 | These aren't opioids that people take.

01:10:16.860 | This isn't related to the opioid crisis.

01:10:18.540 | We're talking about endogenous opioids

01:10:20.440 | that are released in response to music,

01:10:23.020 | things like exercise,

01:10:24.180 | different types of social interactions.

01:10:26.180 | Those and other chemicals are released

01:10:28.820 | according to the firing of specific neurons.

01:10:30.860 | And we know that when you listen to music

01:10:33.980 | at particular frequencies

01:10:35.180 | arranged in particular motifs, et cetera,

01:10:38.740 | that the neurons that release those neurochemicals

01:10:41.060 | are firing at those same frequencies.

01:10:43.180 | In other words, that the sound is causing

01:10:45.420 | a sound-dependent pharmacologic concert within your brain.

01:10:50.420 | So that fact should make it incredibly clear

01:10:53.060 | as to why certain music, even in the absence of lyrics,

01:10:56.220 | can evoke certain emotional states.

01:10:58.260 | Certain sound frequencies are transformed

01:11:00.440 | into the neural language within your brain

01:11:02.760 | that releases certain neurochemicals

01:11:05.020 | that create certain emotional states of brain and body.

01:11:09.200 | Just to drill in how incredible that really is

01:11:12.260 | a little bit further,

01:11:13.920 | if you see a beautiful painting

01:11:15.820 | or the picture or presence of somebody's face in real life

01:11:20.380 | that evokes a particularly strong positive

01:11:23.740 | or negative emotion,

01:11:25.620 | you can imagine that, of course,

01:11:27.640 | it creates the release of certain neurochemicals,

01:11:29.900 | or perhaps in the case of a negative face,

01:11:32.900 | suppresses the release of certain neurochemicals.

01:11:35.380 | But we can't say that a particular frequency of color,

01:11:38.620 | say reds against oranges or the presence of a rainbow,

01:11:41.720 | evokes a sort of rainbow-like cascade of neurochemicals,

01:11:46.720 | whereas with sound, that's exactly what's happening.

01:11:49.700 | And this isn't to diminish the value of vision

01:11:52.340 | in terms of its ability to evoke emotional states within us.

01:11:55.300 | After all, I'm foremost a neuroscientist,

01:11:58.380 | but under the umbrella of neuroscientists,

01:12:01.040 | I started off as, and I continue to be,

01:12:03.280 | a vision neuroscientist studying the visual system

01:12:05.580 | and its ability to evoke emotional states within us.

01:12:07.840 | But I have to acknowledge that the auditory system,

01:12:09.860 | and in particular, the circuits in the brain

01:12:11.700 | that respond to music,

01:12:12.940 | have a remarkably potent ability

01:12:16.480 | to evoke these emotional states,

01:12:18.400 | which is why when surveys have been done

01:12:21.540 | asking people why they listen to music,

01:12:23.920 | the responses that have come back

01:12:25.860 | generally resemble the following statistics.

01:12:29.060 | Approximately 90% of people

01:12:30.660 | say they listen to music to relax.

01:12:32.940 | Approximately 82% of people

01:12:34.980 | self-report that they listen to music

01:12:36.560 | in order to make themselves happy.

01:12:38.320 | Approximately 46.5% of people

01:12:43.500 | say that they listen to music

01:12:45.020 | in order to process particular states of emotion.

01:12:49.360 | We'll get back to what process means in a moment,

01:12:51.720 | but more often than not,

01:12:53.400 | when these studies have asked specific questions

01:12:55.060 | about what particular types of emotions

01:12:57.380 | people are listening to

01:12:58.360 | in order to process their emotions better,

01:13:01.200 | it is the emotion of sadness.

01:13:04.140 | And 32.5% of people report that they listen to music

01:13:08.960 | in order to increase their sense of concentration,

01:13:11.740 | and we already talked about the role of music

01:13:14.040 | in concentration or its ability, in some cases,

01:13:16.720 | to inhibit concentration a few minutes ago.

01:13:19.700 | Now, you might be asking yourself,

01:13:20.880 | how can 90% of people listen to music for one thing

01:13:23.700 | and 82% of people for another thing, and so on and so forth,

01:13:27.000 | we're well over 100% of people.

01:13:29.340 | Well, in this survey and other surveys like it,

01:13:31.600 | people had the option to give multiple reasons

01:13:33.980 | for listening to music because, of course,

01:13:35.620 | most people have multiple reasons for listening to music.

01:13:38.420 | Now, with that said,

01:13:41.000 | if we are to examine this one particular category,

01:13:44.820 | nearly half of people who report listening to music

01:13:47.680 | on a regular basis listen to music

01:13:49.320 | in order to process their emotions,

01:13:51.360 | we can ask, what does the scientific literature tell us

01:13:55.620 | about how certain types of music

01:13:58.200 | evoke certain types of emotions

01:14:00.060 | or help us process certain emotions?

01:14:02.220 | Again, we'll get back to what we mean

01:14:03.280 | by process in a moment,

01:14:04.300 | but a number of studies have been done on this.

01:14:07.900 | There's some meta-analyses

01:14:09.060 | that converge on some general themes,

01:14:10.840 | what I refer to as the center of mass of data, right?

01:14:14.040 | When there are a lot of studies in a given area,

01:14:16.120 | the outcomes of some of those studies

01:14:17.440 | conflict with one another.

