I want to tell you about how music
changes the brain and also a personal
story about how it changed my brain and
so I’m going to start with that and I
want to tell you about when I was an
adolescent and like many adolescents I
was listening to the music that all of
my friends were listening to which was
sort of you know mediocre rock-and-roll
music and one day somehow I came into
the possession of a record album this is
what a vinyl record looks like for those
of you who aren’t familiar with it and
this is music by béla bartók the
Hungarian composer who died in 1945 I
had never heard of Bela Bartok I had no
idea what it was
I really just randomly sort of put it on
just to see what it sounded like and
this is what I heard
so I still get chills when I hear this
and back then when I was like 13 I
experienced this epiphany I had I’d
never heard anything like this I had
chills down my spine I had goose bumps I
just felt this unbelievable sensation
that I I really couldn’t explain and so
I it really changed me in the sense that
I it gave me a focus about something
that I really needed to pursue and so I
decided right then that I would try to
understand more about music I would try
to learn about music I would try to
learn to play music and that I would
also perhaps try to apply science to
music because I was already quite
interested in science I was already
training as a scientist and so I tried
to put these things together now the
experience that I had of course is one
that probably many of you have had and
indeed it is something very common in
our species so human beings have been
enjoying music for extremely long time
so this flute for example that you see
here dates from the Upper Paleolithic
period that’s about 35 to 40 thousand
years ago and this particular specimen
was found in a cave in the Danube Valley
and what is now part of Germany what’s
remarkable is that at that time this
part of Europe was under glaciers so you
know the living was not easy at that
point for these people who were making
these remarkable musical instruments so
they must have felt a tremendous power
of music to devote energy and resources
and time to the creation of musical
instruments it must have been extremely
important in some sense for their
survival that they would even carry out
these activities when survival was so
difficult otherwise so how is it what
are the what are the brain systems that
allow us to be able to create music to
perform on musical instruments to
perceive musical patterns
and to experience the pleasure from them
well we know a fair bit about this now
over the last few years in many
laboratories around the world and in
mine as well we have been trying to
dissect some of these neural pathways
and this diagram tells you a little bit
about some of the important circuits
that are involved in connecting
different parts of the brain
particularly those that involve
perception of sound and the motor system
for production of sound and kind of a
close-up look of it is here so the
colored areas represent the portions of
the brain that are devoted to the
perception of sounds this is known as
the auditory cortex and then you have
connections going from there to other
regions particularly those that involve
control of the motor system so you have
a kind of a loop between the auditory
and the motor systems that allows us
both to perceive and to produce music
and a point that I want to make is that
when you become trained in music you
basically fine-tune these circuits to a
remarkable degree in this video that I’m
going to show you in a second which is
courtesy of my colleague marcelo
wonderly what you will see is the motion
trajectory of the bow of a violin as the
violinist is playing so there’s a sensor
at the tip of the bow and as the
violinist is playing you’ll see the
patterns that it creates and I want you
to pay attention to the precision with
which these patterns are shown so that
you’ll see that the movements completely
overlap one another in quite a beautiful
see those loops you see how they’re
perfectly superimposed on one another
as we’re playing on two Springs your
sometimes I think we should just forget
about the lecture and listen to the rest
of the Partida and we would be very
happy
so what allows this level of precision
how is it that you can train your brain
to be this accurate well one thing that
is interesting is that musical training
can actually change your brain structure
and this was actually predicted by
Santiago Ramon y Cajal who won the Nobel
Prize for medicine and physiology 1906
and in 1904 he actually predicted this
idea that the brain might be physically
changed by training so he specifically
mentioned the idea of musical training
he said the ability of a Penant of a
pianist requires many years of mental
and physical practice and to understand
this phenomenon fully we have to admit
the formation of new pathways and
progressive growth of nerve terminals so
he had this idea that the anatomy of the
brain could actually be changed by
training and this concept was just a
hypothesis at the time he didn’t have
any direct evidence for it but in our
laboratory and others we’ve been able to
demonstrate that indeed there are some
of these anatomical changes so what you
see here are the two halves of the brain
the two hemispheres left and right and
the colored areas represent areas where
the thickness of the cortex is actually
greater in people who’ve received
musical training compared to a control
group who does not have musical training
and the areas that distinguish these
groups are not surprisingly the auditory
areas that I am showed you earlier as
well as the motor cortex and importantly
areas of the frontal cortex which are
involved in many types of higher order
cognitive functions including executive
functions like planning or anticipation
or being able to create to pay attention
to new new events that are coming up one
important detail about this sort of
result is
that it is linked to the age at which
you start training so we see in this
image the blue region is a an area of
the frontal cortex but it’s degree of
change is linked to the age at which the
person began to train with music so the
earlier you start the more change you
have and this is quite important because
it speaks to the plasticity of the brain
