0:49

Welcome to the music, ghost stories podcast, where we explore the profound connections between music and its synchronicity in our lives. I'm your host, Donny Ingram. And today, we have a very fascinating guest. Before we get into it. I want to share something from a video I saw recently. I listened to this audio carefully. Did you hear a piano? Do you hear anything else? I'll play it again. Now in the episode description. I'll add some texts. Take a look at it. And while you're reading it. Reroll that clip. I found this to be so interesting because this demonstrates how harmonics sort of play their role in sound, but also highlights the significance of visual cues. In our auditory processing. The brain is a fascinating thing. Ever wondered how music shapes our minds and souls. Join me on today's episode. As we dive into a fascinating conversation with Alan Harvey, a renowned neuroscientist with a passion for music. Discover the incredible journey of how music influences our brains and emotions. Let's dive right in.

Donny: 2:31

Alan Harvey, welcome to the music ghost stories podcast.

Alan: 2:34

Thank you.

Donny: 2:35

you want to tell the listeners who you are and just give an introductory, about you.

Alan: 2:39

well, I was born in London in the UK. I did my undergraduate degree in Cambridge and then did a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra, here in Australia. some postdocs in the United States and then came back to the UK. To Australia, and I've actually been now at the university here in Perth, University of Western Australia, 40 years this month. my training was in physiology, neurophysiology, which was a fantastic grounding, I think, in, in neuroscience. And then I, did a lot of work on transplantation, trying to put new cells into the brain to connect up with the nervous system. And then moved to. Two decades worth of gene therapy, looking at trying to save nerve cells from dying after they're injured. throughout that whole sort of life, I've been in muso. So I was in choirs at school. I played in a folk rock band at university, which by the way, we made an album that is still available on Amazon. and, uh, played in some folk groups. I was in the Seattle Symphony Choir when I was in Seattle. Played with a dear friend in Charleston for a couple of years. I've been in a cover rock band playing keyboards here in Perth and I'm now singing with the symphony choir. and I'm in the process of trying to make an album. that's a project for this year. so yeah, I've got two sons and a wife and, I live in a nice house and Perth is probably the greatest city in the world. I'm in my seventies now and, still, still active and music is still, an important part of my life and getting a message out about the power of music for good. is really, my life's work from now on.

Donny: 4:18

music for the power of good? Is what do you mean by that exactly?

Alan: 4:22

because when modern humans evolved, language and articulate speech, we became more and more aware of our own individuality. and the words and language allows us to mentally time travel as a colleague of mine has said, so we can think about the past, we can also project forward into a time when we know we won't exist. And that's a, For all of us, quite, that notion of there'll be a moment when everything that happened didn't happen, that notion of mortality, and individuality, one of the things I've suggested is that the sort of Musee language or proto language that we had Before finally evolved into cognitively modern humans, split into language and articulate speech, but also we kept a lot of the other elements of that and focused it down onto music. And the primary driver of music and communal music making is to drive social interaction, empathy, altruism. cooperativity to get people to work together and as I've said in a TED talk, anyone who plays music together or sings in a choir together or dances together, forgets about their 24 7 rubbish, the organism suddenly enlarges and becomes different, it becomes an interactive joy, where you're sharing this rhythmic and melodic experience with a whole bunch of others, In a way that, that you, that no one's ever found the words to explain it because the words don't actually work. one of the quotes in my book was from a wonderful songwriter who died far too young called Nick Drake. And if anyone's never listened to Nick Drake, they need to go and listen to him. And one of the lines, the heading of a chapter is, If songs were lines in a conversation, the situation would be fine. Bernstein said music names the unnameable. and Mendelssohn The composer said in a letter, if I could explain in words what I do when I'm writing music, I would stop writing music. So it's this extraordinary sort of bonding agent. But it's a bonding agent. Essentially, I believe in this first instance was driving pro social, cooperative, empathic interactions where the group's benefit sometimes actually superseded the individual's needs

Donny: 6:42

what they call the icebreaker effect.

Alan: 6:45

Yeah, now that's from the Oxford group. That's a nice word that they used. again, there's been a many different groups over the years talking about this, the pro social aspects of music making. those particular individuals were looking at a peptide called endorphin. I've been pushing a lot recently for the involvement of another peptide called oxytocin that listeners may have come across. the paper I've just written on pain and why music reduces our perception of pain. When I did a deep dive on that, I discovered actually that oxytocin and endorphin they interact. Both peripherally and in the brain itself. So, the receptors that they use in the brain actually interact with each other. And it turns out that oxytocin, interacts with the receptor for the endorphins. there's another one called dopamine. neurotransmitters or neuromodulators. I don't think any of these are really working independently. but music, I think, seems to have a capacity for, enhancing all of these things in a way that, gives you, be termed the psychophysiological outcomes of being involved in music making.