01:14:19.060 | Generally, in a good meta-analysis,

01:14:20.660 | what happens is different studies

01:14:22.520 | are considered more powerful or less powerful than others,

01:14:25.360 | depending on how many subjects were involved,

01:14:27.620 | the different control conditions

01:14:28.800 | or lack of control conditions, and so on and so forth.

01:14:31.180 | This is one of the great values of meta-analyses

01:14:34.200 | is that they don't treat all studies equally.

01:14:36.540 | They separate out studies

01:14:37.880 | based on their level of rigor and thoroughness.

01:14:41.320 | Well, what we can say with confidence

01:14:42.800 | is that music that makes us quote-unquote happy

01:14:46.500 | or tends to shift people's state from less happy to happier,

01:14:50.340 | regardless of how they entered the experiment,

01:14:52.620 | tends to be faster music, meaning music that on average

01:14:57.100 | contains 140 to 150 beats per minute or faster, okay?

01:15:02.100 | And there are some other features

01:15:04.540 | to quote-unquote happy music, if you will,

01:15:06.980 | that it tends to be in a major key,

01:15:09.180 | that if there are lyrics to that music,

01:15:11.060 | that the lyrics tend to report things that are happy

01:15:13.080 | or get this, total nonsense.

01:15:16.060 | In fact, when the type of lyrics in this quote-unquote

01:15:18.840 | happy music's, I guess, singing about great events

01:15:22.380 | in life and positive things,

01:15:24.020 | falling in love, being in love, positive memories,

01:15:28.280 | birth of children, connection to friends, great adventures,

01:15:31.840 | those lyrics, or I should say that music

01:15:35.980 | containing those lyrics was no more effective

01:15:39.340 | in creating states of happiness

01:15:40.920 | than was music of equivalent cadence.

01:15:44.300 | So again, music that was 140 to 150 beats per minute

01:15:47.900 | or faster on average.

01:15:50.300 | Well, even if the lyrics were complete nonsense,

01:15:52.900 | even if the vocalizations weren't actual words,

01:15:56.260 | it still evoked the same increase in the level of happiness

01:15:59.780 | in the subjects than when compared to the music

01:16:02.640 | containing coherent lyrics around happy events.

01:16:06.540 | What this means is that the cadence of music

01:16:09.680 | is no doubt the critical variable

01:16:12.020 | when one is trying to shift one's mood

01:16:14.180 | from a state of whatever, could be depressed or sad

01:16:18.280 | to non-depressed, non-sad, or neutral to positive

01:16:21.780 | and so on and so forth.

01:16:23.440 | But what this also explains is one-hit wonders.

01:16:27.560 | Rarely, if ever, by the way,

01:16:29.740 | are one-hit wonders sad and depressing songs.

01:16:32.440 | Sometimes, almost always, these one-hit wonders

01:16:35.120 | are songs that are very effective in shifting people's mood

01:16:38.100 | from not so happy to happier, or we could just say happier,

01:16:41.660 | regardless of where they started out

01:16:43.340 | before listening to the song.

01:16:44.400 | They feel better while and after listening to the song.

01:16:47.960 | And indeed, more often than not,

01:16:50.380 | the lyrical content of those songs

01:16:52.300 | is not particularly meaningful.

01:16:54.860 | It's not addressing a particularly meaningful state or issue.

01:16:57.980 | It's just what some people call a party song,

01:17:00.180 | or it's something that's just uplifting,

01:17:01.980 | not just to them, but to many other people,

01:17:04.020 | which actually brings up an interesting

01:17:06.100 | and future-looking point, which is that nowadays,

01:17:09.260 | we are seeing the emergence of AI, artificial intelligence,

01:17:12.900 | being used to generate new songs

01:17:15.940 | by capturing these well-established rules,

01:17:17.900 | gleaned from neuroscience of how music impacts the brain,

01:17:21.320 | such that in the future, artificial intelligence

01:17:23.900 | is going to be generating hit songs for us,

01:17:26.980 | as opposed to having people generating hit songs.

01:17:29.160 | I know this evokes a state of concern and fear

01:17:32.400 | in many people.

01:17:33.240 | I think that this is a fear that needs to be matched with,

01:17:37.760 | I don't know, perhaps a cautious optimism.

01:17:40.360 | I mean, who knows?

01:17:41.200 | Maybe there are patterns of music, including lyrics,

01:17:44.100 | that human beings, in their current understanding

01:17:46.440 | of themselves and of music,

01:17:48.200 | have not yet been able to tap into, and who knows?

01:17:50.400 | Maybe AI will be generating the best music

01:17:52.600 | that we've ever heard,

01:17:54.320 | or perhaps music that can shift our states

01:17:57.720 | from more depressed or sad to heightened levels of happiness

01:18:01.620 | in ways that humans have just not been able to accomplish.

01:18:04.360 | So I think it's important to balance any pessimism

01:18:06.400 | about AI and its ability to generate music

01:18:09.160 | based on these rules of how music impacts the brain

01:18:11.680 | with an open-mindedness.

01:18:12.900 | After all, neuroscience, neuroimaging, and neural recordings

01:18:17.180 | directly with electrodes in the brain,

01:18:18.940 | while people are listening to music,

01:18:20.580 | is teaching us how the brain responds to that music

01:18:23.180 | and is giving us information that indeed human beings,

01:18:27.020 | but also computers, can use

01:18:29.720 | in order to generate stimuli, music,

01:18:32.200 | that can shift our brain into more positive states.

