full interview_indre viskontas_1.mp3
Speaker 1 [00:00:00] So tell us a little bit about what you've been doing sort of lately, because obviously you know we're interested in art, science, and creativity, and you are certainly well placed to talk about those kinds of things.
Indre Viskontas [00:00:17] It's a really exciting time right now. In the last five years, there's been this explosion of research into the impact that the arts can have on our health and well-being. And so I've been part of that movement as the director of communications of the Sound Health Network, where we're really focused on how we can use music strategically in our lives to make it better. It used to be that there was a paper that would come out every couple of years or so that if you studied creativity or improvisation, like you didn't tell anybody in your field that that was the case, it was a bit taboo. And now there's just this real interest. And there's sort of two reasons why that is. One, I think we're starting to recognize that the arts are in peril, that they're often cut, that this is something that we need in our lives and how important they are. And two, we have much better tools as neuroscientists to really study their impact. And so the evidence is really building that there are measurable ways in which the arts and in particular music can impact our health and well-being. So that's kind of the sphere I've been living in in the last few years.
Speaker 1 [00:01:24] The arts and sciences have sort of always got classically been sort of siloed, right? You know, there's either you're an artist or you're a scientist, but that was not true 500 years ago.
Speaker 3 [00:01:36] Right.
Speaker 1 [00:01:36] Division and people like that but over the past over the past whatever it has kind of tended to sort of be that way is that something that you've just found
Indre Viskontas [00:01:45] Yeah, so in the last century, you know, you were either a scientist or an artist. The idea that you could be both was just really foreign. And I think that that really was a mistake on a number of different levels. But fundamentally, to me, it's because it's a misunderstanding that in both cases, you're after the same thing, which is to understand what it means to be human on this planet. And we just use different tools. So scientists really focus on the objective. I like to say that scientific creativity is independent on the discoverer. So it doesn't matter who discovered the structure of DNA, that was a creative leap. But when it comes to artistic creativity, it's really the individual experience that illuminates what's universal. And the more specific the experience, the more universal it seems, paradoxically. And so. For an artistic creative, the person who's actually doing the creating is fundamental to the value that we place on that object. So, you know, for example, if I went and taped a banana to the wall of the Museum of Modern Art, I'd probably get thrown out. But in Art Basel, when an artist, Risto Catalan, did that, he was able to sell the piece for $120,000 because there was a whole sort of story behind it, there was concept behind it. So I think that now we're kind of getting to this better understanding that scientists, artists, creatives in general really are at trying to understand what it's like to be human and how we can use that to understand ourselves better. And the parallels between the fields I think are becoming more clear. Yes, there is still this sense that science is objective and art is subjective, but there's a value to both perspectives. I can keep going.
Speaker 1 [00:03:38] Oh, that's fine. You're doing great. You can also personalize this because ultimately you've got these two things going.
Indre Viskontas [00:03:48] You bet. You bet, yeah. So when I was a young opera singer just coming of age and I discovered the writings of Oliver Sacks, it really sort of changed my trajectory for a moment because I discovered that, wow, there's this whole world of the brain and we're just now starting to get these amazing tools to study it. And that just seems so much more important than going back to the practice room and continuing to train my voice, which started to seem like a kind of selfish act. But after I finished my undergraduate degree, and then again after I finish my PhD in neuroscience, in both cases I still felt like I wasn't being true to myself if I didn't engage in opera, if I didn't train the voice, if didn't do the thing that really kind of makes my heart beat more quickly. For a long time, I kept those two lives separate. I was a very serious opera singer. I trained every week. I had a coaching and a lesson. I practiced every day. And I went to the lab every day, and I worked on the science, and I trained up all the skills that I needed. And I didn't tell my scientist friends about my opera world. I didn't tell my opera. Friends about my science world because I felt like I was going to be called out as a dilettante in either field if I was too honest about how serious I was in this other field. And then, after I finished my PhD, I just thought, what would happen? How good a singer could I be if I devoted the same number of hours to training my voice as I just had for my PhD? I'd never done an official degree in music before. It was always something that I'd done privately and kind of made my own path. So I enrolled in a master of music degree in voice performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. And that's when I realized that there was a niche that I was really poised to fill that no one else could, which was that there were a lot of misconceptions in the classical music training world about how we learn and remember. And I had just done a PhD, understanding how memories are written into the cells of the brain. And so I thought if I could bring that knowledge and that understanding and translate it into the language of musical training, I could really make a unique contribution, not only to the field, but also like what could I learn? How could I be a better singer if I can apply some of this knowledge? So that's what I started doing. I started teaching musicians at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music how to use the neuroscience of learning and memory to strategically map out their rehearsal sessions and their practice sessions, how to solve specific problems that they had, and so on. And that's when I realized that actually musicians are hungry for the science. And it's this total misconception that these two fields are, that you can't. Join them that you can't have cross talk and that one can't benefit from the other.
Speaker 1 [00:06:55] So how has your background in neuroscience affected your music? I mean, you kind of touched on it, but I'm curious to see how that...
Indre Viskontas [00:07:05] So you might think somebody who has a PhD in neuroscience, who has bachelors of science, when they approach something like training their voice, they would go and check out all the anatomy of the larynx, figure out the musculature, map it all out. I didn't do any of that. I didn't do any that because I was already too much in my head when I was singing. I was overthinking things and what I needed to do was just trust my gut, trust my instincts and be present in the performance. And so that did not help me. That kind of neuroanatomical precision approach didn't help me, what did help me was understanding how the brain of the listener is affected by what they hear and how musicians can strategically make their performance more effective. And the reason this is important is because we all have performance anxiety. When we're out there on stage we can't rely on just being able to pull it out of a hat on the day where you know your dog just died and you know you're feeling so sad the last thing you want to do is get on stage and entertain but you know what someone's paying you to do that someone bought a bunch of tickets so you got to do, that and you have to be able to pull that performance no matter how you feel in that moment. And that's what professionals learn how to do. And so we need to know what it is, what's the minimum that we need to do with our bodies to get the message across out to the audience, even if we ourselves aren't feeling it in that moment. And here's what I learned. This is where the neuroscience came in for me. For such a long time, my singing teacher would say to me, Indray, Indray Indray. It's not the high note that's important. It's all the notes leading up to the high notes. And I would say, that's totally false. If I mess up the high note, everybody knows. I'm not gonna get paid. The critics are gonna write about it. That's the big thing to fall flat on, right? That's a climax for a reason. It's a high note. You hold it. And I just didn't believe her. And so I kept going for the high notes and it just wasn't musical. And oftentimes I just couldn't do it even technically. And then in part of my work, I read this paper out of Robert Satori's lab at McGill. And my friend Valerie Salampour, she became my friend later, wrote this, or did this study in which she demonstrated that all the notes leading up to the high note are critically important because the way that the reward pathway in your brain assigns value to the higher note depends on the expectation that you have set up to get there. So it was essentially an understanding of the fact that the wanting part of what ultimately will bring you pleasure is really, really important, right? This is like storytelling 101. You set up the tension before you can release it. And seeing that in the timing of the release of dopamine, which is this neurotransmitter that we all know is involved in motivation and reward, made it so clear. And I just took that information into my... Next lesson and I knew exactly why every note leading up to the high note was more important than the high note itself. So that's an example of how the neuroscience of music sort of has informed my own performance and allowed me to overcome the performance anxiety that I would have in the moment because now I knew what to do. I had a strategy. I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to get that response from the audience and that's what science told me.
Speaker 1 [00:10:50] That was great. Is it possible?
Indre Viskontas [00:10:52] To say that in one minute or less.
Speaker 1 [00:10:54] Yeah. Sure. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I can just be really specific. If you can just sort of fit the hot points, because I think it's a great story. Sure. Sure. We'll try it. Give it a shot. OK.
Indre Viskontas [00:11:09] For a long time, my singing teacher used to say to me, Indra, Indra. Stop focusing on the high note. You've got to focus on all the notes leading up to the high notes. And I just thought, like, BS. That's not true. What's important is the high not. That's where I get to shine, right? And it wasn't until I read this one scientific paper that I knew that she was right. And in this paper, what they showed was that when people are listening to music, that is going to give them the chills, we actually see this whole anticipatory phase in their reward pathways, that there's more dopamine, this neurochemical we know is involved in motivation and reward, in the part of the brain that sets up the expectation of a reward before you get the chills. And if you don't set it up, you don't get that amazing ecstatic experience when you hit the high note. And it was that one paper that changed the way I sang forever. It was how I was able to use science to be a better singer. Because with that knowledge, I could go back into the practice room or onto the performance stage and know exactly why all the notes leading up to the high note were more important than the high note itself.
