Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Is Music the Language of the Universe? with Daniel Levitin About this episode Did early humans sing before they could talk? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice discover how music helps us recall memories, the Singing Neanderthal Theory, the default mode network, and how music can be used as medicine with neuroscientist and author, Daniel Levitin.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, the brain remains a frontier. Yes, it does. Greater than the universe itself. Oh, you said that? Wow, this must have been a really good show. I love the recipe of all the ways music can not only work with our moods, but work with our emotional and physical health on StarTalk Special Edition.
0:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
0:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? StarTalk begins right now.
0:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And I got with me Chuck Nice. Chuck, how you doing, man? Hey, Neil. All right. Okay, this is StarTalk Special Edition. It is. And if I've got you for StarTalk Special Edition, we also get Gary. That's right. In this edition, Gary O'Reilly is gonna take us in. Gary, what do you have to tell us?
0:54 Speaker 01 Generally speaking, music is a pleasure. We appreciate the artistry and enjoy the performance. Music can transport us to another time and place, alter our emotional state. Now, ask yourself, what throws an audience into a trance or a performer into a flow state? Why do we get earworms? They're nasty little rascals and they're annoying.
1:21 Speaker 01 They are just some of music's gifts. The ancient Greeks knew way back when that music has the power to heal. So we're talking the cognitive neuroscience of music. And for that, we need someone very special, whose range is nothing short of extensive. Daniel Levitin, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist with expertise in music and psychology, multimillion bestselling author with another just out. A musician, a record producer, and an engineer, working with some of the best in the business, and I mean the best.
2:02 Speaker 01 And I am just scratching the surface when I say that he has won loads of awards for loads of stuff. So Neil, enjoy the show. Sorry, I can't be there. Covid stopped me, but I know you're gonna have a great, great time. It's gonna be a fantastic show.
2:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thanks, Gary. Again, sorry you can't be with us. So, Daniel Levitin. Daniel, welcome to Startalk.
2:22 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me, Neil.
2:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Listen, dude, you've done everything in your life.
2:27 Speaker 02 I haven't done an interview with you yet.
2:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
2:30 Chuck Nice? And now you can die.
2:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're here primarily because you just released a book.
2:36 Speaker 02 Yep.
2:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we're gonna talk a bit about that, but mostly just about the human brain and music.
2:43 Speaker 02 Ooh.
2:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When we look at your background, starting out as a music producer, and you knew everybody, anybody who's anybody. This book connects music and neurological health.
2:57 Speaker 02 Yep.
2:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Maybe we kinda knew it.
2:59 Speaker 02 Well.
3:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But this book, all 350 pages of it, is-
3:05 Speaker 02 It's 412. You didn't read the notes at the end?
3:11 Chuck Nice? That was good.
3:12 Speaker 02 I read 4,000 peer-reviewed articles, so you wouldn't have to. And they're in the notes.
3:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very good. That's why we buy the books.
3:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you analyze and put into narrative something we always suspected was true, but didn't really have evidence for it.
3:26 Chuck Nice? Right.
3:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, let's just start from square one. The movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
3:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We communicate with those aliens initially with musical tones.
3:36 Speaker 02 Yep.
3:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It makes the bold assumption that aliens can hear.
3:42 Speaker 02 Right.
3:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is a sense that we have, which is assuming other life forms will have it. They might have some other sense that we don't have.
3:48 Speaker 02 Right.
3:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. So that's our bias. It's fun to see what biases we put on our aliens. Plus, they were bipedal. They had two eyes and nose and mouth, ears. Okay, that's our bias.
3:59 Chuck Nice? And they also had lousy taste in music, because they actually liked that song that we played them. It was awful.
4:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All four notes.
4:06 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
4:09 Speaker 02 But there is this idea-
4:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Five notes.
4:10 Speaker 02 There is this idea that a sufficiently advanced technology society will have things like the Fibonacci series, or a geometric series, powers of two. And so, the idea that there might be some universal language. Math would have been the obvious one. Not so entertaining for a Spielberg movie to have.
4:30 Chuck Nice? Have prime numbers popping up.
4:32 Speaker 02 That's right, right, that's right.
4:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would have totally fed the geeks in the world.
4:37 Chuck Nice? Oh, God, yes.
4:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We would have flocked to the film. Can you comment on why we care at all about music?
4:45 Speaker 02 What we do know, you know, music being auditory, doesn't leave the same kind of trace as, say, cave paintings, right? So, a lot of this is speculation.
4:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When you say trace, same historical evidence.
4:58 Speaker 02 Archaeological, physical evidence, right? Although, we do have bone flutes that are dated between forty and sixty thousand years ago.
5:05 Chuck Nice? Oh, wow.
5:07 Speaker 02 And they've been found not just in...
5:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, you just said that like that's a thing. You mean, someone took a femur, carved it out, and blew air through it, and made a flute?
5:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
5:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just said, "A bone flute," like, you can get it in the corner, huh?
5:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know.
5:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It is Sam's music.
5:20 Chuck Nice? I shut up, because there are many, many jokes that go with bone flute.
5:24 Speaker 02 You are exactly right to point this out, because, yes, somebody had to find a femur.
5:29 Chuck Nice? Right.
5:30 Speaker 02 And drill holes in it at precisely spaced intervals.
5:33 Chuck Nice? Right.
5:34 Speaker 02 To get particular pitches. They're forty to sixty thousand years old. They're among the oldest artifacts we find in human burial sites.
5:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm guessing they might have done this with wood, because it's easier.
5:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But wood doesn't last as long.
5:46 Chuck Nice? Right, I was gonna say.
5:47 Speaker 02 That's right, well, that's right.
5:48 Chuck Nice? Here, wood, wood would turn to dust.
5:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
5:51 Speaker 02 And so, the interesting thing is, okay, well, if they went to that much trouble to have this technological thing, of drilling the holes, however they did it, the bone flute wouldn't have been the first musical instrument. They would have been stretching skins across stumps. They would have been beating their chest, Bobby McFerrin style.
6:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is perfectly reasoned. The bone flute requires sufficient effort.
6:12 Chuck Nice? Right.
6:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That surely, there were other instruments made with less effort before you got to that.
6:17 Speaker 02 And they didn't last.
6:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
6:18 Speaker 02 Right, yeah.
6:19 Chuck Nice? And it makes sense, because there are other instruments that happen without you doing anything.
6:26 Speaker 02 Well, singing.
6:27 Chuck Nice? Yeah, singing is one.
6:28 Speaker 02 Or banging, banging two sticks together.
6:29 Chuck Nice? Two rocks can be, can keep a beat.
6:31 Speaker 02 Early rock music.
6:33 Chuck Nice? I see what you did there.
6:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or if they had any Coke bottles, you know, at the time. Okay, so we agree it existed.
6:40 Speaker 02 We agree it's old, so then the question, why? So, in my field, we have a journal called Behavioral and Brain Sciences. And it's an interesting model for a peer-reviewed journal. Somebody writes a Target article, I don't know if they have this in astrophysics. Somebody writes a Target article, and then other people around the world who are qualified in the field get to write commentaries on it. Peer-reviewed, and those commentaries are peer-reviewed. So you have an idea put forward, and then maybe forty or fifty people weighing in on what they think about it. Do you have this?
7:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Not really.
7:10 Speaker 02 It's a wonderful thing.
7:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we do have, in the journal Nature.
7:14 Speaker 02 Right.
7:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have, you can write an article, and if the article's a little bit controversial, the editor will solicit a comment on it.
7:21 Speaker 02 I've written some of those.
7:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
7:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
7:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, beyond that, no, it's not a free-for-all, as you describe.
7:28 Speaker 02 The nice thing is that it helps a field to cohere into some kind of a consensus.
7:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Almost a town hall.
7:33 Speaker 02 Yeah. Then the Target article, people get to write a response to the... So, I mention this because in 2019, there were a couple of Target articles about the evolution of music. And this is something I devoted a whole book to in 2008. "The World in Six Songs," the subtitle was "How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature." And the idea was, you know, like so many things with evolution, as you've explained to the public better than anyone can, things don't evolve typically for a single reason or a single purpose. There's a bunch of different evolutionary pressures. And in the case of music, there were at least six independent lines of why music became important and encoded in the genome and passed down, not just culturally, but genetically.
8:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Give me the most significant one that has to do with survival.
8:20 Speaker 02 I am not qualified to...
8:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You said there were six!
8:24 Speaker 02 Yep.
8:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, give me one of the six.
8:26 Speaker 02 I will. You asked me to rank order. I'm not an evolutionary biologist.
8:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, give me any of the six.
8:30 Speaker 02 Okay, my favorite of the six.
8:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, there you go, your favorite.
8:33 Speaker 02 Think about the transmission of information within a culture and across generations. Now, we do that by talking, but we also write things down. We've only had written language on this planet for about 5,000 years.
8:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In fact, it almost defines history.
8:47 Speaker 02 Well, that's right, absolutely. But, you know, humans have been on the planet for forty to a hundred, two-hundred thousand years, longer than that, depending on how you define "human." And so for most of the time we've been on the planet, we did not have writing. And what we believe from studying contemporary hunter-gatherer societies that are cut off from Western civilization and industrialization, we have every reason to believe they're living the way they might have been 20,000 years ago. We believe that they used music to encode knowledge. For example, they would have a song that would encode, "This is the route to the well, and this is the route you take to the other well if this one goes dry." Or a song that says, "Don't go over that mountain because great-grandfather Og went
9:31 Speaker 02 there and the neighboring tribe killed him." And this is how you make a watertight canoe, or this is how you boil a plant so it's not poisoned. Why music? Because, first of all, the available evidence from my lab and now many others around the world...
9:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And where's your lab, by the way?
9:47 Speaker 02 At McGill University.
9:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? McGill, up in Canada?
9:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, okay.
9:52 Speaker 02 The Laboratory for Music Cognition and Expertise. The available evidence is that the neural structures that encode music are phylogenetically older than those that encode speech.
10:04 Chuck Nice? Wow. So, evolutionarily, we were musicians before we were talking to one another?
10:10 Speaker 02 So it seems. From a brain development standpoint, yes. And Stephen Mithen has written a wonderful book called The Singing Neanderthals, where he posits that some sort of proto-language was music.
10:23 Chuck Nice? Sounds like a great punk group, by the way. The Singing Neanderthals.
10:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are you suggesting that we made sounds, if we don't yet have words, that we could imagine writing, or language as we now think of it? Sounds can be put together into musical...
10:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there's two parts to this. Let's talk about sound without language and sound with language, and if you don't mind, I'll go backwards in time.
10:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you.
10:50 Speaker 02 Once we had language and we set the language to music, once we had words that we set to music, those words would become encoded and preserved in memory. With far greater resistance to distortion.
11:03 Chuck Nice? Oh my god.
11:04 Speaker 02 Right? Because you've got the mutually reinforcing cues of rhythm, accent, structure, meter, and rhyme scheme. So that there's a limited number of ways that you can fit words into that space. And so you look at the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were orally transmitted, very, very long poems. The Old Testament.
11:24 Chuck Nice? The Bible, Psalms are all songs.
11:26 Speaker 02 That's right. And the Old Testament was sung.
11:29 Chuck Nice? Right.
11:30 Speaker 02 Before it was ever written down for a thousand years and preserved as far as we know fairly accurately. And so songs are able to resist, to a large degree, distortions that simple speech is not.
11:42 Chuck Nice? Makes perfect sense, simply because we teach all of our children in song first.
11:47 Speaker 02 The ABCs.
11:48 Chuck Nice? Yes. All of your nursery rhymes are sung.
11:51 Speaker 02 Little kids learn the body parts through a song, right? You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out.
11:56 Chuck Nice? You put your right foot in, you turn, head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. Everything we learn as a kid. I mean, a lot of what we learn is through song.
12:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That explains why it would have had evolutionary value. Because we can remember lessons.
12:10 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For where the water hole is, where the food, how to not get eaten.
12:14 Speaker 02 Right.
12:14 Chuck Nice? It's like the equivalent of the bee dance. We sang, like bees dance, that's how they give direction.
12:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, yeah, exactly right.
12:23 Chuck Nice? And that's how we give direction.
12:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The bees with the waggle, the waggle dance. So might you then suggest that among vertebrates at least, birds engage in song?
12:33 Speaker 02 Oh, well.
12:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Whale song. We call them songs. Maybe they're just angry and they're complaining.
12:39 Speaker 02 Wow, this is really.
12:40 Chuck Nice? For the humans. Which is the whale equivalent to, get off my lawn.
12:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Get the hell off my planet.
12:49 Speaker 02 Or, I've got lumbago.
12:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, just to sharpen my question, what other animals offer any evidence at all for musicality? If not birds, when we think of birdsong, whales, when we think of whale song, or other creatures that make what we think of as melodic sounds to one another?
13:07 Speaker 02 So this is a very contentious question in the ethology community.
13:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind me what ethology is?
13:13 Speaker 02 The study of animal behavior.
13:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's called ethology?
13:16 Speaker 02 Is it not?
13:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I don't know.
13:17 Speaker 02 Biology, let's say.
13:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, but...
13:19 Speaker 02 Ethology, yeah.
13:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ethology, animal behavior.
13:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cool, thank you.
13:23 Speaker 02 So, let's look at the characteristics of human music. For one thing, we'll sing when we're all by ourselves. Birds won't. Birds will only sing if they know there's another con-specific nearby. Bird and whale song is communicative. It's, when we speak to one another, we are speaking with a specific intention, usually, and we're referring to things. All the animal calls that we know of are referential to some event in the world. They're either a mating call, or a call to distress, "Hey, everybody look out, there's a predator here."
13:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
13:56 Speaker 02 Or, "Hey, there's some food over here." They are specific stereotyped communications that are used in the presence of others. They aren't, for the most part, changeable. We have an infinite variety of songs. Birds do not. They're not riffing on a melody.
14:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I have a bird song identifier on my smartphone.
14:18 Speaker 02 And the only reason it works...
14:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's because they can pull it out of its sound.
14:21 Speaker 02 And because a bird...
14:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And they don't change the song. Right, right, because you can, it could be a noisy environment, but if there's a bird in there, it will find that bird.
14:29 Speaker 02 And the bird in New York, and its offspring, and a bird in Illinois, and a bird in Brazil, if it's the same species, they're gonna sing more or less the same song their whole lives. And it's encoded, and you know how we know this? My colleague Evan Balaban did a study. He took embryonic, I don't remember the species, but let's, well, he took, yeah. He took, he took eggs.
14:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Embryo birds.
14:52 Speaker 02 He took fertile, he took.
14:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's an egg. The egg is an embryo, right?
14:55 Speaker 02 Well, yeah. He took fertile eggs.
14:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
14:57 Speaker 02 Let's say it's a chicken and he gets the auditory cortex of a zebra finch and he implants it in the developing brain of the chicken.
15:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, is the zebra finch a zebra or a finch?
15:06 Speaker 02 It's a finch. It's kind of, a kind of a bird. A songbird.
15:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just being literal here. Cause you know, you don't name stuff, you know? Zebra finch.
15:15 Speaker 02 Takes a songbird auditory cortex and puts it in the developing brain.
15:19 Chuck Nice? Of a chicken.
15:20 Speaker 02 And vice versa.
15:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not a zebra that looks like a finch. It's a finch that has zebra stripes.
15:23 Speaker 02 Exactly. Exactly right. And so the question is, are birds learning their song from their parents and from the environment? Or is it hardwired? And what he found was the chickens started singing the song of the finches and the finches started clucking like chickens.
15:38 Chuck Nice? Oh.
15:40 Speaker 02 Because it's hardwired.
15:42 Chuck Nice? That sounds like a great Pixar movie.
15:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Somebody mixed up the eggs at the beginning?
15:51 Speaker 02 You're not a chicken. I'll be a chicken if I want to. I could be whatever I want.
15:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, the chicken goes moo. Scramble the farm animals. That'll mess up the farm.
16:00 Chuck Nice? So these are hardwired actions in these animals.
16:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For everybody else.
16:05 Chuck Nice? Right.
16:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But not for us.
16:06 Chuck Nice? But not for us.
16:17 Speaker 04 Hello, I'm Vicky Brook Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson.
16:33 Speaker 02 Everything that we know about animal communication is that it's not music the way we would define music. It's not infinitely generative. You can't model it with a Markov chain.
16:43 Chuck Nice? Is there any evidence that we have always enjoyed music as entertainment? Because, you know, when you talk about, it becomes this directional medium. It's a medium of direction where we're telling each other stories or we're giving each other, you know, information. At what point do we have?
17:06 Chuck Nice? Proof or evidence historically that it went from that, which it still is, which we just determined, to, "Man, this is my jam. I love this so much. What a great song."
17:19 Speaker 02 Well, so one of the other uses of music is to create a bond between mother and infant, because the infant would imprint on the mother's singing voice. And we now know that relaxing, comforting songs can release prolactin, which is a soothing and tranquilizing hormone. So we've got a number of different reasons why music was there, and they're subserved by different neurochemical systems.
17:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This works even in utero?
17:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, so by the age of 20 weeks, the auditory system is fully functional.
17:49 Chuck Nice? Wow.
17:50 Speaker 02 And the fetus can hear sounds, it's through the amniotic fluid. It would be like you-
17:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It would change the frequency of it?
17:57 Speaker 02 No, it would not change the frequency. It would change what frequencies you hear. So if you put your ears underwater-
18:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that the same thing? I don't get the difference.
18:05 Speaker 02 Oh, well, I mean, it's not like a prism that can change-
18:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Isn't it exactly that?
18:10 Speaker 02 I can change the frequency by speeding up tape. But if I simply play music in a different medium, it doesn't change the frequency. It changes which frequencies are emphasized over others. If you stick your ears underwater in a swimming pool or a bathtub and music is playing, you'll only hear the, primarily hear the bass notes. The frequency of those bass notes hasn't shifted appreciably, although water is a different medium than air, but you could do the calculations and see, I think-
18:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I have to think about this.
18:37 Speaker 02 Okay.
18:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Let me table that for a moment.
18:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the value of a lullaby, for example, is not just soothing auditorily, it's soothing chemically, as you described.
18:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's the, what is the chemical?
18:49 Speaker 02 Prolactin.
18:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Prolactin, and what does that do?
18:51 Speaker 02 It's a soothing, tranquilizing hormone that calms you down.
18:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, is it hormone?
18:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a neurohormone.
18:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
18:58 Chuck Nice? So does different music then activate different parts of the brain?
19:03 Speaker 02 Yes.
19:04 Chuck Nice? Holy moly.
19:05 Speaker 02 Music activates every part of the brain that we have so far mapped.
19:09 Chuck Nice? Oh, my goodness. That's astounding.
19:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When you say activates, you mean all parts of your brain respond?
19:15 Speaker 02 But not, not all at once, not to every piece of music.
19:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
19:18 Chuck Nice? So, music regionalizes your brain.
19:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Would this account for why, because they say the same of smells, where you can hear a piece of music and it takes you right back to a time and a place? And you, everything is explicit, without you even trying to summon that memory?
19:33 Speaker 02 Depends on the music. Uh, so, uh, by that, I mean, the current theory of memory, the neurobiology of memory, is that everything you've experienced or thought gets in your memory. It's there, the problem is getting it out. And so what you need to get a memory out is what we call a retrieval cue. And that retrieval cue should be unique. So, if I sing you "Happy Birthday", that's not going to bring you back to a particular time.
19:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, not at all.
19:57 Speaker 02 You've associated with hundreds of different-
19:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, I heard that on my ninth birthday! Oh my gosh!
20:01 Speaker 02 Not gonna happen. But, if I play you "Nah Nah Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye", and you haven't heard that in a long time, or "Tears of a Clown", or something that you associate with a particular time in your life, you are brought back there because it's uniquely associated with that time in your life, like Proust's "Madeleine's", right?
20:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
20:18 Speaker 02 Or a smell.
20:19 Chuck Nice? That's pretty cool. I mean, is that why, and then this just popped in my head because of what you just said, Tony Bennett had Alzheimer's, and the thing that they said often about him was, even when he was in the midst of an episode where he could not remember even that he was Tony Bennett, he could sing his songs! You could start playing "I Left My Heart", and he would jump in,
20:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:49 Chuck Nice? and then he would start singing-
20:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? "My Heart in St. Louis",
20:52 Chuck Nice? Right.
20:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Almost worked!
20:56 Chuck Nice? That's messed up, man.
20:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I know, that's messed up. We should probably cut that, I don't know.
20:59 Chuck Nice? No, don't cut that, that's hilarious.
21:01 Speaker 02 That's, St. Louis is comedy gold.
21:06 Chuck Nice? But, so, I mean, do we, I mean, that, that's pretty wild. Is that the reason?
21:12 Speaker 02 We saw it with Glen Campbell, too.
21:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which is why he was able to perform well into the affliction that he suffered.
21:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I've had the opportunity, the privilege, to see his brain scans from when he was on the tour. Half of his brain was offline. The Alzheimer's had really made it so half of his brain, literally half his brain, was not functioning, but he was still the best guitarist on the planet, arguably, and could still remember the songs. He might do them two or three times in a row because he couldn't remember he had just done it.
21:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But the act of doing it was intact?
21:44 Speaker 02 Yes.
21:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is he drawing from the part of his brain that works? He must be.
21:47 Speaker 02 Well, so the interesting thing about brains is that they're massively...
21:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Any sentence that begins, "The interesting thing about brains." Is that everything? Here's an uninteresting thing about brains. All right, go on. Tell me something interesting about brains.
22:03 Speaker 02 They're massively redundant.
22:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I came to learn in recent years.
22:07 Speaker 02 So whatever circuits there are, they're massively redundant, and it makes evolutionary sense. If you get a hit in the head, you don't want to lose the ability to do important things. The other thing we talk about a lot in my field is cognitive reserve. And by analogy, if you're a marathon runner and you can run 26 miles, on a bad day with COVID and a sprained ankle, you can probably still run five miles faster than I can.
22:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
22:31 Speaker 02 You've got all this athletic reserve built up. Musculature, air capacity, not to mention willpower, right, to work through it. Musicians have cognitive reserve in the musical domain, and they have so much of it that you can lose lots and lots of circuits, and the other redundant circuits are still intact.
22:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting.
22:52 Speaker 02 And so what I said in my book Successful Aging and reiterated it in this...
22:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, when you lose half your brain, you might still be able to tell jokes.
22:58 Chuck Nice? I am, right now. What are you talking about? Might be able to. This is how I've made my entire living.
23:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the expression, "If you had half a brain, you'd be dangerous?"
23:09 Chuck Nice? I do have half a brain.
23:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I interrupted. Sorry, go on.
23:15 Speaker 02 If you learn an instrument at an older age, I write about this in Successful Aging, which was the previous book, but also reiterated here. It's never too late to learn an instrument. If you're 70, 80, not too late. And I'll tell you a story about that in a second. But it's neuroprotective. Neuroplasticity is the fancy word for making new neural pathways. We do that our whole lives. If you ever heard that, "Oh, you don't grow new neurons after..." No, not true.
23:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So even if you learn music at a later age, that will help this neuroplasticity?
23:47 Speaker 02 It's neuroprotective, and it means that by building up all this cognitive reserve, all these new pathways. For one thing, it's invigorating, and you get a sense of agency and really self-efficacy by learning something new. And you can then engage with some of the greatest works made by some of the greatest minds in history. The story of my grandmother, I think, is a very personal illustration of this. My grandmother was born in Berlin in 1897 and had to leave under the Nazis. My grandmother escaped with her three daughters and her husband. The rest of the family were all killed. On her 80th birthday, my grandmother told my mother and I that she was so grateful
24:30 Speaker 02 to be here in the United States, to have been able to raise three children here, to have a country that would take her in. And she said that she, ever since she came over in 1939, every single morning, in gratitude, she sang "God Bless America," a song written by another Jewish immigrant, Irving Berlin.
24:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So she would sing the song?