01:18:34.580 | And if that's the case, wouldn't that be wonderful?

01:18:37.020 | Another established feature of happy music is, get this,

01:18:40.280 | its ability to get people to relax the furrow of their brow,

01:18:44.000 | indeed to raise their eyebrows and to be a bit wide-eyed,

01:18:47.160 | and not just through autonomic arousal,

01:18:49.900 | but rather through activation of the muscles in the face.

01:18:53.560 | Conversely, we know that sad music,

01:18:56.480 | and here we can define sad music,

01:18:58.280 | this has actually been done in the literature,

01:18:59.940 | sad music tends to be slower than average,

01:19:02.920 | slower than 60 beats per minutes or so, again, on average.

01:19:07.920 | And this again is independent of the lyrics

01:19:09.740 | that might not even be present in the song.

01:19:12.020 | Sad music tends to activate the corrugator muscles

01:19:17.280 | of the forehead, which are the muscles that furrow the brow

01:19:20.540 | and that lead to a kind of serious look.

01:19:24.180 | It's a folding in of the face,

01:19:26.640 | as opposed to a widening up of the eyes

01:19:28.920 | and a relaxation of the brow.

01:19:30.820 | Now, given where we are in the course of this discussion,

01:19:33.640 | that shouldn't be surprising.

01:19:35.100 | We already talked about how listening to particular sounds

01:19:37.380 | evokes the release of particular neurochemicals,

01:19:39.520 | but in a more direct fashion,

01:19:42.300 | listening to particular sounds

01:19:43.500 | activates certain premotor and motor circuits

01:19:45.620 | within the brain and body,

01:19:46.540 | not just the desire to move one's torso, limbs, or both,

01:19:49.480 | bob one's head or move a head side to side,

01:19:51.840 | but also the micro structures of the face,

01:19:55.500 | which because one of the main roles of the face

01:19:57.820 | is to communicate emotion,

01:19:59.280 | is going to cause either a relaxation of the brow

01:20:03.580 | and a lifting of the eyebrows or a furrowing

01:20:06.340 | or a activation of the corrugator muscles

01:20:08.940 | of the eyebrow.

01:20:10.240 | And if that's not obvious and yet interesting enough,

01:20:13.240 | well, get this, there seems to be a direct relationship,

01:20:17.560 | I'm chuckling 'cause this still just blows my mind

01:20:19.820 | because it's a total duh, obvious when you hear it,

01:20:22.640 | but it's still just so cool,

01:20:24.580 | that there's a direct relationship of the frequency

01:20:27.020 | of the sound that you hear,

01:20:27.860 | either low pitched or high pitched

01:20:30.060 | and the cadence of that sound,

01:20:31.700 | and here I realize I'm not using

01:20:32.860 | technical music theory language,

01:20:34.320 | but whether or not that particular tone is played

01:20:38.180 | over and over close in time or more spaced out in time

01:20:41.460 | and facial expressions,

01:20:43.260 | and indeed when we listen to base tones,

01:20:48.260 | low frequency tones set apart from one another

01:20:51.580 | with some distance so that they're not overlapping,

01:20:53.980 | we get the all too familiar base face.

01:20:58.480 | So what I'm referring to here is what neuroscientists

01:21:00.540 | would call a labeled line,

01:21:02.580 | literally a circuit of neurons

01:21:05.420 | that goes from the periphery, in this case, our ears,

01:21:07.820 | into our brain through several different stations

01:21:10.300 | and then wicks out to impact all sorts of things within us,

01:21:15.300 | states of emotion, states of motivation,

01:21:18.660 | our propensity to move,

01:21:19.860 | but also a labeled line circuit

01:21:22.860 | coming from hearing low frequency sounds

01:21:26.020 | played spaced apart from one another

01:21:28.220 | that evokes a particular facial expression,

01:21:31.280 | and again, this takes us back to the earlier statement

01:21:33.920 | that I made, which is not an original statement frankly,

01:21:37.120 | there are people within the field of auditory processing

01:21:40.880 | and understanding how the brain processes music,

01:21:43.180 | in fact, one of the world experts in this,

01:21:45.000 | Dr. Eric Jarvis at the Rockefeller University

01:21:47.120 | was a guest on this podcast

01:21:48.340 | where we talked about the relationship

01:21:49.700 | between music, movement, and singing,

01:21:52.820 | and the fact that music, movement, in particular dance,

01:21:56.560 | and singing likely preceded the evolution

01:22:00.300 | of modern spoken language.

01:22:03.260 | Well, Eric Jarvis and others have argued quite convincingly

01:22:06.640 | that these circuits that I'm calling labeled lines

01:22:09.200 | to particular facial expressions and states of emotion

01:22:12.680 | are the most fundamental components of communication

01:22:16.100 | and the ways that humans have communicated

01:22:18.260 | about their emotional state

01:22:19.960 | and literally induced that same emotional state

01:22:23.140 | in other members of our species

01:22:24.740 | dating back tens of thousands, if not more years.

01:22:27.940 | One of the fun things about researching this episode

01:22:30.060 | on music and the brain

01:22:31.340 | is that there are a lot of quality studies

01:22:33.180 | exploring how music impacts the brain,

01:22:34.900 | neuroimaging, neural recording data

01:22:36.820 | from excellent laboratories, as well as a lot of studies.