Speaker 1 [00:12:22] And that's, you know, that is so true in music generally, right? I mean that, you have the move away from the tonic and then back to the tonics, which gives you this sort of sense of completion, that sort of, and there is an anticipation. So I think it's those kinds of things that musicians use, do they not, in order to be able to create that feeling in the audience.
Indre Viskontas [00:12:45] Yeah, I mean, even some musicians like James Taylor said that music is only tension and release, right? If you need to, like, boil it down to one thing, it's the buildup of tension and then it's release. It's the anticipation of a reward and then the reward of itself. But every great artist, and that's true, I think, across many, many media, right, that's true in suspenseful films, that's through in like a great podcast. If you're setting up, building up the story, you don't give everything away at once, right? That's like a rookie mistake. Instead, you want to sort of build attention, give the sense that the person, there's something coming and I need to stay in it. And it's interesting because we sometimes think of dopamine as the pleasure chemical, as this thing that just, it's ecstasy, it is sex, drugs, rock and roll, all those things. But dopamine really isn't about pleasure, it's about motivation. It's about setting up the want for something, which if we're going to talk about technology, has a whole other set of implications. But when it comes to art, you know, often that journey is what ultimately is why we come back, right? The pleasure is fleeting, but setting up that tension, setting up at what? Feeling motivated, that in some ways is the real reward. It makes us feel like we're alive, that we're engaged. That's what's exciting. But yeah, when it comes to music, if you think about what jazz players are doing, you know where they're supposed to land. You know where the beat is. They set up the expectation of a beat. They might even set up the expectation a wrist and then play with it. There's a push, there's a pull. And in that push and pull, the audience member gets information. Is the person holding back a little bit? Are they coming too fast? And all of these things have an emotional language and a sort of understanding of the humanity, of the human experience that we really gravitate towards and that we really want to uncover. What is that person feeling? And that's what we hear in terms of how they set up the tension and how they release it.
Speaker 1 [00:15:00] So what's going on in the brain that's doing this, or as others would say, what's in the mind rather than necessarily in the brains, in order to actually feel these kinds of things? Is it just go for me? Is that the je ne sais quoi of all of this, or is it more than that?
Indre Viskontas [00:15:21] Yeah, so, you know, sometimes people say things like, music is so great because it engages your whole brain. And I call that the sledgehammer approach. And the truth is, is that it's simply not true. There are certain pieces of music that you can play for me and my brain is going to totally ignore, not going to engage anything. And the same thing for you. And you know there's so many different ways in which we use music in our lives, whether it's at the gym or to focus or to grieve. So every use of music has a specific tool and a specific purpose and is or not specific to the person, right? There's a whole subjective side of it. So I think of music more as a Swiss Army knife. What does this have to do with the brain? Well, of course, the brain is a highly complex organ, and of course every use of music, every piece of music every experience with music is going to leave a signature. Even more so, I will make the argument that music doesn't exist in the compressions of air, in the sound wave itself, it only exists in the brain that interprets it as such. Because you can play the weirdest, most avant-garde jazz piece to someone who has no experience with jazz and it will not sound like music, it will sound like noise. And you can play that same piece to somebody for whom this is just the hype. Of the musical experience. What's different in those two cases, not the sound wave, it's what's happening in the person's brain. And so this is one of the reasons why I'm not too concerned about generative AI taking over the entire music industry. I'm sorry. Because when we play music to people who are listening, and we tell them this was composed by a computer, they don't listen in the same way, their brains don't light up in the way, the same networks are not engaged. But if you tell them, this is an unearthed composition by their favorite composer Bach or Beethoven, nobody's seen, heard this work before. All of a sudden they engage all of these networks in their brain, including theory of mind, including the insula, these pathways that are really involved in extracting meaning from the piece. So their brain looks totally different. And if you think about why you listen to music, it really is about trying to understand not only what the musician is experiencing, but how that relates to us. And that's why these networks in the brain that are involved in our own identity. In our own building up of who we think we are are involved when we're listening to music that we love.
Speaker 1 [00:18:10] It's a follow-up on what you were saying there. It's kind of like we talked to Moby.
Speaker 3 [00:18:14] I'm awesome.
Speaker 1 [00:18:15] Right, right. But he said, there's no such thing as music. It's only molecules. Uh-huh. And then we talk to David Levin, okay? And he says, sort of, well, kind of more like what you're saying. Yeah. It's like, there is no, it's nothing until your brain interprets it. It is there, but it's not there.
Indre Viskontas [00:18:36] Yeah, so if Moby thinks it's just molecules, I'm going to, I mean, I don't know exactly what he meant by that, but I'm gonna take issue and say I think he's wrong. And I will also say the same thing, there's a philosophical question, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And the answer is no. Sorry philosophers, it's no. Why is it no? Because sound is a subjective experience inside of a brain. And if there is no One there, to turn those rarefactions and compressions of air into a subjective experience of sound. There is no sound. It's just air molecules moving. So it isn't music in that sense. And one of the great demonstrations of this was by the music cognition pioneer Diana Deutsch. She has this musical illusion called the speech to song illusion where there's a that that she says. And part of it, half of it she puts into a loop and then it repeats over and over and again. And it has a little rhythm, it has little melody and you listen to the repetition a few times and you start to think, oh yeah, this is music. Now your brain has tagged that sound wave as music, but only half of that, only the part that she repeated. Now you play that full sentence again and all of a sudden halfway through the phrase it sounds like she breaks into song. And what's amazing about this, when you think about it, biologically, is that this little change that took less than a minute of repetition will last a lifetime, or at least many, many years. So the next time you hear that phrase, your brain is gonna tag that second half of it as music. And it's going to sound totally different from speech. Think about that for a minute. Something happened biologically in your brain. Next time you have that exact same external stimulus, it's going to have a fundamentally different experience for you. So, to me, that's remarkable, and that also underscores the fact that music isn't music until your brain decides it's music. And when it decides it is music, it listens differently, it activates differently, you know, all different networks are engaged, and so it becomes a different experience.