Donny: 7:54

it's funny though, because I, I'm in this, point where my son's very young And I think the relationship between him and his mom. isn't there a lot of oxytocin that, happens with that relationship

Alan: 8:04

Absolutely. So when I was at university, we had really good reproductive biologists. In fact, that, the people that taught me were the people who grew involved in the first test tube baby. So that's gone way, way back. essentially oxytocin was talked to us as being released because it helps with uterine contractions during birth. It is important for Making lactation to make milk for the babies, but it's also in all mammals. It's important in bonding, affiliative interactions. even, rats and mice have oxytocin and you can mess with the receptor in those animals and alter the way that they interact with their pups, for example. And if you mess with that oxytocin receptor later on in life in mice, for example, you can interfere with their social learning capability. So it's. It's clearly an important player in affiliative bonding, in helping to drive interaction, pre verbal communication between, in humans at least, I mean I'm not saying mice talk, but those sorts of bonding and attachment types of things. But it's still important later on. in the paper that I wrote several years ago now on if you put oxytocin into the nose in a nasal spray in some sometimes it actually makes antisocial behavior worse, which is a little bit mysterious. But overall, what happens is that it actually encourages cooperation group bonding within group interaction. If you give it to women, they find men more attractive, for example, so I don't know why there's no pharmaceutical company out there. doing that, but, but anyway, so it's, to me, it's absolutely clear that its role in attachment during early life, you could almost argue that music in humans has hijacked that system as a way of, helping to drive the, as I've talked earlier about this empathic, social, cognitive nature. And in fact, not enough has been done on oxytocin, in my opinion, communal music making. several papers claim that oxytocin is increased, there was one paper in particular that suggested had data that suggested that if you've got a group of singers together to read the notes on a piece of paper, following the score and measured their plasma levels of oxytocin. And then you've got the same people to improvise that's when the oxytocin went up. Now, any listeners who've actually improvised together in bands like we did at university, knows that whole process of improvisation requires you to be cooperative and listen to what everyone else is doing because it doesn't work otherwise it just cannot work you cannot do your own thing if you're trying to make something up as a group it's not possible so that to me is an interesting observation but there's very little data and the other problem is As I wrote in, in that paper and this new pain paper is that measurement of oxytocin is really tough according to the people who are specialists at it. And it depends what time of day you do it. It depends what you've been doing in the hours beforehand. it depends whether it's male or female. It depends how old you are. and also the measurement of oxytocin in the blood or in the saliva doesn't necessarily tell you what's going on in here. and it's the same with endorphins. It's a really tough call right now, because there's no real measure of measuring these peptides. in real time in the brain. You can kind of measure, receptor occupancy, for example, for, in other words, to what extent there are receptors available for the beta endorphins, but even that's subject to some Controversy. So the underlying of these things is still to be sorted. and I guess all one can hope to do as someone who's in a sense, not doing the work, but as an an observer, accumulating and trying to knit together patterns is hopefully you can point To what needs to be done, perhaps what should be done next to help define how these things work. But overall, there's no doubt that if you actually, I've just, as I say, just joined the symphony chorus and you get to know people quite quickly. That's what that icebreaker effect is all about. they did psychological studies and found that people really got to know each other and trusted each other much more quickly if they were singing next to each other than if they just met, around a table. in a sense, if you think about the underlying physiology of all of this and the underlying evolutionary biology of all of this, it's a no brainer if you pardon the pun. it's just nothing else makes sense.

Donny: 12:38

so oxytocin, can be responsible for how we are socially as a species.

Alan: 12:44

I think endorphins are also important in all of this, and also dopamine is very important because of the reward nature. The fact that music making is also rewarding. and the other feature about music, communal music making or making music is it's this capability of prediction. So in terms of, for example, dance, when you're dancing with other people, suppose you're in a dance troupe, we went to see recently stage show of Mary Poppins. It was fantastic. But there was about a five minute tap dancing routine and about 10, 12 guys or 15 guys. It was astonishing. That they were so in time. Now, the only way you can synchronize that is you can't actually synchronize after the fact because you'll be too late. So you have to predict the movements and the patterns, right? Yeah, they have to be in train, but they have to be predicted so that you're in time because if you wait for somebody else to do something. it's no good. The same is in singing, choral singing or playing musical instruments. So the predictive nature of this sensory motor coordination is really important. And there's a lot of, I'm not an expert in, in, in reward, but the structure in the brain that's important is called the locus coeruleus. And most of the reward, whether it be addiction, gambling, Eating chocolate, having sex, enjoying a piece of music together. Essentially, they all funnel into this region using different access points. And most of them seem to be working through this transmittable dopamine. but my understanding is that a lot of the reward is the satisfaction of actually achieving what you set out to achieve. That's the reward. So if you hit a good golf shot, you go, yes, I've hit one out of a hundred. if you hit a good tennis shot, yes, I've hit one out of 400. so it's the achievement of that expectation is the reward that comes with all of that. And so in the same in music and movement and dance, it's essentially the same thing. I think that. the ability to sing in time or in harmony with other people. You have an expectation, your prediction of doing that. You set all your musculature up to do that. And it comes out. And you think, yeah, what a buzz. That's a serious buzz.

Donny: 15:41

so what I'm wondering, and I think you'll have some good insight on this how do you think music achieves? this unique connection to our inner, deeper selves, the emotional response to music.