01:22:40.280 | In fact, a surprising number of studies

01:22:41.840 | exploring how particular types of music impacts mood states.

01:22:45.940 | And fortunately, that allowed me to glean

01:22:47.660 | some very specific recommendations

01:22:49.620 | as to the minimum amounts of, say, happy music

01:22:53.200 | that you need to listen to

01:22:54.040 | in order to shift your mood into a happier state.

01:22:57.360 | And indeed, the numbers exist in the literature,

01:22:59.420 | and it has been shown that the threshold

01:23:01.580 | for significantly shifting one's mood into a happier state

01:23:04.500 | by listening to the sorts of music we talked about before,

01:23:06.880 | that faster cadence music, even with nonsense lyrics,

01:23:09.980 | although it could include other lyrics,

01:23:11.700 | instead is nine minutes.

01:23:14.540 | Not 10, not eight, but nine.

01:23:16.420 | And I'm sort of joking when I say not 10, not eight, but nine

01:23:20.040 | because, of course, you could listen to music

01:23:22.040 | for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or longer.

01:23:23.900 | In fact, earlier, we talked about the benefits of doing that.

01:23:26.360 | But when one examines the various studies

01:23:29.780 | that looked at how long subjects need to listen to music

01:23:33.400 | in order to shift their mood into a happier state,

01:23:35.700 | the threshold seems to be nine minutes.

01:23:37.980 | So if you want to feel happier than you currently feel,

01:23:40.760 | it seems that listening to happy music for nine minutes

01:23:43.220 | or more is going to be the effective approach.

01:23:46.860 | Okay, so nine minutes or more to shift one state to happier.

01:23:50.100 | What about to process somber or sad feelings,

01:23:53.180 | feelings of loss?

01:23:54.980 | Well, this raises an even bigger question,

01:23:58.900 | and it's a question that I also get very often.

01:24:01.620 | As you're noticing, I get a lot of questions often.

01:24:04.180 | In any event, one of the common questions that I get

01:24:07.160 | is when we are feeling sad or experiencing a loss,

01:24:11.840 | grieving the loss of a relationship by death or decision

01:24:15.500 | or by somebody moving away or the loss of a pet, et cetera,

01:24:19.700 | is it better to go into that state,

01:24:23.720 | in other words, to quote, unquote, feel one's feelings

01:24:26.080 | or to counter those feelings?

01:24:28.040 | Now, historically, that's been a very difficult question

01:24:30.300 | for me to answer because who am I to say

01:24:32.820 | whether or not you should feel your feelings

01:24:35.020 | or whether or not feeling those feelings

01:24:36.720 | will take you down a trench of feeling much worse

01:24:38.900 | or much better?

01:24:39.980 | In fact, there's an emerging literature

01:24:41.500 | exactly about that issue.

01:24:43.380 | That is whether or not the catharsis model is really best,

01:24:47.140 | catharsis being the expression and feeling of one's emotions

01:24:49.700 | as a way to extrude or get rid of those emotions

01:24:52.740 | or whether or not that simply drives us further down

01:24:54.780 | the trench of those emotions.

01:24:56.460 | That's really something that we should address

01:24:58.340 | in a separate podcast episode.

01:24:59.840 | And I will have experts from the fields of psychiatry

01:25:02.980 | and psychology to help us address that question directly.

01:25:06.220 | But since we're talking about music and the brain

01:25:09.060 | and the fact that music has a tremendous capacity

01:25:11.780 | to evoke emotional states, including sad states,

01:25:15.540 | what has been shown in the peer-reviewed literature

01:25:17.940 | is that when people who are feeling sad,

01:25:21.680 | for whatever reason, loss of relationship, death, who knows,

01:25:26.640 | doesn't really matter why they're feeling sad after all.

01:25:30.540 | It's that they're feeling sad.

01:25:32.420 | Listening to 13 minutes or more of sad music,

01:25:37.420 | that music can contain lyrics they are familiar with

01:25:41.820 | or no lyrics, regardless of whether or not

01:25:44.420 | it contains lyrics, it's going to be on average

01:25:47.200 | 50 or 60 beats per minute or less.

01:25:49.260 | We established that already.

01:25:50.660 | Listening to that for 13 minutes or more

01:25:54.880 | has been shown to be effective in allowing people

01:25:57.820 | to quote unquote process their somber feelings

01:26:01.080 | and to some extent to move past their feelings of sadness.

01:26:05.120 | So those studies support the idea that when feeling sad,

01:26:09.860 | feeling one's feelings and perhaps even amplifying

01:26:12.880 | those feelings of sadness by listening to sad music

01:26:16.080 | for 13 minutes or more can help people

01:26:17.900 | process those sad feelings.

01:26:19.860 | And while that point might seem overly reductionist,

01:26:22.620 | I actually think it's a real value.

01:26:23.940 | I'm certainly familiar with feelings of loss,

01:26:26.500 | feelings of grief, and I've often struggled

01:26:29.220 | with this question of, gosh, do I try and just push it aside

01:26:32.900 | or do I deal with those feelings?

01:26:35.080 | Again, this is something that you really need to determine

01:26:37.080 | for yourself, but what these studies show

01:26:40.100 | pretty conclusively is that when we're feeling sad,

01:26:43.860 | matching that sadness or amplifying that sadness

01:26:46.580 | by listening to sad music for 13 minutes or more

01:26:49.720 | can help us move through that state of sadness.