Speaker 1 [00:20:57] So what is that experience because you know you're kind of getting to that because obviously we know that music can do so many things As you say some people will like But other people will go like you know Right, it's moving it here. What is it about? What is about that? What does it about those molecules in the air? Okay, so that gets you to that
Indre Viskontas [00:21:21] Yeah so that's the million dollar question. Why is it that a particular sound wave, you know, can have such an effect on us that it can incite riots, that it can move us to tears, that I can make us fall in love? What is that? And this is where I make the argument that Steven Pinker and others would totally disagree with me on, that music is fundamental to how we understand each other and how we communicate. Here's my logic. One and a half million years ago our early human ancestors discovered fire and that allowed them to cook their food, to fuel a bigger brain, to sit around and do stuff beyond just trying to survive out in the world. What is it that they did around the fire? Well what do we do around the Fire? You know we roast some marshmallows, we tell stories, somebody pulls out a guitar. Well I can pretty much guarantee that there were no guitars a million half years ago. I'm not sure about the marshmallows, I doubt it, but I am almost certain that in that time we began to communicate with each other. We told stories in the way that we could have. Now here's the kicker. Language didn't come around for another million years. So our ancestors were sitting around the fire doing something that didn't language for a million years. My theory is they were dropping a beat, they were exchanging calls, they were demonstrating their emotions with their bodies, they were essentially creating music. And this coincides with this exponential rise in brain size, you know, and all of these, you know, changes that now distinguish the modern human brain from our early human ancestors. So I believe it is built in to the way that we communicate, Even in a much more, and I don't want to say primitive, but instinctual way than language. One example of this is that you have a baby. Your baby doesn't understand the words that you're saying, but they sure do understand the emotion behind them. They understand the prosody, they understand the melody behind the words. If you yell at a baby versus if you sing to a baby, the baby's nervous system reacts differently. So they are already, they come out into the world. Already ready to respond emotionally to music. There's lots of great studies showing that if you like sing to babies in the neonatal ICU, they put on weight faster, you know, they're just, they get out of the NICU more quickly. There's something really healing and comforting about that kind of an exchange. So what does this have to do with music and the brain? Well, to me, this is why music is so redundantly represented in so many different aspects of what our brains do and how they function and the networks that make them up. This is why is such a powerful mnemonic, why we can remember things when we put them to music, why we learn the ABCs by singing a song. This is way we can track emotion on the basis of tone of voice. And, you know, so many other ways in which music helps us connect with each other. And so what's going on in the brain? Well, again, I think it depends on exactly how you're using music. It's a tool. And there isn't, unlike the language regions, you can't damage one specific part of the brain and lead to a complete loss of all forms of music. Yes, there are people who are born with congenital amusia, which means that they're quote-unquote tone-deaf that they have trouble pitch matching, that they have trouble, you know, that kind of thing. So there is a sort of genetic component to that side of pitch perception. But some of those individuals still love music, some of them still go to concerts and enjoy it, some of them don't. So you know there are all these ways in which you know our brains respond to this stimulus and are moved by it. And so what's happening in the brain when you're having this sublime experience, let's just make it specific. Because of course, I actually think that some of the uses of music that are more important are participatory music making. I think that making music is a great way for us to learn, to develop skills, to do a whole bunch of things. And that's really, to me, the power of music is when you are actually making it. But setting that aside, let's talk about the listening experience. And even the listening experiences is not passive. Uh, you can be actively listening or you can just be passively listening. You can develop an ear. Uh, so Susan Rogers, who was the sound engineer on Princess Purple Rain and a neuroscientist has written this amazing book called, This Is What It Sounds Like, where she really tracks the talent and skill involved in developing an ear? So what's the difference between a person who's just listening like that and Susan Rogers listening to, you know, Prince Princess Purple Rain, the difference is, of course, how she's engaging these different brain networks, and particularly how these networks that we now know are attaching meaning to the stimulus. And so there's this one network called the salience network. We used to think of the brain as divided up all into these different regions, and there were these islands. And now we know that not true, that they're all part of these networks and these networks can coordinate with one another and one of them is called the salience network. It attaches meaning to what's out there. So you see something that your brain thinks is going to have a negative outcome, your salience network says, hang on a minute, there's something that you need to worry about over here. And so the salience network gets built up over time. Um, and also it is highly engaged in attaching meaning to music. I don't know if I can keep going. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1 [00:27:28] Yeah, I mean, I just sort of, you're calling to mind, we have a number of stories where music plays a part.
Speaker 3 [00:27:38] Great.
Speaker 1 [00:27:38] And I'm just curious about how the brain processes various different sorts of sensory experiences. One of them, of course, is the human voice.
Speaker 4 [00:27:52] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 [00:27:55] And we have, have you heard of a group called Roomful of Peace?
Speaker 3 [00:27:58] Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1 [00:28:00] So we have a story with Google, we follow a composer who worked with them over at Mesmoca.
Speaker 3 [00:28:06] Oh, great.
Speaker 1 [00:28:07] And we've followed the whole development of a tune, as it were.
Speaker 3 [00:28:10] Aha!
Speaker 1 [00:28:11] Okay so and fat acapella is kind of the purest
Speaker 3 [00:28:18] Yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:28:19] And so how does that work in terms of the structure? I think we might have to...
Speaker 5 [00:28:32] Stand by. Yeah, we got it. Great. Okay.
Indre Viskontas [00:28:41] So the human voice is a special signal to the human brain. In fact, when you hear the human voice or you look at someone's brain as the human voices playing, we see a different signature from other kinds of sounds. It can have a kind of direct link in some ways to your sympathetic, your fight or flight nervous system. This is why when you get the chills, it's often from a human voice, it's like right tapped in to. You know, that particular nervous system. Why a baby's cry is so aversive and why you can pick it out of noise? I mean, there's an evolutionary reason, right? Why we orient ourselves to the sound of the human voice. Just like, you know a bonobo is going to orient itself to the sound of another bonoboo voice, right, different frequency. This is very adaptive. When you Think about the complexity of speech as well. You know, this is one of the reasons why when people lose their hearing, they get particularly frustrated in a restaurant where they can't, it's not like everything just gets turned down the volume, it is that they can not parse speech out anymore and that is very very frustrating. So, we don't just hear all sounds, you know, in the same tone or the same volume. There's this little tiny brain region called the precuneus, which we now know is kind of a gateway to our attention. So the precunious can amplify something in the environment that we should pay attention to and then impact how we actually perceive that thing. Let me give you an example of how this works. You're in a room and there's a lot of people there. And somebody says your name at the same volume as the person speaking in front of you, but suddenly you can hear it. And you've been paying attention to what the person is saying, right? How did that work? Well, in your inner ear, you know, where you have this, you know, amazing organ that essentially translates the sound wave into the language of the brain, you also have a connection ultimately to the precuneus. And the precunious, when it tracks something as salient as your name. Can go back down and influence those cells in your inner ear and amplify that particular part of the signal. So that is how you can hear things that are at the same volume that, you know, to another animal, to a computer, wouldn't be any different. You can pick it out because you have this ability to tune in, literally, to parts of the sonic world that are important to you.
Speaker 1 [00:31:33] And that happens like, you know, involuntarily, right?
Indre Viskontas [00:31:35] Totally involuntarily. This is why it's actually really hard to tune out when someone's talking to you when you're trying to focus on another task, right? It's totally involontary. You can't help it. You can help but eavesdrop on the conversation next to you if it's fascinating, right, if it somehow has captured your attention. So it's not just a bottom up, this influence of everything coming in and your brain just has to figure out what's important. It's also top down. Where your brain is making decisions for you on the basis of what it thinks could be important so that you will actually hear the things that are important as they reach your ears.
Speaker 1 [00:32:14] So I'm going to go back to Rufo and Tifa again, because they have, you know, it's not like you leave the auditorium humming it, right? It's not. Right. They have, they wouldn't call it atonal, but others would.
Speaker 3 [00:32:30] Right.
Speaker 1 [00:32:30] You know, it uses certain kinds of things like repetition. Uh-huh. Right. And to sort of, well, you could expound on that. I'm just curious if you could use actually Rufus Latif in your answer, that would be. Sure.
Speaker 3 [00:32:42] Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1 [00:32:43] Did you know about it?
Indre Viskontas [00:32:47] Great musical groups, like a room full of teeth, understand how this kind of tuning into what's meaningful in a sound works instinctually. They might not be able to write it in a paper, but they do it. And one of the things that we see, for example, is that with repetition, your brain begins to assign the stimulus with new meaning if there's something interesting about how it's repeated. So let me kind of unpack that a little bit. If you just repeated a phrase over and over and over and again, and your brain, when you first say the phrase, just tags it as speech. Once it knows what the words mean or what the person is trying to say, it's no longer interesting, right? It habituates, begins to ignore it. But if that repetition continues, the brain might be like, well, but wait, maybe there's some other meaning in the fact that this pattern is repeating that is actually worth getting a little bit more deeply into. And that is how, you know, for example, like if I'm going to emphasize something and I'm gonna say it again, you can kind of trigger this other way of like processing that same information. So in a piece of music, what the repetition serves to do is for one, to tell your brain, hey, listen to this stimulus differently, you know, parse it for emotional meaning or harmonic meaning or, you know, some other aspect of it so that you start to hear things in the fourth, fifth, sixth repetition that you didn't hear in the first one. You know, and there are, you, know, a lot of strategies here, so, for example, familiarity breeds preference when it comes to music. Oftentimes, you hear something once and, oh, fine. You hear it a tense time and it's sublime. You know, why is that the case? The stimulus is the same. Why does it have the same, you know, because your brain has found additional layers of meaning and it's tagged it into your own, the salience for you, what it means to you. And you literally hear it differently on the tense listen. A really good composer knows how to sort of. Use strategically this building up of tension, this motivation, this set up your desire to keep listening, but also have enough variation so that you don't get bored and tune out. You don't to the point where you're like, okay, I already know what they have to say. I don't need to listen anymore. If there's something slightly different in those repetitions, if those variations build upon each other, if there's an overarching hierarchical pattern that is even more Meaningful. Your brain is gonna continue to stay involved and you're gonna continue listen. And I think that's what's wonderful about groups like Runeful of Teeth or Acapella in general is that there are these layers that build upon one another that keep you interested, that keep your brain engaged because you know that there's a payoff coming and you've got this motivation, but there's also these other levels and patterns that you pull out that give you information. That, you know, you didn't have before, and that sort of satisfies our desire as infavores for especially emotionally-laden information. So when you think about, you now, information in general is fine, but when it is tied to an emotion, why do we even have emotions? We have emotions, you, know, for two reasons. One is to show other humans whether something is good or bad, and, you so that we can – they can figure out what we've just experienced. They don't have to go through it themselves. And also to help us learn what's good and bad. Should I approach this situation in the future or should I avoid it? So emotional information is really important to us for our survival and that's one of the reasons why things that have an emotion are not only more interesting to us, but they're also more memorable. There's all of these ways in which emotion has an impact. And the human voice is full of emotion. I mean, you can tell the difference between what someone is feeling on the basis of how they say it, what it sounds like. You can tell in 10 seconds, even less, one second, when your partner or your parent calls you. You can from the minute they say hello, whether they've had good news or bad news. And so that's very exciting to us because it gives us, it scratches us emotional information it. And this sort of layer of harmonies, this layer of voices, this layer emotion really is a very powerful experience for us.