Alan: 15:57

That's been troubling people for a long time. There are whole books on this. And one of the problems is that the nature of the music that you listen to is not necessarily reflective in the emotional consequence of listening to that music. There's a lot of, so just, I'm so sidestepping this a little bit, but there's a number of papers looking at why is it that music that is in the minor key, for example, and I'm talking really now in terms of music in the last several hundred years, but my interest of a lot of it is to do with what was music like 70, 80, 000 years ago. When we first, I think, needed it as a counterweight to this new language system, this new articulate speech system. But if you think about the last several hundred years, when we listen to music that's in a minor key, it can sometimes make us, you Very emotionally, charged and not sad at all, but almost gloriously happy in the sadness of it all. and it's very odd. But certainly when I listen to some classical music, I can listen to Rachmaninoff and it's incredibly melancholic music, but it's heartwarming and it makes me feel good about it. so there's a disjunct there and a lot of that's to do with your own I think. I never, I've never judged what other people think of as good music or bad music. That's entirely their business. I grew up listening to classical music in the 60s. Well, I started off listening to Beatles and the Kinks and the Rolling Stones and all that, but also listened to classical music. And in those days in Britain at least, the classical music stations were telling you what you should and shouldn't listen to a bit, don't listen to this old fashioned stuff, you should listen to modern music that made no sense whatsoever, like Stockhausen or some of these 12 tone people, and that somehow melody was a bad thing, I mean, really, I don't know where that came from, but one shouldn't judge other people's musical tastes because it, you Everyone's musical tastes really is a track record, if you like, of their own emotional history, their own biography. you ask people us your top 10 favorite songs or your top albums or your five favorite symphonies. Whatever it might be, so often that gets wrapped up in times when you're most emotionally charged, which is, from right about the age of middle teens, from puberty on to early 20s. That's when you have your first love affair. It's when you have your first, yeah, physical sex is when you have your first major breakup, when you first have a broken heart, all these sorts of incredibly intense emotional experiences where you make some incredibly strong bonds with people at school or when you go to university or whatever it might be. That for me is always the nut. where you tend to always go back to when you're thinking about what's really important. but everyone's history is different and everyone's song is different. And that's, and in the end that becomes really important later on in life in terms of music therapy. Because there's no question whatsoever that, that in things like dementia and Alzheimer's disease, where people are using music to try and unlock, in people's memories, the sort of thing that Oliver Sacks talked about in his book, Musicophilia, for example, which is worth a read, by the way. it always has to be what's relevant to the person with the dementia, it has to be something that unlocks a memory that is relevant to their autobiography might be a tune that was played when they got married. It might be a song that was their favorite when they were first going out with who became their life partner. We could be any of those sorts of things, So the family has to give us a good sense of what's important to that person and that will unlock them. I've actually been helping out a guy here in Perth who's trying to get funding. He's from Italy and they're very interested because Australia is a country of. Migrants, and there's a lot of Italian migrants who came to Australia after the Second World War, and they came from all over Italy, and if you don't know, then Italy has a whole vast range of different dialects, rather like England, if you go to, or in the UK, there's Scottish, Welsh, Scouse, Liverpool, Cockney, there's West Country, and It's the same sort of thing in Italy So one of the things that he is trying to do is to go to people who are not completely Demented so these are people who are all have been shown to be You know, on the decline. And while they're still capable of these interactions, he's actually finding out what village they came from and what dialect they spoke. And then getting them with him to create a new song in that specific dialect, which brings joy to the person who's gradually fading away, from comprehension. But it's also brings enormous joy to the family because they will eventually have this new piece that's relevant to the. their grandma or whatever it might be that was created while this person was still, interacting in a way, it's just a fantastic idea, because the other thing I think that's so important about this is that the caregivers, get five or 10 minutes of time with these people when they're like normal, the interaction is normal. Now, one of the things I want to do, I'd love to be able to do if I live long enough and I've got enough energy. It's to try and understand what is it that, why is, does music have what I've called in the book the gold pass to memory recall? What, why is that? Why does it do it in a way that, prose would just wouldn't, maybe it would, but music seems to do it even better. And you can go on YouTube and find all these examples of people who either start singing and dancing or just smiling and suddenly interacting just by. Unlocking them through a song that was autobiographically relevant to them. How does that happen? And it actually might turn out that oxytocin is important in that. but on the other hand, let me just say this, that there is a wonderful book, I think, called The Dark Side of Music, which is to say that music can be actually used in groups to, as a means of driving cooperativity when you're actually opposing another group, music can act as a label because it's to do with within, again, within group cooperation, within group. Action, if you like, so it can work as a label. The example I gave in my book was growing up in the UK in the late fifties, early sixties of these people called the mods and rockers. bit like James Dean, the rockers had leather jackets, motorbikes. and play a certain sort of music. The mods had scooters, sort of jackets with velvet collars, but they listened to a different sort of music. And the music differences were just as important in defining the groups as anything else. and in war, it's understood that it's a power and in, and the other thing I think that's really important to note here is that in situations where there are Where you have a dictator or an autocrat who doesn't believe that they have complete control over the people that they are governing. They hate music because group music making is what, I think it's Ian Cross in Cambridge talked about a safe space because you're allowed to have your own thoughts. You're allowed to have your own dreams and so on, while in this community environment. And people don't know what you're thinking. People don't know what's going on in there because you're able to have these thoughts in this independent sort of group entity. Which is why, religious groups sometimes will ban musical instruments, even burn them because music making is a way of bringing people's coordination together that they can't control. So when Oliver Cromwell took over as a Puritans in England in the 17th century, they, he tried to burn all the organs in churches because it, it was, music can be dangerous to these people. So its power is, its unifying power is for good, But if you're on the outside, it can be, scary. but think about movies. So if anyone wants to go to my TED talk, we had a, we had some images of sharks and we played a really lovely piece of music and the sharks looked lovely. And then the quartet played stuff that was a mixture between psycho and Jaws. And the sharks look really edgy. So if you go to any movie, the music always fits. And in fact, there's some studies on the neuroscience of. Of the relationship between the visual image and the musical sounds. And if those two go together, you get an even bigger hit than if they're separate. So you couldn't imagine watching psycho. If anyone's seen that film with that, you couldn't imagine that to catch the, even say morning has broken like the first more, it just doesn't work. It's not possible. so yeah, It's got enormous power, but it, but again, we have to think of this communication system as integrating with other things. facial expression, gesture, movement, all of these things. We're a whole being that has all these complex sensory, motor, emotional interactions. And music just Is a significant part of what it is to be a modern human being