01:26:52.140 | And one could argue this is more or less the use

01:26:53.980 | of catharsis of amplifying emotional expression

01:26:57.100 | or feeling in order to try and move that feeling out

01:27:00.660 | is a classic idea originating in Freudian psychology,

01:27:03.660 | but probably before then as well.

01:27:06.220 | But in any event, I think these data support the idea

01:27:08.320 | that even when feeling sad, perhaps especially

01:27:11.860 | when feeling sad, amplifying or matching those feelings

01:27:15.860 | through the use of sad music for 13 minutes or more,

01:27:19.860 | again, you don't need to set a timer for 13 minutes,

01:27:21.900 | but giving yourself a period of time

01:27:23.100 | to just listen to that music is one way

01:27:25.500 | that can help you move through that state of sadness

01:27:27.660 | and then be able to lean back into other areas of life.

01:27:31.060 | So we've talked about the role of music in evoking

01:27:33.180 | or shifting states of happiness and sadness.

01:27:35.680 | There are also interesting data that support the use of music

01:27:39.800 | for shifting one out of a state of heightened anxiety.

01:27:43.500 | And I find this especially interesting because my laboratory

01:27:46.220 | for a long time has worked on behavioral interventions

01:27:49.340 | to reduce anxiety, things like the physiological psi,

01:27:52.720 | which if you're not familiar with,

01:27:53.860 | you can put physiological psi and my last name into YouTube.

01:27:56.460 | And there's a demonstration of that.

01:27:57.700 | It's a breathing technique of two inhales through the nose

01:27:59.820 | and a long exhale through the mouth, the lungs empty,

01:28:02.420 | that at this point in time,

01:28:03.820 | we understand to be the fastest and most effective way

01:28:06.440 | to reduce one's levels of anxiety in real time.

01:28:10.460 | So it's two inhales through the nose,

01:28:12.040 | long to lungs empty, exhale through the mouth.

01:28:15.860 | That's the physiological psi.

01:28:18.380 | Earlier, we talked about the fact that one of the main ways

01:28:21.700 | in which listening to music shifts heart rate

01:28:25.820 | and increases heart rate variability,

01:28:27.860 | and thereby positively shifts

01:28:30.340 | a number of different health metrics

01:28:31.880 | is through shifts in breathing.

01:28:33.400 | So I justify that brief vignette about the physiological psi

01:28:37.580 | as within the general context

01:28:39.040 | of what we're talking about today.

01:28:41.080 | In any event, there are data that have explored

01:28:45.400 | whether or not specific musical stimuli

01:28:48.160 | can be used to significantly reduce anxiety.

01:28:51.700 | In particular, one published

01:28:53.140 | out of the University of Pennsylvania,

01:28:54.820 | and I'll provide a link to this study

01:28:56.500 | in the show note captions,

01:28:57.920 | which shows that people that listen to a particular song

01:29:00.380 | that I'll describe in a moment,

01:29:02.060 | experience up to 65% reductions in their anxiety.

01:29:06.300 | That's a significant reduction in anxiety.

01:29:09.500 | And I should point out that 65% reduction in anxiety,

01:29:14.780 | in this case, was accomplished with just three minutes

01:29:18.800 | of listening to this one particular song.

01:29:21.240 | And get this, that particular song

01:29:23.040 | was as effective in reducing anxiety

01:29:25.440 | as one of the most commonly prescribed benzodiazepines.

01:29:29.040 | So what is this magical anxiety-reducing song?

01:29:32.600 | The title of the song is "Waitless" by Marconi Union.

01:29:37.060 | I hadn't heard of the song prior to researching this episode.

01:29:39.880 | I did indeed look up the song on YouTube

01:29:42.640 | and listen to the song.

01:29:44.200 | I will provide a link to the song in the show note captions.

01:29:46.400 | I confess that it is a very relaxing song.

01:29:49.900 | I also confess that I was not experiencing anxiety

01:29:52.800 | when I listened to the song,

01:29:54.200 | but it was successful in reducing my level

01:29:58.300 | of overall autonomic arousal.

01:30:00.600 | I found myself more relaxed, et cetera.

01:30:02.240 | Now, of course, what I'm describing

01:30:03.400 | in terms of my own experience is not a peer-reviewed study.

01:30:05.540 | It's what I would call anecdata,

01:30:07.720 | meaning I'm just describing my experience.

01:30:09.840 | But again, there are peer-reviewed studies

01:30:12.880 | exploring how this particular song

01:30:14.560 | shifts one's autonomic state.

01:30:16.200 | And I think this three minutes of listening to this one song

01:30:19.280 | should at least be tried by anyone

01:30:22.000 | that's trying to reduce their anxiety,

01:30:23.360 | because unless you're listening to the song

01:30:24.680 | in some way that I'm not aware of,

01:30:26.080 | like excessively loud or something of that sort,

01:30:28.440 | I can't imagine how listening to the song

01:30:29.840 | would be detrimental in any way.

01:30:31.280 | And if you are anything like the subjects in the study

01:30:34.560 | that they explored, it could very well be beneficial

01:30:37.520 | and help you reduce your anxiety.

01:30:39.320 | It's also something that you could keep queued up

01:30:41.060 | in your phone or on any device,

01:30:43.540 | such that if you think you may experience anxiety,

01:30:46.120 | you just put your headphones in and listen to it.

01:30:48.360 | You might be wondering whether or not

01:30:49.640 | Marconi Union's "Waitless" is only three minutes long.