Speaker 1 [00:37:38] No, it's funny because it's called to mind by, you know, I had this one piece of music, just like Sibelius and Second Symphony, okay, and I can only listen to it once a year because... Mm-hmm. Will be in my brain.
Speaker 4 [00:38:00] Hmm
Speaker 1 [00:38:01] for like a week after I've listened to it.
Speaker 3 [00:38:05] Yeah, right.
Speaker 1 [00:38:05] Right, I mean, it just won't go away, right? Yeah. So I have to be really careful with that piece of music.
Indre Viskontas [00:38:15] Yeah, so there's this phenomenon of earworms, which is very interesting, which is when you get a little melody stuck in your head and it's often a melody that hasn't resolved yet. So, there are these devilishly annoying children's songs like the wheels on the bus. Why are those so annoying and yet so pleasant to the three-year-old set? We can talk about the three-year-old in a minute, but it's so annoying to us because it doesn't resolve. It's never-ending. And so the earworm kind of just can keep playing in your head and not resolve. So some of the strategies I sometimes tell people if they've had this trouble is that you need to like actively pull your consciousness into that piece and finish it. Give it a big ta-da and finish that particular phrase. And hopefully it will go away.
Speaker 1 [00:39:14] Time or other other people say like what you need to do is need the Sammy Jamison jr. Version of raindrops he falling in my head which is the worst song ever recorded put that in it like for places
Speaker 3 [00:39:25] There you go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah Replace it with another earworm
Speaker 1 [00:39:31] Okay, I'm going to run through a couple of other things that we have been experiencing in our travels. We have a story about pipe organs. But we had following the construction of a pipe organ and installation of a pipe organ actually in Trinity Church in death time of that.
Speaker 3 [00:39:53] All right.
Speaker 1 [00:39:54] And it's been a really interesting thing. People have talked about it, and we see it. There's something about that technology, ancient technology, that hasn't changed very much.
Speaker 3 [00:40:05] Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:40:07] It has this effect.
Speaker 3 [00:40:10] Yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:40:11] Sister, talk about that as something that you're, that you have any interest in talking about.
Indre Viskontas [00:40:15] Yeah. I mean, a pipe organ is a really interesting instrument for a number of reasons, but the one that I think, at least for me, makes it so compelling to be in that presence, is that you have these deep, deep layers of sound across all of these different sort of In a way, I think that you don't with other instruments, and I don't know, you'd have to ask an acoustician about exactly why that is, but I get the sense that when you're in the room and you have, the sound is, it's not, I wanna say, The sound is coming from the same instrument, but it's coming across the entire room. And so I feel like it has the way that the sound waves then in the room react to that. It's just so immersive, like it just washes over you in a way that like if you were in front of a speaker or in front an orchestra, it's just not the same. In an orchestra you have a lot of different instruments making that big sound. And so when you think about, like, if you visualize what the sound waves look like as they're coming off of the instruments, the timbres are all gonna be very different. But in a pipe organ, you have this wall of sound that shares a timbre, right? That shares, like this kind of synchronicity to it in terms of, you know, the timbre is really in the complexity of the waveform. So, you now, if think about sort of like, if you superimposed one waveform on another, it would kind of sort of track in the same pattern. That I think is one of the reasons why we can be so moving. I think it has this homogeneity to the way that it affects not only our ears but our whole bodies that we get this like sense, this real sense that we're in this wall of sound that has this this homogeny to it but also this harmonic and timbre complexity.
Speaker 1 [00:42:38] Okay. You know what, we have another story. I need to change batteries.
Speaker 5 [00:42:44] Alright, we have a battery to see how much we got. Good, that's great. That's great!
Indre Viskontas [00:42:52] So do you guys talk to the architects? What's the story of the pipe organ?
Speaker 1 [00:43:00] Oh, well, it's really just the development of it, and yeah, literally there's a company in Tennessee that built it correctly with the voices that will be singing with it in each part of the room.
Speaker 3 [00:43:14] Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:43:15] And that's where the technical part of it comes in, in terms of the actual voicing of the instrument.
Speaker 3 [00:43:23] Yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:43:23] Right, and it has to be, to them, it had to be kind of perfect.
Speaker 3 [00:43:26] Yeah, yeah, of course.
Speaker 1 [00:43:28] So it was really kind of fascinating to sort of watch them do those things, oh my gosh. So, anyway, I have another point. Okay, so one of our sources is a bit of an acoustician. An acoustician and... Thank you. I need an acoustic, kind of a famous acoustician, and we took him to Boston Symphony Hall. And we brought him and we had the first violinist, Lina Kang, and she got up and played the lute bop on the violin. And he went around the room and just sort of... Because this is where I see your hair falling over. And then he had all sorts of other things to say about the way that you measure it. So you're not mistaken.
Speaker 4 [00:44:20] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 [00:44:20] You have sung in lots of different venues, right? Yeah. Is there something about the halls? Is there a tuning difference? Oh, yeah.
Indre Viskontas [00:44:31] Oh yeah, I mean, as opera singers, man, we have such strong opinions about the halls that we like to sing in, but the irony is that the hall that you like to sing in which, you know, will often give you a fair amount of the sound back, those are not always the halls in which you sound the best to the audience. So there is this skill that opera singers have to develop. Which is to not listen to themselves in performance and to be able to sing no matter how dead the stage is, no matter little of your own sound comes back to you. And the reason this is so important is that, oftentimes you will audition in a place that is like that, where you don't get a lot of feedback, but you sound great to the panel as long as you don't push. So what does that mean? What does pushing mean? A singer, if they are listening to themselves too much, will try to adjust their technique to make what they're hearing sound better, right? One way that we do this is if we're feeling like all of a sudden we don't get anything back and our voice sounds super small, we're going to push a little bit to make it bigger. We're going actually strategically kind of lean on the larynx to make the sound sound louder. But this is a huge mistake. Because what that introduces is tension into the sound, and that can cause intonation problems. It can make you sound sharp or flat, more often flat. It can change the frequency of your vibrato, make it go faster or slower, and essentially make you sound So absolutely, the hall matters in terms of not only your own experience, but how your voice sounds in that hall. And opera singers have to, because we're unamplified, so it's not like you're bringing your own microphone and your own speaker system and that you know predictably what you're going to sound like in the hall no matter what. You're relying on the hall to essentially be your amplification. And so, yeah, so it makes a huge difference and that's definitely something singers have to learn how to do.
Speaker 1 [00:46:46] Have you ever, have you ever sang at Boston Symphony at all?
Indre Viskontas [00:46:49] I have not.
Speaker 1 [00:46:50] But
Indre Viskontas [00:46:51] But I imagine it's, yeah, I don't know. I imagine that's pretty good. So, symphony halls usually are very friendly places for opera singers to sing in, in terms of hearing themselves. The kinds of, ironically, opera houses are often the ones that are hard because you have curtains, you have this big space behind you, so you're not, and you have these seats in the theater, like... That are absorbing the sound, so there isn't a lot of things coming back to you. But usually in a symphony hall, it's a friendlier space, there's more wood, it's just more fun to sing in.
Speaker 1 [00:47:30] Maybe you're talking about it being a box, you know, but sometimes the boxes are really, they're somehow they're real preferable to all different kinds of sounds.
Indre Viskontas [00:47:42] Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the box, so again, you know, yeah, it depends, and you know if you're unamplified as you are an opera singer, you actually, you know, in some ways, like you want to create a shell kind of behind you so that if you turn your head a little bit here or there, and then yeah, and then it comes out directly to the audience. But, like for example, singing outdoors for opera singers. Because the noise just dissipates out through, exactly.