Donny: 25:22

It's so interesting how music can be so individual yet so collective. what I'd like to ask you is, about your own personal experience. Is it called where does the time go? Is that

Alan: 25:34

Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Donny: 25:36

Can we talk about that song?

Alan: 25:37

that? Why do you mention that? How do you know about that?

Donny: 25:41

I just the question I ask people is,

Alan: 25:44

But how did you know that particular song? Have I, that's

Donny: 25:47

that particular song,

Alan: 25:49

Yeah. How did you know that?

Donny: 25:50

I just try to do a

Alan: 25:51

Have I been hacked?

Donny: 25:53

I

Alan: 25:53

hacked? yeah. Now, why does this have such a profound effect on me? the why is problematic in terms of the physiology and the pharmacology and whatever. But in a more overall sense, Sandy Denny, who sings that song. if you go back to the book, at the end talked about the incomparable Sandy Denny. I'm a huge fan of Bonnie Raitt, for example, and Carla Bonoff and Joni Mitchell, but for me, Sandy Denny has always somehow, and I don't know why, this is the, going back to this discussion we had about emotion and music where the emotions come from, there's something about her and maybe experiencing her in late teens and listening to that is, there's a depth and quality of emotion in her voice that is just. indefinable. Robert Platt of Led Zeppelin thought of her as the greatest as well. that's why he asked her to sing with him on Led Zeppelin 4, for example. and who knows where the time goes? Hasn't she been rated as, in the UK as the greatest, electric folk song by many. I think it's to do with, the passing of time. And so it has been, this is, in terms of music that I want to have played when I'm dead and at my funeral, that is certainly one of the songs that I think I want to have played. I won't hear it again. And that makes me incredibly sad that I won't be in a situation assuming that there's no afterlife. but I think it will, communicate a range of complex emotions in people about the beauty and the fragility of life and death that I wouldn't mind accompanying me. I know that sounds terribly pretentious, but yeah, it's incredibly moving song. and there are some other songs that I. Listen to that I, it's all to do with going back to this dopamine and, reward and the incredible passion that music can raise in you there was a beautiful study done it from Montreal in McGill, where they measured dopamine release. When you were listening to music that you knew and where there was a climax or a moment that you always enjoyed or that moved you in a piece of music, and they measured the dopamine and at the moment when that moment arrives in the piece of music, there's a huge dopamine spike in that region of the brain that where the locus serulis is, which is this loss. I've hit it again. So I don't know whether anyone out there it. There's a particular song or a particular riff or a particular moment, that you know every time you hear it, no matter what you think, A tear's gonna roll down your cheek. Who knows where the time goes moves me a little bit like that. There's a Bonnie Raich song, I Can't Make You Love Me, which is just, it, it's just astonishing. Last Sunday, we went to a really lovely concert in the, Governor's Ballroom here in Perth, and it was, an opera by, An English composer called Henry Purcell, written in 1680 something called Dido and Aeneas. one of the first great English operas ever written. and she becomes enamored with Aeneas and they make all sorts of promises. And then he gets fooled by some evil people that he has to go back. to save Troy and therefore he breaks his vows and she's shattered and says, go you've betrayed me. And there's this aria called, when I am laid to rest. and there's this line in there about when she says, please remember me after I'm gone. And I knew that I was going to burst into tears because every time I've ever heard it. And it's Getting back to who knows where the time goes, I guess if someone played that one at a funeral, I'd actually probably come out of the box and start crying. It would be that much of a, have that much of an impact on me. Really.