01:30:53.840 | Well, I don't know the answer to that,

01:30:55.140 | because when you go on YouTube,

01:30:56.460 | what you'll see is that clearly a number of people

01:30:59.040 | are benefiting from listening to the song

01:31:00.680 | to reduce their anxiety,

01:31:01.700 | or at least that a number of people have listened

01:31:03.260 | to this song, because if you put Marconi Union "Waitless"

01:31:06.740 | into the search function on YouTube,

01:31:08.700 | what you'll quickly discover is that the top video

01:31:10.820 | has, get this, 47 million views, and it's 10 hours long.

01:31:15.820 | Now, across today's episode,

01:31:17.920 | it's been in the back of my mind

01:31:19.240 | that some of you out there perhaps are trained musicians,

01:31:23.660 | that you grew up playing an instrument,

01:31:25.620 | perhaps sang in choir or at school,

01:31:29.040 | perhaps you played multiple instruments,

01:31:30.540 | perhaps you even know music theory,

01:31:32.880 | whereas others, such as myself,

01:31:35.240 | were encouraged to play an instrument when we were younger,

01:31:37.880 | but then abandoned that instrument.

01:31:39.800 | In fact, I'll just tell you a brief story.

01:31:41.160 | When I was a kid, every kid in school was required

01:31:43.980 | to pick an instrument.

01:31:44.820 | My parents, for whatever reason,

01:31:46.820 | clearly they didn't ask me what I wanted to do,

01:31:49.400 | they asked me to play the violin in school.

01:31:52.980 | And I got the violin, I started playing the violin,

01:31:57.380 | I took the Suzuki method lessons.

01:31:59.100 | This is where you don't learn to read music directly.

01:32:02.080 | There's a number assignment to the different notes,

01:32:05.980 | and that's initially how you learn.

01:32:07.080 | I was also supposed to listen to the songs while I slept,

01:32:10.220 | this idea that some of the music and musical learning

01:32:12.200 | could be encoded during sleep.

01:32:14.360 | An interesting topic because there's actually

01:32:15.840 | some emerging evidence for that now,

01:32:18.460 | but at the time, as far as I know,

01:32:20.320 | there were no peer-reviewed studies,

01:32:21.560 | but nonetheless, it was thought that this works

01:32:24.080 | and perhaps it does.

01:32:25.360 | Well, I can tell you one thing for sure,

01:32:26.880 | it did not work for me because I have one photo

01:32:31.280 | and truly just one from a concert that I played,

01:32:34.280 | I must've been about eight or nine years old,

01:32:36.360 | and within this photo, what you'll notice

01:32:37.960 | is there's a gallery of children, all with violins,

01:32:42.800 | all of whom's bows are up and my bow is down.

01:32:47.800 | That in addition to the fact that my fly was open

01:32:50.680 | in the picture and the fact that every time

01:32:53.080 | I played the violin, either by practice

01:32:55.760 | or with the teacher present,

01:32:57.620 | when we would go to these once a week sessions

01:33:00.120 | with a individual teacher, people would cringe,

01:33:04.100 | animals would cringe, literally dogs would howl

01:33:07.380 | such that my parents did not encourage me

01:33:10.300 | to continue playing, in fact, they and many others

01:33:12.980 | encouraged me to quit playing, so I quit playing.

01:33:15.440 | I confess I don't know how to play any instrument,

01:33:18.100 | I've attempted a few other instruments in my lifetime.

01:33:21.360 | Yes, I believe in neuroplasticity,

01:33:23.140 | it is a hallmark feature of our brain,

01:33:25.240 | our brain can learn things even as adults,

01:33:27.620 | but the point I'm trying to make here

01:33:29.040 | is that I am not of the category of kids

01:33:32.060 | that played an instrument and understands music theory

01:33:36.080 | or how to read music, I simply don't.

01:33:38.520 | And I realized that those of you that are listening to this

01:33:40.820 | or watching this out there are probably in a mixed category

01:33:44.320 | of proficiency all the way down to what I would consider

01:33:47.740 | my own relationship to music, which is deficiency,

01:33:50.800 | although I greatly enjoy listening to music

01:33:53.120 | and I do have a pretty good ability to memorize lyrics.

01:33:57.040 | In any event, the reason I raised this is that

01:34:01.220 | there are now dozens, if not hundreds

01:34:03.900 | of quality peer reviewed studies using a variety

01:34:06.960 | of technical approaches that show that when children,

01:34:09.960 | especially children younger than eight,

01:34:12.800 | learn to play an instrument and even better,

01:34:14.920 | learn to play multiple instruments,

01:34:17.740 | regardless of whether or not they learn to read music,

01:34:20.820 | that it leads to greatly enhanced connectivity

01:34:24.540 | within their brain that persists into adulthood

01:34:27.500 | and that it facilitates other forms

01:34:29.820 | of neuroplasticity and learning,

01:34:31.740 | which is basically to say that my brain very likely

01:34:35.040 | does not include these enhanced circuits.

01:34:37.320 | Which circuits am I referring to?

01:34:38.840 | Well, there are a number of different circuits in the brain

01:34:40.580 | that have been shown to expand when children learn

01:34:42.720 | how to play an instrument as a child, eight or younger.