Speaker 1 [00:48:18] Yeah, I'm sure it does. Another story that we have is with a, I don't know if you have any experience with drummers. Mm-hmm. Okay, but we have as a master drummer. Oh, great. And you know, they just sort of have this ability to, I would call maybe an intuitive understanding of rhythm, right? Yeah. And they're able to, they're sort of able to use that, they kind of use all of their, one of their arms and limbs, you know. Do you have anything? Yeah.
Indre Viskontas [00:48:45] Yeah, I do. So I'm fascinated by drummers, so much so that I did this in-depth interview with Jack Van Geem, who was the principal percussionist of the San Francisco Symphony for a number of years. And I asked him, like, how do you process rhythm? Like, what's happening in your brain? And he had this fascinating story about how he has this beat at the back, and he literally did at the back of his head, and it just... Keeps the beat. And even when he, you know, his other limbs are off, he knows what the beat is because of this beat that's happening at the back of his head. So he literally disembodies his own sort of movements from this sense of pulse that is strictly on time at the the back his head
Speaker 1 [00:49:36] Can you repeat that, but don't mention his name, because it won't be easy if we don't use it again. Okay. In general.
Indre Viskontas [00:49:45] Sure, sure. So there's this one drummer that I spoke to who's had a long career as a symphonic percussionist and he told me how when he is playing he has this like consistent beat, you know sort of and he said like it's like at the back of his head like this that he knows when the rest of his body is off on the basis of its relationship to that beat. So somehow he's just developed this ability to keep a steady rate, steady beat here that he can kind of then relate everything else to. How the brain processes rhythm is really fascinating, and there are a number of different clocks in the brain. There's your circadian clock, which tells you when it's time to get up or when it is time to eat. Then there are all these other clocks that synchronize your neurons. You know, tell you the difference between one second and five seconds, and so some of these are more available to you consciously, and some of them are unconscious, like the hormonal setting of your circadian rhythm, but to me, what was really interesting is how you can train this up, because it does really feel like it's outside of consciousness. We developed a study in which we looked at percussionists in particular and how they were able to learn a Morse code tapping task. And what we learned is that yes, certainly percussionists were better able to extract the pattern, but they also, the way that they approached a Morce code tapping tap, which isn't inherently musical, it doesn't really have a pulse, is by overlaying poll. So they would take this set of seemingly random notes or taps and turn it into a pulse and find what the underlying rhythm is there. And then that's how they were able to do the task. And what I think is really interesting that most people don't realize is that musicians are actually better than lay people at keeping a very slow pulse. That's much harder than keeping a fast pulse. We're often impressed by the percussionist who can do all of these actions super super super fast and keep a very accurate beat when it's really really really fast. That is actually easier than keeping an accurate beat, when it is really really slow. And if you track with a metronome or with another tool, the ability to be steady at a slow beat, that's what musicians learn how to do with time, that is harder for people. There's another thing that I will say about beat, which is that as you get older, your intuition that time goes faster is actually true. So if you ask older individuals to estimate how long a minute is, you know, they will not be as accurate as younger individuals in the same way that you think it is. And you think, like, why is this the case? Well, one of the reasons is that, first of all, our processing speed generally just, you know, the way that our brains function does slow down a little bit with age. And so it just takes us a little more time to sort of make that loop between seeing something and turning it into the subjective experience. But there's another side of it too, which I think is the one thing that we can actually do something about. Which is that as you get older, there's less and less new. There are fewer and fewer new experiences that you engage in. And so, when your brain is a creature of habit, when it habituates to things, it begins to ignore things. And so when, you know, every day seems the same, there's no reason to tag different elements of that day so your brain just doesn't really remember it, doesn't encode it, doesn't remember it. So, it doesn't have a lot to do with music, but to me, I think it's a fascinating, you know example of how. Our experiences on what it is that we do on a day-to-day basis can have an impact on our perception of time.
Speaker 1 [00:53:51] Yeah, I guess it's so much of this is a filtering process. It's if you remembered everything, people have perfect memories. So you have to go crazy.
Speaker 3 [00:53:59] Yeah
Speaker 1 [00:54:00] Right, and they're going to think that for some reason that's some sort of good fact.
Speaker 3 [00:54:04] Yeah.
Speaker 1 [00:54:04] One way or another. I've had a couple of other things that we've been doing and we'll get into some other stuff too, but you ever ride roller coasters?
Speaker 3 [00:54:13] Yes, of course. Okay.
Speaker 1 [00:54:16] What is there a kind of a neuroscience to that? Have you ever thought about that? Have you thought about like what the impact is? G-forces, is that mean? What is it about that that gives us that kind of unbelievable thrill?
Indre Viskontas [00:54:32] Yeah, so there are a number of reasons why roller coasters are either terrible or really exciting. And in the same way that music is all about tension and release, a good roller coaster tells that kind of story, right? It builds up the tension. There's a reason why you go a lot more slowly as you're getting closer to the peak. And it's not just physics, right, it's because you're building up the attention, you're build up the expectation. So what's happening in your nervous system? While your fight or flight response is being activated. Your sympathetic nervous system is sending out a signal saying, whoa, hang on a minute, we gotta be ready. There's something scary around the corner here. And why does that then when you go down the roller coaster turn into a thrill as opposed to just like, well, that was a bad experience and I wanna get off? Well, one of the reasons is that when you have this big sympathetic nervous system activation. One of the things that it does is it gives you energy, gives you adrenaline so that you can get out of that situation, right? There's a bear, you've got to run away, you need this energy to get out there. When you have this big buildup of energy and there's no bear, that's fun. So in the case of the roller coaster, you know, you get to that anticipatory phase and you come over. And then there's no bear. Instead of a bear, there's this really fun sensation of the release of all of that tension, but also this riding into this actually pleasurable experience for a lot of people. So for some people, they don't like the experience of their stomach going into the air or whatever. But after a while, I think for other people, that is actually pleasurable, that it becomes kind of a pleasurable physical sensation. You know, there are reasons why we like spinning, you know also too, and especially some individuals who have different brains, often spinning is a way that, you know, they can kind of help regulate their own emotions and like find themselves again, ironically. And so, yeah, I think there is this sense of like, you've got this exciting thing that's happening in a safe environment. The other thing that happens is after you have a big sympathetic nervous system experience, you can't stay in fight or flight forever. You would literally die, right? What your nervous system does is that the pendulum swings in the other direction. You have these two nervous systems, sympathetic nervous systems and fight or fight, parasympathetic nervous system, which is kind of like the opposite, rest and digest. And so They're often kind of at odds with one another, and when you have a big increase or activation of the sympathetic nervous system, after that you get a parasympathetic rebound. This is one of the reasons why Olympians cry when they get their medal, right? They've had this massive adrenaline buildup, and then this release. And, you know, they just have this big rebound, you know, sense and, um, and, and you know the, the, the crying is essentially one of the features of the parasympathetic nervous system. Uh, so in a rollercoaster situation, you have again, that, that parasy empathetic rebound, uh, which is the same experience that you have after an orgasm, you know, after you have, you know, the great meal, right? You know, that's, that part of that same reward. Pathway. So that's one of the reasons why I think a lot of people find roller coasters really fun.
Speaker 1 [00:58:25] That's great. That was great. In fact, you've just now touched on the next thing I was going to say. A great meal, okay? One of our stories is about Indian Pali. Ah, okay. You know the multiple dishes. Right. Some of them are complimentary, but they're
Speaker 3 [00:58:41] Right
Speaker 1 [00:58:41] Not necessarily in your mouth, but then in your cover, and then we sort of had a whole sequence where a kind of a top famous chef of London served a bunch of people, a Tali, but some people were, there was a chemist, there were people who specifically could talk about the science of labor.
Indre Viskontas [00:59:01] Oh, interesting. Uh-huh.
Speaker 1 [00:59:04] How we respond to that, right? Do you have anything to say about sort of that kind of labor response?
Indre Viskontas [00:59:13] And so most people know that flavor isn't just taste buds on your tongue, right? That aroma, what you smell, is a big component of how you experience food. And something that smells bad but tastes good is not necessarily going to be great. But people don't realize that all of the other senses also can have an influence on what it is that you experience when you eat something. So there's some great studies by Charles Spence out of the UK where they would uh, feed you, like, raw oysters, uh, but then play sounds of like, you know, from a chicken farm or somewhere where, like you don't expect there to be the sea versus, like sea sounds. And people rated the oysters as being more fresh, more flavorful, better tasting when they were listening to the sounds of the sea than when they're listening to the sound of a chicken clucking.