Donny: 29:55

Wow.

Alan: 29:56

Again, it's incredibly personal, but I think we've all, if any of us out there love music, we all know that piece or those pieces that will hit you. And that's really good for you. I think that credible burst of emotion, is really good for the body. I think it's good for the immune system. It's good for just, withdrawing from all the stresses and strains because you're so focused on this. this extraordinary power, emotional outburst that I don't think does you any harm at all. Interesting. when I first started researching music therapy, it seems positive music, happy music, upbeat, but I almost wonder if, the music that you said unlocks maybe a memory. I wonder if it also unlocks that deep inner emotional response That could be healing in some I think there's no doubt about that. That's why I think I said earlier that, in, for example, the use of music in pain therapy. The general consensus seems to be that, and all the studies would seem to show that the patient has to pick the music that's relevant to them. It's chosen by the clinician, or if it's just imposed by the experimenters, the effects are nothing like as powerful.

Donny: 31:14

Yeah. It

Alan: 31:15

And so that's when it gets difficult to try and understand how it works, because, I'm sure that it's, in this review, there's, I think there's good evidence that it works both in the periphery, in terms of the immune system and reducing inflammation, believe it or not. That it works at the level of the spinal cord, the brain stem, and it probably works on these receptors and transmitters that we talked about. But the problem is disentangling those sort of physiological things from meditation and mindfulness and relaxation. Because those are psychological things that in terms of how they work. At the physiological level is still being understood, but there's clearly an intersection between them and this other kind of underlying physiology about music, reducing the sensation of pain. That's what I had to grapple with in this review. It's very difficult thing to write, but I think even raising those issues is useful because I think it's working at multiple levels. and that's an extraordinary thing for something that's just coming through your ears, just vibrating the eardrum. That's all it's doing, vibrating the eardrum. And then look what happens afterwards. it's just, it's mind boggling is what it is. It's just, so beautiful. and, it's so human that you can't help to just want to know more and appreciate. Again, it's power, it's unique power I suspect, and again going back to what I wrote, that it was also had unique power in how we evolved as well as driving the various aspects of interaction and cooperativity that were really important in the early days. Of, evolving modern humans. Now, of course, that's not to say that it was the only thing, because it's clear that speech and language were the keys in driving cognitive development in terms of planning, ideas, thoughts. The generative kind of way of thinking about things. language is key to that and there's some good evidence I think that intelligence genes were the ones that were being selected for not how good looking you were, but clearly early on in human evolution, if you were a good communicator, and you could pass information on a generations, which is clearly what was the accelerating. power of language and music as Richard Dawkins wrote, the moment that language allowed us to communicate across generations, evolution was never the same. It's just, it's not the same. It's just accelerates because you start selecting on what he calls means you start selecting on cultural, information about how you do this, how you do that, All this thing gets passed down across generations and communicating in a way that just Keeps being, accentuated across generations. so that clearly the driver of modern cognitive evolution, but my thesis always is that alongside that you had this other communication stream, which is music and dance that was there to make sure that during this cognitive explosion, this explosion of individuality, that we still had this harmonious communication system that helped. Us work together and cooperate together and all the things I've said earlier in this session.

Donny: 34:32

it's interesting to try to zoom out and think about that.'cause you're referring to, estimated how many tens of thousands of years ago.

Alan: 34:42

Yeah, that's again, these are all guesswork, but, the people that you talked about, who talk about the icebreaker, and others think languages evolving very slowly, I actually think, along with some others, that the explosion of modern human beings, and the genetics, all the genetics will suggest that this is all within the last 100, 000 years or so. so from an evolutionary point of view, it's massively fast, and we know that there are these things called human accelerated genes. So that there are certain genes that are mutating faster than perhaps we should expect. and a lot of those are in the frontal cortex involved in thinking and creativity, which makes sense. I have an ex graduate student in Holland who's working on some other, elements of things that are different in the human genome from any other animal in terms of the way that they're, that there are sequences that are being repeated and they're trying to understand what the evolutionary significance is of these repeat sequences in certain genes in terms of. accelerating intellectual, and communicative. Human capabilities. and the other thing that's coming to play now from a genetics point of view, is epigenetic regulation so we know that, we've only got a couple of thousand genes that make up our DNA. Proteins and the 98 percent of the genome or something is not, what is it doing? it's they're involved in controlling the other ones. And at the same time, there's all these environmental influences that come in to determine whether a gene is turned on or turned off. and those kinds of, changes seem to be, very important during the evolution of modern cognitive capabilities and also modern memory. Because remember that we have this extraordinary memory, we're growing up, we can learn new words, scores of words a day. we've got vocabularies of something like 10, 20, 000 words. and our memory systems, and it's not to do with the brain size. there's been a lot of obsession about size in all sorts of things, of course, but actually in terms of brains, size is irrelevant. it's the circuitry and the plasticity and the adaptability of the circuits that matters. not necessarily even how many nerve cells you've got. See, some of the most brilliant minds in the world have small, quite small brains. and what does that matter? It doesn't mean anything. it's that plasticity that's key to all of this.