01:34:46.500 | And again, eight isn't a strict cutoff

01:34:48.600 | and I always have to highlight this, forgive the tangent,

01:34:51.000 | but when we say eight or younger,

01:34:52.520 | I don't want people with nine-year-old children

01:34:54.620 | or a 10-year-old kid or even 16-year-old kid listening

01:34:56.740 | or even adult listening to think,

01:34:57.900 | oh, you know, the window is shut for me.

01:34:59.860 | Because when one designs a study,

01:35:01.220 | you have to have some thresholds of who you include

01:35:04.420 | and who you don't include and sometimes that leads

01:35:06.700 | to these kind of artificial perceptions

01:35:09.260 | about where the cutoffs are.

01:35:10.340 | But in any event, it's very clear

01:35:12.640 | that if you did learn an instrument when you were young

01:35:15.540 | or ideally even multiple instruments

01:35:17.380 | and even better would be to learn multiple instruments

01:35:19.980 | and how to sing along with instrumentals,

01:35:22.460 | especially in an improvised manner,

01:35:25.700 | well, your brain has expanded connectivity on average

01:35:30.260 | relative to children that did not have that experience.

01:35:33.020 | Now, the good news is that learning how to play

01:35:36.540 | an instrument or even, thankfully for me,

01:35:40.540 | listening to novel forms of music,

01:35:42.800 | music that you don't typically listen to

01:35:45.340 | for 30 to 60 minutes per day,

01:35:47.380 | and it doesn't have to be every day, in fact,

01:35:49.260 | it can even be just three days a week for 30 to 60 minutes,

01:35:52.460 | has been shown to expand brain connectivity

01:35:54.940 | in ways that of course lends itself

01:35:57.420 | to better musical comprehension and even performance.

01:36:01.180 | But learning how to play a musical instrument at any age

01:36:04.300 | as well as singing and singing,

01:36:06.300 | especially with others in a group,

01:36:08.460 | has been shown to enhance learning

01:36:11.080 | and the acquisition of new skills

01:36:12.820 | separate from musical learning and singing.

01:36:15.700 | In other words, it seems that learning how to play

01:36:17.580 | an instrument and singing are a gateway to neuroplasticity.

01:36:22.580 | And this is, again, supported by neuroimaging data.

01:36:26.140 | Some of the more striking of those data

01:36:28.260 | are that children that learned how to play

01:36:30.200 | one to three instruments when they were a kid

01:36:32.180 | or that sang in a choir or a group

01:36:34.520 | or that were taught to sing solo for that matter

01:36:36.900 | show up to 30% greater connectivity

01:36:39.580 | within this particular brain network

01:36:41.080 | that links the two hemispheres of the brain.

01:36:43.300 | Now, as soon as I say two hemispheres of the brain,

01:36:46.580 | it starts drawing up a lot of ideas in people's heads,

01:36:48.660 | mainly derived from pop psychology

01:36:50.860 | that there are left-brained people and right-brained people.

01:36:54.420 | I've touched on this before,

01:36:55.520 | but I want to make this abundantly clear again now.

01:36:58.460 | Most of what you've heard

01:36:59.580 | about so-called left-brained people or right-brained people

01:37:02.620 | is complete and total nonsense.

01:37:05.740 | It's myth.

01:37:06.820 | There are some functions in the brain

01:37:08.540 | that are lateralized to the left or the right hemisphere,

01:37:10.780 | in particular, prosody.

01:37:12.300 | They sort of lilting and falling of speech and in singing

01:37:16.000 | is highly lateralized in the brain.

01:37:17.540 | Other aspects of language can be lateralized in the brain.

01:37:19.880 | But really, if you hear that certain people

01:37:21.280 | are more emotional or certain people are more logical

01:37:23.520 | based on right-brain, left-brain stuff,

01:37:25.760 | that stuff is completely false.

01:37:27.480 | It's complete garbage, in fact.

01:37:29.080 | It's not based in any real solid data.

01:37:32.680 | So when I say that learning an instrument

01:37:34.920 | or learning how to sing young or even as an adult

01:37:37.200 | is beneficial for increasing the connectivity

01:37:39.240 | between the two sides of the brain,

01:37:40.880 | what that increased connectivity

01:37:42.120 | between the two sides of the brain,

01:37:43.520 | which is, by the way, mediated through a structure

01:37:45.320 | called the corpus callosum,

01:37:47.440 | is not about enhancing one's emotional capacity

01:37:50.700 | or logical capacity.

01:37:52.160 | It's really about increasing the capacity

01:37:54.360 | of all brain circuits,

01:37:56.280 | or at least the brain circuits

01:37:57.960 | that are connected up directly with the corpus callosum,

01:38:00.520 | which includes many brain circuits

01:38:02.040 | for things like cognition, language learning,

01:38:04.280 | speech, mathematics.

01:38:05.880 | A lot of people don't realize this,

01:38:07.320 | but a lot of musicians are also

01:38:10.080 | especially adept at mathematics.

01:38:12.000 | And for you musicians,

01:38:13.480 | you're probably nodding, of course, right?

01:38:14.920 | Because music is grounded in theory

01:38:17.520 | that has basis in math and in physics,

01:38:20.120 | something that we will address in a future episode

01:38:22.080 | about harmonics, et cetera.

01:38:23.760 | When children or adults learn

01:38:26.960 | how to play a musical instrument or several,

01:38:29.680 | or how to sing and play musical instruments,

01:38:32.520 | that increased connectivity in the corpus callosum

01:38:35.360 | is essentially providing multiple highways of option

01:38:38.960 | for learning all sorts of things.