Speaker 1 [01:00:09] We need to be self-taught by the way.
Indre Viskontas [01:00:10] Oh, you did? Okay, great. Yeah, and then there's the other one, too, where you play people's sounds of crunching chips, and they rate the chips as being less stale. So there's a whole sound relationship. There's also studies of people tasting wine and listening to music, and using the adjectives that describe the music to describe the wine. So you tasting a Zinfandel and they'll use words like zingy. You play classical music and they will use words elegant. Which in some ways are pretty different descriptors of what the wine tastes like. So sound effects, you know, what it is that we taste. But there's another component too that I think is particularly relevant to the Tali situation, which is that we quickly satiate to a particular taste. You can think about why this might be from an evolutionary perspective. We want to have a variety of foods that we eat so that we get all the vitamins and minerals and nutrients that we need. So once we eat too much of the same flavored thing, we get satiated and our brain is no longer as rewarding. So the lovely thing about Itali, of course, is that you have not only a variety of flavors but a variety a very different flavors and different textures. So you can override the satiety mechanism and continue to feel rewarded as you're tasting these new flavors. Another example of this is that oftentimes the first bite of a meal is the best, right? Because that's the one that really is kind of the most novel. And then the more you eat, the sort of diminishing returns you get from that particular flavor. So, again, in a TOLI, where you have... These different, very vastly different flavors, you can continue to reset that kind of clock on that flavor and re-experience that first bite again on the eighth bite because you've had seven very different bites in between.
Speaker 1 [01:02:19] Great. Okay. That was great. That's good. Okay, what about visual stimulation?
Speaker 4 [01:02:25] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 [01:02:26] One of our stories is about the generative art who was an artist by the name of Rafik Anadol. Okay. Well, he is kind of the main guy these days. Okay. And he creates these giant screens made out of...
Speaker 5 [01:02:45] Okay.
Speaker 1 [01:02:45] To modern art in New York. He has created, he has all of the, every piece in the 137,000 pieces of art have been sent into his algorithm.
Speaker 4 [01:02:57] Okay.
Speaker 1 [01:02:59] And it's this sort of constant remorhing of all of the art.
Indre Viskontas [01:03:05] Huh!
Speaker 1 [01:03:05] And it's just another giant...
Indre Viskontas [01:03:08] Wow.
Speaker 1 [01:03:09] You sit there and we have filmed this and filmed with him and you sit there, people are looking at this completely different.
Speaker 4 [01:03:17] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 [01:03:18] I mean, you know, and some people have sat there for like an hour. Wow. It was constantly changing. Yeah. It was never the same. Yeah. Do you have any idea what's going on in the brain with all of that?
Indre Viskontas [01:03:30] Sir? So there's this hypothesis about what we find esthetically pleasing when we look at a visual stimulus, whether it's art or a landscape or what have you. And the idea is that the more you can see and the more kind of meaning you can extract out of what you're seeing, the more mu-opioid receptors are targeted by the information. What are mu-apoid receptors? So these are little gates on your cells. That respond to endogenous opioids. Opioids are pleasurable. This is why we have an opioid crisis, right? So it looks like if you track the density of these receptors starting at the early visual regions, like just where your brain is processing the difference between an edge or not an edge, you know, something that's black or that's white, like, just kind of these superficial features. We see fewer of these receptors in those regions. But the more further down the visual stream we get, and so that information kind of goes down in these streams where, like sort of towards the end of these streams, you're gonna have your object recognition areas. So these parts of the brain are where your brain is able to say, aha, that's a chair, not a table. And not only that, but that's the chair that was in my grandmother's living room when I was five. So it's tied to your memory, and it's tied to, you know, your ability to kind of recognize these objects, and that's where there are a lot more of these mu-opioid receptors. So when you just think about, like, the pleasure that we get out of seeing something meaningful, it might be tied to this system. Now, this is still a little bit speculative. But the idea that we crave information, that we continue to look when there's more to see, and that we can... Learn to see more in terms of how we look, very much is true. So, for example, if you just look superficially at a photograph, you might get all the information that you need from it. But then if you're told that photograph was taken just after some event happened, You know, like that, you know, it's like a picture of a kangaroo in a forest. And you learn actually that forest just burned down and that kangaroo is the last kangaroo. All of a sudden, you're like, oh, let me look more into the picture and let me see all these other layers. And so you see more and more meaning from it. And so, you continue to be engaged in it and that is also rewarding. So, but there's another sort of set of information that we know about what makes a vista beautiful. So, this is one of the reasons why we love. Views, why we pay more for real estate with a view. And what makes a good view? Well, you're usually high above, you can see a lot of things and there are subtle changes in the, whether it's the sun going up or down or the city lights going up and down or the ocean waves coming in or out. If there's some kind of change, we remain interested. When it's static. Over time, your brain says, I've got all the information I need from this. It's no longer rewarding to continue looking. Art that has this slight change, but also all of these other things to look at can be esthetically pleasing. There's also the issue of fractals. So fractals are a kind of way of describing elements in nature in particular, where the patterns are repeating across all the different kinds of levels. So think about in a tree, you have. Leaves, the leaves have their own patterns, but then the leaves are on the branches, and then the branches have their patterns, all these layers. And it turns out that when there are these kinds of fractal patterns, we also find that more esthetically pleasing. The reward systems in our brain are more engaged. So what makes, you know, a visual piece of art something that captures our attention? Well, there are many things to look at, there's multiple meanings. If those meanings somehow are personally meaningful to you, so you recognize a chair from your grandmother's living room or the Mona Lisa, it's really hard to know what emotion she's feeling. These are the kinds of things that keep us looking and the more we look and the more meaning we find, the more rewarding we find it to be.
Speaker 1 [01:08:15] Harriet, part of, I think you kind of almost touched it, it's sort of talking about the context of what these things are.
Speaker 4 [01:08:21] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
Speaker 1 [01:08:22] across cultures, so let's talk a little bit about that. Why would one particular sound, if you're playing Bach, to a tribe in Brazil?
Speaker 4 [01:08:32] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 [01:08:33] Are they going to have the same kind of response that we as Westerners are going to have? I mean, what's happening cross-culturally? Or culturally defined, I guess, is sort of what I was going to say. In terms of music.
Indre Viskontas [01:08:45] In terms of music? Okay. You know, this question of whether there are universals in music that go across cultures has been hard to answer because every time you think you found a universal like, for example, the octave, right, that, you know, every eight notes, the notes are somehow related or sound the same to you, somebody goes out into, you know, the depths of a forest in Brazil and finds a group of people for whom this is not the same, where they don't tag. You know, octaves as the same, but for the most part, you know there are these kinds of universes that we see across musical genres. I would say the one universal that we across every genre except the one genre that actively avoids it is repetition. So repetition is like the one, universal feature of music and I think that comes back to the fact that when we repeat a sound... That is a signal to the brain that there's something more than just a superficial sound there. There's more information, there's a reason behind the repetition, and there's a pattern to be found. And our brains really are very, we like finding patterns, especially non-obvious patterns, and you can think about why that might be the case. Well, if you think about what are our brains trying to do, like why do we have these big Well, one of the things they're trying to do is predict the future. They're trying to be able to simulate, you know, what a potential future might be so that we can adjust our behavior accordingly and survive. This is why memory is not very accurate. It's not about the past. It's about taking elements of whatever happened and being able to stimulate a potential feature. And so we can, you now, take these elements. Repetition in music signals where the patterns are, and it can be repetition in the course of three notes in a bar, or it can across an entire piece, like in the sonata form, where you come back to the theme and variations. So that's the kind of universal that we see across many different musical genres. Other aspects, really, again, I think that so much of music now is insulin. Cross-influenced, across cultures. It's very hard to find kind of music that, or people who haven't listened to Western music or even now, you know, Indian music. You know, it's so ubiquitous that I think it's becoming harder and harder to distinguish between, you now, a music of a particular culture.
Speaker 1 [01:11:20] Yeah, you know, it's also funny when we were talking about musicians and musicians generally, you know it seems as if they almost, once when they're really together when something's really happening, it's almost as if if they are communicating. They're improvising, but yet at the same time they always say like they're jazz musicians and they go off in a thousand different directions, but they end up the same note. Right. Yeah. So, what's going on in that? Is there some way of sort of saying what's, what going on the band in terms of neuroscience?