Donny: 37:03

And it, the brain knows how to prioritize it too. It seems

Alan: 37:06

Hopefully, hopefully. Oh, that's another thing that's interesting about music is the other thing that you haven't gotten to yet is about the power of music training and education.

Donny: 37:15

Oh, I'd love to talk about that.

Alan: 37:17

yeah, maybe that's for another day, but it's clear that if you have music training, it's not absolutely certain how much, or how often and whether it's as an individual or in a group, but certainly, overall, it helps with, working memory. It hurts with planning. It also helps, seems to help with what's called inhibitory control, which is that kids at school who get some music. learn that, but maybe your first action, your first thought is not the best one. So you learn inhibitory control, which is that sometimes you have to think before you act. in schools, that's really important, of course. So I give a lot of lectures to schools or to music teachers a lot. Yeah, two or three a year, four a year. And I'm going up to Japan to talk at their music therapy conference about why music exists and why it's relevant today. and I'm talking at the national music teachers conference next year, because what they want to hear is that some music training actually has a lifelong benefit. there's good evidence, again, for some cognitive benefits, you acquire language, the vocabulary gets acquired more quickly, but there's also some evidence as you get older, it acts as a sort of a buffer, because there's clear evidence now from studies that if you do music training, your circuits change, brain changes, no doubt about that whatsoever. And my favorite study on that was a. Scandinavia several years ago, they managed to find nine identical twins. one of them was a musician and the other one wasn't. it wasn't a professional musician, but just played the piano. And they scanned the brains of the piano playing twin versus a non piano playing twin. And all the regions that people had suspected were different. But up until then, it seems to me that you never knew whether they were musicians because those things were different in the first place, or whether those things changed But the fact that they're identical twins would suggest that these consistent changes, are to do with, the practice of music. Now, one of the things that's never been done, and I'll challenge anyone listening out here, needs to do this with someone with professional singers who don't play a musical instrument. I really would like to know how their brains work. Because one of the things that always changes in musicians and in these twins is you know we've got two hemispheres, right? A left and a right. And the left one controls the right hand, right hemisphere controls the left hand, and the same with sensory and vision is also split left and right. So if you're playing a musical instrument with two hands, piano, oboe, violin, from an early age, the coordination between the two hands is absolutely key. So it's not surprising to me that in musical training when you're playing a musical instrument increases the connectivity between the two hemispheres

Donny: 40:08

What's that called?

Alan: 40:09

called the corpus callosum, this is massive fiber track that connects the two hard sides. So in all the studies that have been looking at this, there's increased connectivity across the corpus callosum between the two hemispheres in instrumental music musicians. makes sense because of this constant need for coordination between the two halves, but that might also mean there's also increased connectivity between the temporal lobe, which is where the audition is and the motor part up here. which again, relates to hearing and then playing has to be coordinated. Otherwise it doesn't work. but all of those sorts of circuit changes, may mean that. this idea that music training gives you a buffer when things start to not work quite so well is because you've already, through music training, set up some alternate routes in your brain that you can access.

Donny: 41:03

Cognitive maps?

Alan: 41:05

potential ways of getting from A to B, put it

Donny: 41:07

Yeah. Short, shortcuts, I guess you can call

Alan: 41:10

example, everyone I've talked to, we're all terrified of dementia. and we're all terrified that now, these are people in the, late 60s, early 70s. They, the, some names just disappear. They, they're talking about somebody and they can't remember the person's name or the, the particular word. we're all aware of this as we get older. and the notion that there's some sort of buffer that music helps to find alternate ways around some of these roadblocks. Brilliant. There's some suggestion that it's similar in people who become a bilingual from birth. So if you're, if you are raised speaking two languages very early on, that also gives you some sort of buffer later on There's also a couple of studies very recently where they got people aged average age, I think between 66 and 74. And gave them six months of piano lessons, and they imaged the brains beforehand, and then they imaged the brains afterwards. And there's a particular group that's done this, and they've shown that even at that age, if you compare the brain six months after six months of training, it's already different. even when you get to 70, some music training, according to them, causes some observable changes in, connectivity. and one presumes that's a benefit, I guess that's the assumption you'd make from that. that's really exciting stuff.

Donny: 42:31

I think so. Absolutely. I see this music and our deep connection with it And science it gets you to a certain point, but sometimes there's just some things that can't be explained.

Alan: 42:46

without sounding, self, I do think that the ideas that I've put forward in the book about why music exists alongside language hold water. And I think the whole social power of music making is important. And that comes with an emotional, coalescence between individuals. And that emotional coalescence is known to be involved in things like mirror neurons, facial expression, body language, and all sorts. But it's impact on the consciousness. Is something that is at a different level and remember, of course, that consciousness has not really been explained. There are people who think they've explained it. But this notion of having a mind that where everything that we see is modelled on the activity of a few neurons, and yet we have this external consciousness. As long as we don't really get that, then the sorts of questions about why music has this profound impact upon consciousness and the linking of consciousness between individuals. Which is what it does, then you just ask, it's just getting, it's too hard, just enjoy it.