01:38:40.700 | So it's something that I highly encourage,

01:38:42.560 | so much so that I intend to finally, finally

01:38:46.600 | learn how to play an instrument.

01:38:48.240 | I've got a particular instrument in mind

01:38:49.960 | that I've wanted to learn how to play for a very long time,

01:38:52.160 | but based on my prior experience

01:38:53.780 | with trying to learn an instrument,

01:38:54.900 | and because I like to consider myself a considerate person,

01:38:58.920 | I intend to do this more or less in isolation from people

01:39:02.520 | and indeed from animals as well.

01:39:04.680 | And for those of you that don't have the time or energy

01:39:06.820 | or desire to learn new forms of music,

01:39:08.760 | you'll be perhaps delighted to know

01:39:11.220 | that just listening to novel forms of music,

01:39:14.840 | and in particular, when you listen to novel forms of music

01:39:17.620 | and you pay attention to that music,

01:39:19.520 | not just letting it play in the background,

01:39:22.420 | that too has been demonstrated

01:39:23.900 | to expand the brain's capacity for neuroplasticity,

01:39:26.980 | its ability to modify itself and make it better

01:39:29.660 | at learning other sorts of things,

01:39:31.460 | both cognitive and physical.

01:39:33.120 | So I highly encourage you to listen to the music you love.

01:39:35.640 | I certainly love to listen to the music

01:39:37.680 | that I delight in and have for so many years,

01:39:40.400 | but there's also strong scientific support

01:39:42.420 | to encourage listening to new forms of music

01:39:45.160 | that hopefully you will like,

01:39:46.480 | but nonetheless, the mere forging for

01:39:48.900 | and listening to novel forms of music itself

01:39:51.720 | seems to activate brain circuitry in a way

01:39:54.640 | that allows for better learning and comprehension

01:39:57.000 | of all sorts of things.

01:39:58.440 | So today we've been talking about music in the brain,

01:40:00.880 | and I confess this is an enormous topic,

01:40:04.280 | so much so that I had to discard

01:40:06.400 | with entire sets of data and discussion

01:40:09.840 | around, for instance, the mathematical structure of music

01:40:13.140 | and how that relates to the mathematical structure

01:40:15.560 | of firing of neurons.

01:40:16.900 | We touched on this a little bit, however,

01:40:18.880 | in the context of certain frequencies of sounds

01:40:21.600 | that we hear creating certain frequencies

01:40:23.760 | of neuronal firing and activation in the brain.

01:40:26.100 | I mean, just think about that, how amazing that is.

01:40:28.020 | It's literally like the brain playing your neurons

01:40:30.100 | like a piano.

01:40:30.980 | This is not what happens when you smell a particular odor

01:40:33.580 | or taste a particular taste

01:40:35.220 | or see a particular face or visual stimulus.

01:40:37.840 | Incredible things happen within those senses as well,

01:40:40.640 | but there is something oh so fundamental and incredible

01:40:44.980 | about music and its ability to tap into our neural circuitry

01:40:48.240 | and our neural chemistry in ways

01:40:49.440 | that shift our emotional states and our motivational states.

01:40:52.960 | So we talked about ways that music can be leveraged

01:40:55.520 | to shift our emotional and motivational states.

01:40:58.180 | Again, not as a way to reduce music

01:41:00.320 | to its reductionist parts,

01:41:02.400 | but rather to help us gain understanding

01:41:04.920 | into how the brain responds to music

01:41:06.600 | and how we can leverage music of all kinds

01:41:08.520 | with and without lyrics,

01:41:10.220 | how we can balance the contrast between music and silence

01:41:13.680 | to increase motivation and so on and so on.

01:41:16.400 | For those of you that are interested

01:41:17.600 | in the more formal structure of music

01:41:19.320 | and how it relates to brain function and vice versa,

01:41:22.360 | as well as for those of you that are interested

01:41:24.340 | in singing and songwriting

01:41:26.080 | and more along the lines of lyrical content

01:41:29.360 | and how singing in groups

01:41:30.880 | and how improvisation of singing and musical playing

01:41:34.080 | can impact brain function and plasticity,

01:41:36.220 | I promise you there's going to be both an expert guest

01:41:39.360 | coming on the podcast to discuss that,

01:41:41.040 | as well as a solo episode on those topics.

01:41:42.920 | Again, the topic of music and the brain

01:41:44.440 | being far too vast to cover in just one conversation.

01:41:47.740 | With that said, I hope that today's discussion

01:41:50.520 | allowed for you to think about music differently.

01:41:53.400 | Hopefully it will lead you to listen to music

01:41:56.020 | a bit differently, perhaps even leverage music

01:41:57.940 | for different purposes in your life,

01:41:59.620 | and above all, to think about music and to enjoy music,

01:42:02.360 | either listening to it or playing it or both,

01:42:04.720 | because as you now know, music isn't just able

01:42:06.820 | to activate your brain,

01:42:08.420 | but rather your brain contains vast amounts of real estate

01:42:11.800 | that are literally there to listen to music.

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01:44:11.980 | Thank you once again for joining me

01:44:13.380 | for today's discussion about music and your brain.

01:44:16.500 | And last, but certainly not least,

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01:44:20.440 | [upbeat music]

01:44:23.020 | (upbeat music)

How to Use Music to Boost Motivation, Mood & Improve Learning | Huberman Lab Podcast

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