Indre Viskontas [01:12:02] Yeah, I did this one experiment with a string quartet that I worked closely with where we recorded pieces under different conditions, the same piece and we would have these different conditions where we would just play it sort of normally the way we would in performance or we would have no eye contact so we would say, you know, make sure that you don't look anyone else in the eye and that we would play it We had one in which none of us could see each other so we were all kind of blocked off from each other We had one in which we called it extreme eye contact, so we would actually like look deep into each other's eyes. And it was really interesting to see how these little tiny manipulations had a really big impact, not only on how we felt we were in sync, how other people rated the performance of being more or less in sync and also sort of what were the components that we were using in order to feel like we were at sync.
Speaker 4 [01:12:59] So what's your conclusion?
Indre Viskontas [01:13:01] So, the conclusion is that there are pros and cons to each of these different methods. When we couldn't see each other at all, we had to listen more, but that also made us a little bit more hesitant. So, in the places where we really needed to extend the phrase, we would do that very well, but then when it was time to start up a phrase again, it was harder to sort of start in sync. In the moments in which we had extreme eye contact, we actually felt very awkward, and I don't think if you listened to the piece without actually seeing the video, you would have labeled it as more in sync, but people who were watching it thought we were more in synch. Those cues made people who are watching the video of it say, oh yeah, those people, they're so in sync.
Speaker 1 [01:13:48] So what do you think is going on in the graph?
Indre Viskontas [01:13:51] So, I mean, I think it depends on the jazz band, but I think that ultimately what's beautiful about jazz is that everybody has to keep the riff in their minds, even when they're not the one soloing, even when the person who's soloing is going off on a total tangent. And I think, that that's not only the key to how a great jazz group is able to stay in play, because they're literally, they know where you are in the four bar or eight bar phrase. Um, but also it's what allows the audience to enjoy the piece. So one of the tricks I learned when I was learning to enjoy jazz was to have the riff playing in, in sort of my mind's ear so that I could tell what the soloist was doing and how impressive that was as opposed to just kind of listening superficially. And I think that's what a lot of great jazz listeners are doing. But I think that ultimately when it comes to improvisation, there's another. We can talk about the neuroscience of that, which my colleague Charles Lim has done a lot of this work looking at the brains of jazz improvisers in particular in the scanner. They find a couple of things that are interesting. One is that no two improvisations look the same. So it's like, you know, if you're improvising to one particular emotion... That's going to actually show a different brain activation than if you're improvising to a different emotion. So it's not like there's one improvisation network in the brain. But if you compare what's happening in the brain of a person who's improvising with what's happening when they're playing, you know, that same piece that they've memorized, what we see is a deactivation of frontal lobe function. So your prefrontal cortex is really what we call like your part of your executive control network. It's what keeps you on time, It keeps you strategized. Keeps you socially inhibited enough that you don't do things that are socially inappropriate. It's your CEO in your brain and it turns out that you need to turn that puppy off in order to improvise and you need let the default mode network or these parts of the brain that are more involved in sensation and body awareness and your memories take the lead in terms of what your brain is doing.
Speaker 1 [01:16:09] I don't think jazz musicians understand that.
Indre Viskontas [01:16:11] You know, I think they understand it intuitively. I think, they know when they're in the zone. I mean, this is like, you know, in the movie Soul, the Pixar movie Soul totally got it right when they show that you literally go into a whole other sphere when you're, you know, jazzing, when you are improvising. You're going into a full other brain network and you're essentially, you know, letting the default mode network take the reign. And when we look at, so there are a couple things I'll say about this, one is that when we look at what happens when classically trained musicians who are not used to improvising, when they try to improvise, they try and use their prefrontal cortex to do it. They try to like, you know, like muscle their way into the improvisation. Doesn't sound as good, right? And over time, what they learn to do is let go of that, you now, control, that sense of control and just trust that they'll be able to do. But that isn't to say that jazz musicians... Don't train. They train a lot. They trained to do that, right? They learn the risks. They learn all of these other things. They might not do it in a classroom, but they do it by listening and by playing, by experimenting. And when we look at the brains of people who are expert improvisers, what we ultimately see is more connectivity between the default mode network and the executive control network. So that they can kind of toggle between those two brain states voluntarily. So for a lot of us, when we try to turn off the prefrontal cortex in our brain, it can be hard, we can get fixated on something, it can hard to turn it off. And when we're just letting our mind wander and the default mode network is in control, it can to be hard to return focus back onto the task. But what you're doing when you're a jazz improviser If you're learning how to... Toggle between those states voluntarily, and in fact we see greater connectivity between those networks in expert jazz improvisers.
Speaker 1 [01:18:15] Okay, I have one other sort of general broad question, and then we can open it up a little bit more. Music is therapy. Okay, it's an old, it was going on forever. Right, it is going on, I don't know how long, since the 40s at least. You know, treating, you know, GBSD coming out of the war and stuff like that. But what's going on? I mean, if you could speak relatively broadly, relatively briefly, about sort of what's going on in the brain when we're talking about, you know, treating anxiety or treating a variety of different other things.
Indre Viskontas [01:18:52] So there's a big difference between music therapy, which is the kind of therapy that you do with a board-certified music therapist, often one-on-one, for a specific condition, like PTSD or anxiety, and music-based interventions, where maybe you listen to music with your loved one who has Alzheimer's disease, and both of you get to communicate better. And it's important to make that decision because music therapy as a field has a lot of an evidence-based model on which they use in order to do their work, whereas music-based interventions, it's a bit more of a Wild West. So there are some MBI's that are better studied and there are somewhere, you know, you just bring in a string quartet into a hospital and have them play in the waiting room. Music therapy we know a fair amount about, though there's still always room to learn in specific conditions. And we can talk about those. So how is music therapy used, for example, to help people with PTSD? There are a number of different ways in which it can be used. How is it used to help people relax before surgery? We know that there are ways that you can strategically use music to actually decrease the amount of sedative you need when you go under anesthesia. So again, here we have a Swiss Army knife model, where it's a precision tool for a particular
Speaker 1 [01:20:18] Okay, so what's going on?
Indre Viskontas [01:20:21] So music has been used therapeutically, probably, since the inception of music, right? Since the beginning of time. Music therapy is a field, it's a little bit newer, came out in the 40s and 50s, and that is more a kind of evidence-based approach to really figure out exactly how you can use music strategically. What, you know, generally, like how is music therapeutic and why is it therapeutic? Well, for one thing, it really affects us emotionally. And so in that way, it can help us not only understand our own emotions, and in fact, this is what music therapists often use it for, is to help you figure out what it is that you're feeling. Because often we're very good at like either repressing our feelings or misinterpreting them and not really understanding what they are. Music can help get those feelings out. And it can also help us regulate those feelings, because here's the deal. You can turn off the music, right? At any time, you can stop. So imagine you are going through a really tough situation and you're in the midst of being broken up with. And that's an awful situation. You've got all kinds of emotions that you're feeling. Maybe you're crying. Later on, you cant process all the emotions, all the implications of this big life event in the moment. Later on, maybe you use music to sort of help you sort through some of those little aspects of the emotion. But if it gets too much, you can turn it off and go do something else. You're not in the process of being broken up with. And yet, you still simulate aspects of that experience and help figure out, huh, what is it that I'm really feeling? What do I need to work through? So, I think one of the primary uses of music outside of music therapy as a therapeutic tool. Is really helping us understand our own emotions in a safe space, because we can always get out of the situation if it becomes too intense, and also how we can regulate those emotions, because after all, musicians are like role models for our emotional lives. They're telling us how they got through their breakup. They're tell us how the seduced their partner, and so we can kind of latch onto that and learn something from it, and figure out, you know, hey, yeah. You know that person got through their breakup by feeling like a survivor and like just you know having all of the strength and and we can learn from that and then you know that kind of gives us a a playground that we can use to become kind of like our own therapist.
Speaker 1 [01:22:53] So it's really all about human behavior, ultimately.
Indre Viskontas [01:22:56] I mean everything is about human behavior.
Speaker 1 [01:22:58] It's a shame.
Indre Viskontas [01:22:59] Yeah, yeah
Speaker 5 [01:23:02] First of all, yeah, I got one three-part question. First one is very simple. OK. Speaking of the neuroscientist. OK. Speaking to Andy. Yeah. What is creativity? Very creativity.