which is greater in earlier ages than in
later ages and you may recall I said I
was about 13 when I had that experience
of music and so I’m one of those blue
dots over there so my my frontal cortex
isn’t quite as developed which is really
why I’m here giving you a lecture about
science and not you know playing an
instrument which is perhaps what I would
do had I started early enough now all of
this that I’ve been telling you about is
with respect to the ability to perceive
and to produce music but really what I
would like to tell you about is about
how it is that we experience pleasure
from music and to do that we have to go
to a very different system of the brain
so everything I’ve been talking about up
until now is in the cortex which is the
outer part of the brain now we have to
go into the deep structures and there’s
one particular structural structure
known as the striatum which is
especially important in the
representation of pleasurable
experiences and this has been discovered
many many years ago so that for example
if you take a lab rat and you give it
food and you measure activity in its
brain you will see that in this area
known as a stratum the dopamine neurons
will be more active when the animals
receiving food so this is basically a
kind of a chemical signal within the
nervous system saying well this is
really good this what you’re getting now
is really important you should try to
get more of it if you can and it’s not
just in lab rats what we can see this in
healthy human participants as well so if
you put people in a brain scan machine
and you give them monetary rewards so
you play some kind of a gambling game
for instance or you give them food
rewards or you expose them to erotic
images you will see a very similar
response in
this deep structure known as the
striatum that’s what this slide
illustrates so there’s a common activity
in this what we call the reward system
to the stimuli which are essentially
essential for survival so you need food
opposites survive you need sex for the
species to survive for reproduction and
monetary rewards you need them only
insofar as the money is fungible right
so you can exchange it for some
something of value and so we wondered
could it be that music would engage the
same biological system even though it is
not a substance you also get these
responses to drugs by the way but music
is not a chemical substance it’s not
strictly speaking necessary for survival
and indeed we’ve been able to
demonstrate that in a series of
experiments you very consistently show
that the stratum is active – highly
pleasurable music we’ve seen this with
blood flow when we measure blood flow in
the brain we see it with dopamine
receptors so when we measure dopamine
uptake while people are experiencing
pleasurable music we see an increase in
the stratum and we can also see it with
functional magnetic resonance imaging
which measures blood oxygen and there
again we see in and this last study is
sort of interesting because what we were
doing there was looking at how much
value people assigned to music so in
this experiment people were exposed to
pieces of music that they hadn’t heard
before and they were asked to decide
whether they wanted to buy it or not
and if they did they had to put a
certain amount of money down so it’s
kind of like iTunes where you hear a
little extra bit of music and then you
decide you want to buy it and you can
pay different amounts so the way the
experiment proceeds is like this you
well that’s okay maybe we’ll give it
$0.99 all right now the next sample
comes in now I don’t really care for
that I think I’ll give it a zero go to
the next one this is kind of groovy
maybe I’ll give it a dollar twenty nine
so in the experiment what we do is we
use the amount of money as an estimate
of the value for that individual to that
particular piece of music and then we
look in the brain what’s happening with
our functional imaging device and what
we see is not only that the reward
system is active in other words there is
more of a response in this region we
call the stratum the more money you’re
willing to give but also and very
importantly the reward system increases
it’s communication with the auditory
cortex the more value that is assigned
in other words those regions that I
talked about earlier in that have to do
with perception are more strongly
coupled with the regions that have to do
with emotion and reward the more you
like something the more you’d like the
music and so this basically links these
two systems of the brain on the left
side we have these cortical systems
which are actually the most
phylogenetically advanced parts of our
brain these are the parts of our brain
that distinguish us from other species
including other primates to a greater
degree than any other region and all of
these cortical areas have to do with
perceiving sounds and being able to plan
for the future
which means that you as you hear music
unfolding you’re able not only to
perceive the sounds but you also have an
expectation about what the next sound is
and the musician or the composer will
sort of play with those expectations so
that they are fulfilled to a greater or
lesser extent that’s all so we’re very
cognitive but on the other hand we have
this interaction with what is one of the
most phylogenetically
parts of our brain which is the these
deep structures in the reward system
which we share with many other animals
so music represents a kind of a fusion
if you will of these two systems the
most sort of advanced cognitive system
with the most powerful emotion and
reward systems and this is basically the
idea that I want to leave you with is
that music has a great power to engage
us to make us feel emotion and to change
our brains and the way we’re thinking of
it is that it derives this power
precisely because it combines these two
very very important systems in our brain
and that I think is the message that I
want to leave you with and also I think
the idea that by combining science and
art we can actually gain a deeper
understanding in the two domains that
these are not two separate domains that
really should be fused and I think if we
want to think about change we want to
think about how can we bring science and
art together thank you very much but is that okay