Donny: 43:50

Coming from someone like yourself. That's very impactful. I really want to emphasize your mission or what your purpose is, what would you love to see involving, music going forward?

Alan: 44:02

It's about communicating a message. There are many people out there who are actually doing the basic research rather than just being a, an observer and communicator like I'm trying to be. it's at the level of education at schools that we need, make sure that children have some music education at school because it is a lifelong benefit. It improves their social interaction. It's about trying to get teenagers getting offline, getting off of their phones and their, games to start cooperating and moving and working together. In song and dance because the isolation and the bullying and the terrible things that are happening due to modern, the computer interactions, and the loneliness that teenagers are now feeling, from stuff that I've read. I once did a show, for ABC radio and there was. They were interviewing some people in Melbourne. There was a songwriting group and homeless and challenged teenagers would come along to this on a Thursday afternoon and they'd all sit down and write a song together. And they were interviewing these people afterwards and they said it was the one part of the week they looked forward to and enjoyed more than anything else. So I think that's the message that needs to get out there. I think it's the other one is it's never too late to actually take up music. Ever. Never too late from this study that we talked about a bit earlier. So all of those are to do with it being embedded in every aspect, if you like, well being and mental health and physical health, if you include dance and exercise with that. But at the music therapy level then, in terms of It's potential role in the treatment of things like Parkinsonism in terms of movement, regate Alzheimer's in terms of the retrieval of memories, in stroke, for example, in using it to help regain language and speech, music's a powerful way of doing that, and also regaining coordinated movements. If it's in things like, Developmental disorders like autism, where music seems to increase relaxation and also enhance ability of these people to communicate with others. In all of those spheres, that's also important. So it's a multi level thing, if the argument is that from the very beginning of us as a species, a modern species, music was embedded in part of that evolutionary trajectory. So it has to be a core part of what it is to be a human being. And therefore it works at all those levels. if you look at the absolute, extraordinary scenes in relation to, this idolization of Taylor Swift, which is extraordinary. it's about the emotional power of her songwriting. It seems to me there's also, she's a very lovely looking woman and the shows are fantastic and all that. But fundamentally there's this unbuttoning, this opening up of a soul. To the world, sometimes maybe too much, but that's again, that's their business, not mine. So young kids are tuning into this extraordinary communicative power that music has communicating thoughts and language through the medium of the music. Carrier as it were. and that's all good. if it means that they also, get this positive energy out of it and a positive attitude towards living and it helps them to get over their own emotional heartbreaks and their own sense of loneliness or isolation. That's all to the good. we're all in this together. We're all in the same, we're all playing the same notes.

Donny: 47:33

I really respect that message Music has a lot of positive things to offer and you have so much extensive knowledge on this, that's something that I'm really, craving. I really look forward to absorbing so much of this. I was reading your book. And I said, I wonder how many, I do a lot of pro audio. I said, I wonder how many audio engineers actually know how the human ear works. Because I didn't know our inner ear was almost like a stringed instrument.

Alan: 48:00

it's actually even more, okay, we'll go to this because I've just started writing a piece at the moment, with some, these colleagues, actually the same people that, wrote that thing on icebreakers and stuff, I'm actually writing this paper with him and another ex colleague, he's now back on at UK, Harmonicity, where does harmonicity come from? we sing in harmony and we sing in octaves and all this sort of thing. Where does octave equivalence come from? Now there's a bunch of studies. several studies in the brain showing actually that the groups of neurons respond not just to a single note, but they, so pitch is a different thing from frequency, right? the picture is still a perceptual aspect of processing, which incorporates. Other, notes within that sound. So there are that you can, pitch can have a fundamental note that's not actually there, but you hear it within the note. Which is not there. Right. Okay.

Donny: 48:53

because of the temp, the timber or the,

Alan: 48:55

yeah, because the timbre and all that sort of thing. So it's much more complicated than just a pure frequency. and there aren't clusters of nerve cells that seem to respond in a, what's called chroma, pitch chroma, which is to do with the quality of the pitch, rather than the actual frequency. and it looks like they're capable of responding to frequencies that contain within them, not all of them, an octave. and so it's, there's some subject, there's evidence that the, this octave generalization or is already built into the system now that this has been huge. This is another story that I'm not qualified. You should talk to. My friend Nick Bannon about this, although he'll ramble on even worse than me. Sorry, Nick. But, they've just written a paper on why is it the woman's voice is an octave above a man's in general, right? So there's something fundamentally intrinsic about that. The reason I'm mentioning that is because one of the things that I've introduced into this paper we're writing, It's actually the cochlea, which is where everything's processed. So you talked about the basilar membrane, which is the, where all the receptors are sitting. And it goes from, there's a frequency map along that membrane. That's what you get taught in part one, auditory physiology. And that then gets transported in what's called an auditory or tonotopic map to all the relays up to auditory cortex. And then everything that you hear after that is, somehow, again, based on vibration of the eardrum. which is. Just think about that. So I tell, when I tell people, in while giving lectures, so if you're an orchestral, if you listen to an orchestra and you're reasonable, you can pick out the clarinet, the oboe, the flute, the bassoon, the cello, the double bass, the violin, the trumpet, the trombone, the percussion, but it's still only one eardrum that's vibrating. How do you do that? How do you, how on earth do you do that? be that as it may, it turns out that the external auditory system is not linear. So there's all sorts of non linear processes in there that relate to the vibration of the hairs and So you've got the fundamental frequency, but there's already distortion in the cochlea itself. which means that there's a signal coming from the cochlea due to the way that the basilar membrane vibrates, which is an octave above. What's called the F1, which is a doubling of the frequency, and it's an octave. So even the info, now, what I don't know that anyone's actually ever done is to look to see whether that F1, which is the octave above, has any kind of, capability of ascending information to the brain, because if in fact it turns out that it does, then everything that relates to the octave, in the cortex is actually based upon the fact that there's this non linear processing in the peripheral apparatus itself. And in fact, this has been recorded, this has been done in two or three different species. So it's a common thing that as this thing vibrates, and as you've got because of these non linearities, that there's already a distortion in the cochlea, there's even an F2, which is, The next octave above, which is very low power. So it's already out there. It's already in there.