Indre Viskontas [01:23:21] What is creativity? Well, in order to study it, you need to define it. And what we've learned is just like the question, what is memory, is that creativity is a number of different things. We can talk about the creative person. So we can talk about the personality traits of highly creative people. We can talked about the created product, how it is that society values something that's creative and that it has its own interesting psychological or we can talk about the creative process. And that's really where the neuroscience comes in. Because what you can do is break down the process in a number of different ways. Just like you can break down memory into your memory for riding a bike, that kind of skill learning, and memory for your 15th birthday party, which is more of an episodic memory. So in creativity, we can break it down into stages. We can talk about... You know, the preparation stage, we can talk about the incubation stage, you know, what's happening when you're in the shower and you're not thinking about the problem. And then illumination, aha, we get that insight, even though we weren't thinking about it. And then finally, verification, which is when the editing work, which is actually what a lot of people don't associate with creativity, but any, you know professional creative will tell you it's probably the most important part. And then we can talk about different ways in which you're thinking creatively. So we can talking about divergent thinking, so just generating a lot of different ideas. We can talk that associative creativity, finding these remote associations that other people can't see. We can talking insight or the aha problem. How do you get this creative solution to a particular problem? Now all of these different processes, all of this different stages. All of these different types of creative thinking are going to have different creative neural underpinnings, right? Different brain states that are involved. And we're really starting to learn now the relationship between these major brain networks. So like the executive control network, the salience network, where you assign meaning to what it is that you're experiencing, and the default mode network, which is what the network you're using when you're daydreaming or presumably just doing nothing. It turns out the executive control network is really important in the preparation stage and in the verification phase, but you need it to go away during incubation. And that's why when you're stuck on a problem and you can only come up with the same solution, taking a walk or a shower or doing something else is actually a great strategy for why you might come up with a more creative solution. Because when you go for a walk, you let the default mode network run the show. And that allows these other ideas that maybe were suppressed by your executive control network to pop up into consciousness. And so that's, you know, how you get that illumination, that insight. So, what is creativity? Creativity... Is a series of processes, a series of ways of thinking, of ways of being. And the beautiful thing is that now we have lots of neuroscience tools, and we can look at each one of these different facets of creativity and learn something interesting.
Speaker 5 [01:26:37] Okay, that being the case, as a neuroscientist and as a musician, do you find there's a qualitative difference in your thinking processes when you're doing one versus the other?
Indre Viskontas [01:26:52] So once you know the neuroscience behind these different stages and forms of creativity, you can learn to use them strategically. And in fact, we're even getting to a place where using different stimulation techniques, you can have a little bit of a extra help from technology perhaps in particular brain states. As a creative, most creatives, especially those who work professionally, they start to know what are the conditions under which they can do what aspect of their work, right? So there are certain conditions that they need when they're writing or generating ideas or thinking of new things versus when they are revising what it is that they've already done or evaluating whether what they've done is really good. And the brain states behind those conditions are different too. It does feel very different and I think one of the major leaps that I made in my own professional creative work is understanding what works for me and most importantly, not latching on to the first reasonable idea that comes to mind. Because now I know that it's not that you're just going to get this one idea that's always going to be the best one, but the more ideas you have, the more likely it is that you are going to come up with an even more creative idea. So being able to stay in that kind of nebulous, like I'm not gonna latch on to any particular decision or particular idea too soon, allows for more of that incubation to happen, allows for these unconscious or less conscious parts of your brain to get involved and come up with an idea that really no one else would have thought of. Often the first ideas that we think of are the obvious ones. And so one strategy is to do a brain dump. So If you're like stuck on these first ideas, just dump out all the ones that just are obvious and then let yourself sort of percolate. And so that's one of the things that I do now in my creative work, both, you know, what I'm writing or when I'm preparing a concert program or something like that, I sort of allow for these different stages and room for incubation. I build that into the schedule. But as a stage director where my job is to really extract the most creative performances both from my design team and from my singers. I also have these strategies in which I lay out not only the schedule, but how I'm touching in with people and how I am running the rehearsal to give people the permission to stay in the dirty phase of creativity, the nebulous, the mistake making, the risk taking. Because so many environments, even though they might outwardly say that they want creative workers or they want people to be creative. Create conditions in which those workers are punished for stepping outside the box, right? It's like they have a bad idea and all of a sudden they're labeled as the person with the bad idea. Well, it turns out that most creative ideas fail. Most creative ideas are bad ideas. So you need to generate a lot of them to get to the good one. And labeling people as one way or another is really, really kills not only their motivation to be creative, which is a big important factor. But also puts them in a state of like what I call the hopes and fears, which is another creativity killer. So when you have a, when you hope your idea is going to be the one, or you have hope or fear, you know, that you might fail. In both cases, the kind of brain networks that are involved are not the ones that are most conducive to generating creative ideas. So those have come to the strategies I use. One other great strategy is perspective taking, so. We know that when we are tied with our own hopes and fears to our own ideas, we tend to fixate on one or two solutions and they might not be the right ones. But we can put ourselves, this is the superpower of the human brain. We can put ourself in somebody else's shoes. We can imagine what it might be like to solve the problem as Batman or as a penguin. And what would the penguin do in this situation? And all of a sudden, our own hope and fears go away and we get many more creative ideas. Because we can sort of engage in this kind of perspective taking.
Speaker 5 [01:31:10] And last thing, I just want your take, you know, we're doing a little bit on arts education.
Speaker 4 [01:31:15] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 5 [01:31:15] And teaching creativity, learning creativity in the school program and I do a lot of work aside from this in supporting arts education and the statistics that year are vastly, I mean I've just filmed a school where 30 percent of the kids in the normal high school population are graduating 100% in the music program.
Indre Viskontas [01:31:37] Right, yeah.
Speaker 5 [01:31:38] Yeah, so I guess just broadly speaking. We could go down the rabbit hole briefly and broadly I'd love your take as you touched on the power of playing music
Speaker 4 [01:31:49] Mm-hmm.
Speaker 5 [01:31:50] What that does in terms of the cognitive development of a child in learning to be creative, whether they're going to be a musician or artist, or whether they are going to become a doctor or a lawyer, and why it matters for both.
Indre Viskontas [01:32:05] So I actually wrote a white paper called Music for Every Child, and the reason I wrote this paper is that I wanted to give policymakers, teachers, educators, parents, the information they need to convince the people in leadership why arts education and music in particular should be a part of every child's curriculum. And most people think, okay, they're going to read this white paper and they're going to learn all about how musical training, especially, you know, learning to play the or the piano. Is going to increase math skills, is going to give kids higher IQ, et cetera, et cetera, etc. To be honest, the data on whether that's really effective is really murky, and it's confounded by socioeconomic status and all of these other factors. And to me that's actually the least important reason for why music should be in every child's education. More importantly is that children who or schools that have music programs have better attendance. You know what, if the kid is in school, it's easier to teach them math than if they don't show up. And music programs are intrinsically motivating to kids. They wanna show up, the good ones at least, and they will come to school and they'll stick around for math. So that's one big argument. But there's a whole other set of skills that musical training helps kids develop that other kinds of courses might not. Fit in as easily. And that is executive functioning skills. So these are the kinds of skills that rely and develop these executive control networks that are important for setting goals, keeping motivated, strategizing, making good decisions, social and emotional regulation, etc. And It turns out that musical training really trains these networks up in the brain. And even for kids who start out with some deficits in executive control. So think about kids who might have attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder or other executive functioning skills. Musical training can help bring them back into the fold, can help improve these skills for them and strengthen up these brain networks. And these are the skills that these kids need in order to be successful in any field. It doesn't matter what you choose to do, you need to be able to manage your time, you need to able to predict the future and strategize and stay motivated, etc. So that I think is in some ways a much better reason for why kids should have music programs and it will make them better on the math test, which by the way it does that too.
Speaker 5 [01:34:45] Can you cover us with one sentence to say, and then similarly to all arts programs? Oh, sure. Not just me. Yeah. Not just you. Okay.
Indre Viskontas [01:34:53] Okay, okay, okay. I mean, I don't know that it's the same for all arts programs, but yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, yes. I think any arts program is, you know, going to be strategically designed to engage the kids in a way that is different and novel. It's going to have, you know, some of the same principles of project design that will help kids develop project management skills. But most importantly, it's going bring the kids into schools because it's going to be about self-expression. And it's going to be about having fun with their peers. And that is a huge motivator for improving attendance.