Donny: 52:05

you're saying that the cochlea itself has a fundamental frequency.

Alan: 52:10

It already has a distortion in it. Yeah.

Donny: 52:12

Yeah, because it's because of its physical shape and size And the

Alan: 52:17

the way it vibrates and everything, and it's a distortion that's an octave. I've just added that to this review and actually a commentary on another paper because I haven't really seen that everyone seems to assume it's all cortical but maybe just maybe there's a actually an element that comes from right out of the periphery that is causing there's an influencing this now that's this is not been talked about anywhere in the world before as far as I can tell so now you've got a scoop here maybe

Donny: 52:41

I'll have to do an episode on this, on just how the human ear works, because it is, it's mechanical, it is chemical, it is electrical.

Alan: 52:50

it's not, but it's also not entirely passive there's what we call efference outflow going back to the cochlea from the brain. so it's not an entirely passive transmitter, so you can actually change. The gain controls and all sorts of other elements of cochlear processing sending information back out. So it's a, it's a very complicated system. It's in the retina. We, there's unlikely that there's any output from the brain back to the retina to control what's happening out there in the eye. But in the, but the cochlear, it's quite different. But is that the reason why the sound of our own voice isn't so loud? Because we're suppressing it as we speak. So that it's melded into external environmental influences. Is that possible? Is it a way of shutting down loud noises? Is it a way of modifying selective frequencies versus others?

Donny: 53:41

Whoa.

Alan: 53:43

I'm not the person, you should find somebody to talk about that.

Donny: 53:46

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I totally should. That's incredible. Wow. what would the ultimate episode of this podcast look like for someone like yourself?

Alan: 53:57

Again, it's just to do with the message, really. the more people that look at things, the sort of thing that you're doing, the more power to you for doing this. the better, if it's communicating all of the things that I said about its role from early childhood, all the way through to old age, and then both in normal aging and in abnormal aging in normal people and in disease. if people can understand that and the individuality that the important. element of loving what you like yourself, right? Rather than worrying about what somebody else is liking or whatever. It's up to you. It's in your own soul, as it were. Then, if that message just gets out there and it's to do with getting people out to communicate, to interact, and this happens, people go out to dances and raves and all sorts and understand all of this. that this isn't just a byproduct. It's not just something that is a leisure time. It's a fundamental aspect of what it is to be a human being. As I said before, and we should grasp it. And I guess the ultimate thing is we should persuade. Governments, we should persuade businesses, we should persuade philanthropists and entrepreneurs that this is such a core part of what it is to be a good human being, that it's worth investing in. It isn't a waste of time. So I was sitting next to someone in a choir thing the other day, we were helping out some new conductors and she teaches at one of the local schools and she specifically said, would I come and talk to the parents? Why would I talk to the parents? Because they want to get more music in the school, but they want to be able to persuade the parents that it isn't wasting their children's time. That's a good message.

Donny: 55:40

I agree with your message, you've definitely given me, A lot of material to, advance in this endeavor. So I'm really grateful for that. And I appreciate your time. just speaking to me, on this topic, cause I think this is sort of my calling right now. I don't know where it's going to take me, but I'm sailing. So I

Alan: 55:58

Go for it.

Donny: 55:59

I

Alan: 56:00

Go for it. Go for it. I'll put some wind in those sails for you. Don't worry about that.

Donny: 56:05

appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Alan: 56:07

You're very welcome. Have a good evening.

Donny: 56:09

All right.

Alan: 56:10

Thank you. Cheers.

Donny: 56:11

All right. Bye bye.

56:14

Thank you for joining us on this enlightening episode of music, ghost stories. Alan Harvey has given us so much to ponder about the power of music in our lives. Remember, Music is not just a byproduct It's a vital part of what makes us human. Together, we can take on this mission to celebrate and advocate. For the transformative impact of music. Stay inspired, and let's keep the world a beautiful place through the harmony of souls. until next time everyone. Keep listening.