24:49 Speaker 02 Sing it. So my mother and I went out to Radio Shack and got her an $80 keyboard, electronic keyboard, and we put little pieces of tape on it with numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, so she could play the melody. And she played it every morning. And when we saw her on her 81st birthday, she had taken the tape off because she had memorized the right-hand part. On her 82nd birthday, she had worked out a rudimentary harmony with the left hand, and she played that song every morning until she died at 97. And I think that having learned the instrument, having a way to express gratitude, had a lot to do... It's an N of one, but it's a very powerful experience.
25:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, Daniel, you have a recent book. Published with.
25:36 Speaker 02 Norton.
25:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Norton?
25:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? WW Norton? That's who your publisher is?
25:43 Speaker 02 Yes.
25:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Anyone over 70 will get that reference.
25:47 Chuck Nice? If you're Eddie Murphy fan, you'll get it.
25:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh yeah, you'll get that from that one skit he did.
25:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm with WW Norton. I'm very happy.
25:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. I have a few books with WW Norton.
25:56 Speaker 02 I know you do. That was one part of the attraction for me.
25:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, is that right?
25:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Really?
26:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
26:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do I get 10%?
26:01 Chuck Nice? No.
26:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't aid in the back the publishers. So, in it, which has the beautiful title, "I Heard There Was A Secret Chord."
26:15 Speaker 02 That's great.
26:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a, that's, that's a beautiful song by, who wrote that?
26:20 Speaker 02 Leonard Cohen.
26:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Leonard Cohen. He's got that, "I heard there was a secret chord that pleased the Lord." And you just hear it, it's like, ooh, I gotta, it gives me the, not the willies.
26:31 Chuck Nice? But even, even without knowing the song, it makes you feel very Gwyneth Paltrow-esque.
26:38 Chuck Nice? You know?
26:41 Chuck Nice? I gotta get this book for some reason.
26:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it draws you to it. So.
26:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, we should, we should bundle this with Sales Of Goop.
26:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exactly. So you, you referred to a default mode network. What is that?
26:54 Speaker 02 This was one of the biggest findings in cognitive neuroscience in a generation, which was, "The brain wants to mind wander." Now, you might say, "This is something we always knew," but, you know, a lot of things we thought we knew turned out not to be true. And so the job of behavioral scientists, we have it a little bit easier than, than astrophysicists in that we have 20,000 years of history of people thinking that certain things are so, and then we can just test them and see if they really are or not. Folk tales and, and all the rest. So, the idea that the mind wants to wander. As opposed to paying attention now has some neurobiological basis. It takes energy to pay attention to something and to keep your mind from wandering.
27:39 Speaker 02 And by energy, I mean neurons need to work harder. They are metabolized with blood oxygenated glucose. Glucose is the fuel.
27:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And your brain is already a big consumer
27:49 Speaker 02 Yes, it is.
27:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? of your body's energy.
27:51 Speaker 02 It is.
27:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now even within that now, you're now dividing up the tasks
27:55 Speaker 02 Right.
27:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? for who's
27:56 Speaker 02 Well, that's exactly right.
27:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? energy intensive and who isn't.
27:57 Speaker 02 Paying attention to something, being engaged with something and making decisions uses up glucose. And the phrase paying attention is actually quite accurate. You're paying with glucose. And it's a limited capacity resource. When you've been paying attention to something for a while, your attention flags. Your brain, your mind starts to wander. This is called the default mode network. It was discovered by my colleague and collaborator, Vinod Menon at Stanford. And it's a very important thing to understand because it's in the default mode when our minds are wandering that most problem solving gets done. Now, if you think about it, it should be obvious because if I'm trying to solve a problem and it eludes me, it must mean in most cases that the solution is nonlinear.
28:42 Speaker 02 It's not just connecting A to B, two things that I knew. It's having to come up with a nonlinear solution. And those typically happen while we're asleep and dreaming. Another manifestation of the default mode, as it were.
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because dreams can get really random.
28:57 Speaker 02 They can.
28:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
28:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. But that's where you get all this nonlinear, out of the box thinking. Or you're walking down the supermarket aisle looking for the Cheerios and suddenly it comes to you, the solution. So getting into the default mode happens automatically when we've worked too hard unless we try to fight it. But you can get into it by doing three things. Meditating, walking in nature, or listening to music.
29:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I think everything we've described thus far has been known to us all. The mood setting, the memory, jogging, the what role it can play in our states of mind. Where does medicine come in? Where there's something wrong with you, measured by doctors, and then
29:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Music fixes it, or alleviates it.
29:45 Speaker 02 So this is the book I wanted to write 20 years ago when I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music, but there was not enough evidence for medical applications of music.
29:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, this is a good scientist speaking here. Not enough evidence? I'm not gonna go out there and do it.
29:56 Speaker 02 No, not at all.
29:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, you know how many people don't think that way and they've started YouTube channel?
30:00 Speaker 02 All of them.
30:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All of them?
30:02 Chuck Nice? All of them. That's every YouTuber that you... Just turn on YouTube and you're looking at that.
30:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
30:07 Speaker 02 No, no, the evidence was weak and I didn't want to go there. It's... What you and I share, I think, is a feeling of an ethical commitment. If we're doing science and we're taking grant money, ultimately that either comes from governmental agencies or from tax breaks to private foundations, meaning the taxpayer funds scientific research. You and I believe that every scientist has an ethical obligation to explain how we're spending taxpayer money. And so I don't want to spend taxpayer money saying stuff that ain't so.
30:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So now we've got this book.
30:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a lot of foundation for your statements. Give me a short list of some of the ailments that have been alleviated by music.
30:50 Speaker 02 I'll start with wellness. So music boosts the immune system, particularly immunoglobulin A. IgA is responsible for fighting off infections of the mucosal system, such as COVID or colds. Music also boosts the production of natural killer cells, NK cells, and T cells, which travel to the site of... to fight an infection.
31:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The most sickly people in the world are people who never listen to music, is that?
31:13 Speaker 02 Well, we...
31:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is the inverse true as well?
31:16 Speaker 02 Well, we're talking about significant but small effects. I mean, and certainly there are always exceptions in the tails of the distribution.
31:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So quantify your statement that it improves your resistance, your wellness. Quantify that.
31:30 Speaker 02 You mean like P less than .05?
31:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I mean... How much of an effect does it have on your immune system?
31:37 Speaker 02 For example, it can boost the immune system better than, say, echinacea or vitamin C or all these things that people-
31:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alright, so if I might have gotten five colds this year and I listen to music, would I get four colds?
31:49 Speaker 02 We don't know. We don't know. These-
31:51 Chuck Nice? Well, you'll get five colds, but they just won't be as bad.
31:54 Speaker 02 Well, that's right. I mean-
31:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That can happen too.
31:56 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
31:57 Speaker 02 We don't really know. And I can't, I don't want to claim that we do.
32:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
32:01 Speaker 02 But we know in clinical studies and in laboratory studies that IgA, for example, NK and T cells are increased. Now, at that point, whether they're successful at fending off a disease or not, there's a lot of other variables.
32:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so it's one thing to say that these things are improved.
32:19 Speaker 02 Yes.
32:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's separate to actually do the clinical trials.
32:22 Chuck Nice? But there is a logical progression, though.
32:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You'd expect it.
32:25 Chuck Nice? Right.
32:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You'd expect a logical progression. Alright, so that's one thing. So your wellness?
32:29 Speaker 02 Parkinson's disease.
32:30 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
32:31 Speaker 02 Parkinson's disease is characterized by degradation of cells in the basal ganglia.
32:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've seen brain maps, brain-
32:39 Speaker 02 Some back here.
32:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, at the base underneath in there.
32:42 Speaker 02 Exactly right.
32:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Basal-
32:43 Speaker 02 Ganglia.
32:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ganglia, yeah.
32:45 Speaker 02 A group of subcortical nuclei that are connected to the brain's own internal clock. So what happens is dopamine is normally used for signaling and transmission of information in this cluster of neurons.
32:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's in dopamine in-
33:00 Chuck Nice? The feel-good.
33:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a feel-good-
33:02 Chuck Nice? Chemical.
33:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Neurochemical. Neurochemical.
33:04 Speaker 02 Well, so that's an interesting thing. Dopamine is throughout the brain and it does different things in different parts of the brain. When you're experiencing pleasure and dopamine is released in the limbic system, including the ventral tagmental area, you feel pleasure. So dopamine does different things in different places and it helps to maintain a steady gait and synchronize circuits that are required for walking, for movement. And that's degraded in Parkinson's. And so we give them L-dopa, which is supposed to promote dopamine.
33:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to be clear, when Parkinson's is advanced enough, you're basically wheelchair-bound.
33:40 Speaker 02 Right. And it starts, the first signs might be shuffling when you're walking, dragging your feet, an inability to maintain a steady gait. Sometimes you try to walk and you end up running. Sometimes you walk and you end up freezing, or you can't get started. This is called fenestation.
33:55 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
33:56 Speaker 02 And what we find is that if you play music for people that's at the tempo of their natural gait- That activates a subsidiary redundant circuit. So we've got populations of neurons that fire in synchrony to music, that entrain to the music, and predict where the next beat's gonna be.
34:16 Chuck Nice? Right.
34:17 Speaker 02 And that allows Parkinson's patients to walk smoothly. There's a technique called rhythmic auditory stimulation, developed by a colleague of mine named Michael Tout at University of Toronto. He was at Colorado State when he developed it.
34:30 Chuck Nice? And let me guess, that's where you play the Bee Gees.
34:33 Speaker 02 You can't tell by the way I use my walk. That's exactly right. Or any music by NSYNC. You play the music at the right tempo, and the neurons start firing, and they can maintain a steady gait. And after a course of this therapy, some Parkinson's patients are able to get rid of their crutches and walkers and walk for months.
34:57 Chuck Nice? Whoa.
34:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this music is a way to get in the brain without having to do so pharmacologically? Because I can imagine a future where, wait a minute, that other part of the brain remembers how you used to walk, and it's being overridden by this. Let me go in there, nip-tuck, suppress this, boost that, and now you're done. Maybe that day will come.
35:17 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But until then, your music is filling that gap.
35:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. Another interesting case is chronic pain. Or acute pain, any kind of pain.
35:26 Chuck Nice? Ooh, okay.
35:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tell me about that.
35:28 Speaker 02 So pain is a $680 million drain on the annual economy of the US.
35:33 Chuck Nice? Well, then, music doesn't stand a chance.
35:36 Speaker 02 It's the number one reason people visit.
35:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm surprised it's only 680 million.
35:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, when you think of painkillers, pain relievers, people with chronic pain, and the whole...
35:45 Speaker 02 Oxycontin.
35:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's all about pain management.
35:48 Speaker 02 Conservative number.
35:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
35:49 Speaker 02 It's the number one reason people go to the doctor. Doctors report that 80% of their patients come in and say, "It hurts here." That 80% of doctor visits, "It hurts." How do we treat pain? We use two things that we've been using for thousands of years. The bark of a tree, or its synthetic equivalents, which is aspirin. Or, you know, something from a poppy, or its synthetic equivalent, heroin, opiates, opium. My lab was the first to show that when people listen to music they like, doesn't matter whether it's heavy metal, or hip-hop, or classical, or jazz, R&B, if it's music they like... The brain produces its own endogenous opiates.
36:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind me what endogenous means.
36:30 Speaker 02 Internal to the brain, its own.
36:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You could've just said internal.
36:33 Speaker 02 We use the word endogenous because we're fancy.
36:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, in my field, we see spots on the sun, we call them sunspots, okay? We're like, tell it like we see it.
36:43 Chuck Nice? But the sun calls them endogenous sunspots.
36:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so it's endogenous, keep going.
36:53 Speaker 02 The brain's producing its own opioids, and they help to ease pain. Now, it's not producing them in pharmaceutical levels, but in sufficient levels that instead of having an oxycontin addiction, you might have been able to get away with, say, an Advil and music, or maybe a very small, much smaller dose of opiates for a much shorter amount of time. The whole opioid crisis could potentially have been averted.
37:17 Chuck Nice? Whether it anesthetizes you, it can definitely help with pain management.
37:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a point.
37:24 Chuck Nice? That's right. You can do it either way. It can either be the painkiller, or it can just assist the painkiller, it doesn't make a difference.
37:33 Speaker 02 Well, that's right, it doesn't make a difference.
37:33 Chuck Nice? Wow.
37:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How about any other sort of neurokinetic afflictions that might be touched by music?
37:58 Speaker 02 Multiple sclerosis arises, you know, the neurons have an insulating sheath, like the wiring in your house is insulated. And it's because they're sending electrical signals, and you need the insulation so they don't interfere with each other and all of this. The myelin sheath is a white fatty tissue, which is why we call it white matter. And multiple sclerosis is a loss of myelination.
38:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ouch, ooh.
38:23 Chuck Nice? That sounds terrible.
38:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you have cross-circuits?
38:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Short-circuiting of your brain signals?
38:29 Speaker 02 But music can help with the movement disorders of multiple sclerosis, and another kind of movement disorder is stuttering.
38:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it's mostly in boys?
38:38 Speaker 02 It is mostly in boys, we don't really know why, but it's an inability to speak smoothly, and we think, again, it has to do with timing circuits and an internal clock gone awry. And music kind of hijacks the system with a steady tempo.
38:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Isn't that helpful for people such as yourself, professional neuroscientists, to one day find a way to get inside the brain and fix that problem?
39:04 Speaker 02 Well, we are inside the brain now. My colleague Eddie Chang and my other colleague Bob Knight, both in California and the San Francisco Bay Area, have implanted arrays of electrodes inside.
39:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm ready for that to fix everything.
39:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, I mean, it's astonishing what it's doing. So the way this happens is that there are people with epilepsy, which is uncontrolled electrical activity that causes seizures. Some of them volunteer to be in our experiments. And from that, we can do in humans what we've been doing for 100 years in animals, which is to measure from single cells at a time. And so, you know, it's not far off where we will figure out where the stuttering cells are and maybe be able to treat it.
39:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And treat that. And how about Tourette's Syndrome?
39:44 Speaker 02 Yes.
39:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, well, tell me about that.
39:46 Speaker 02 Tourette's disease is debilitating. Almost every case is accompanied by tics, unwanted motor movements, facial tics and body jerking. It's often thought of as the disorder in which people swear uncontrollably. But that's not present in all the cases.
40:04 Chuck Nice? Yeah, I read somewhere that was the rarest of the...
40:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is.
40:08 Chuck Nice? Oh, is that right? That's the rarest of Tourette's, where people actually swear uncontrollably. The tics, and often what they do is make sounds.
40:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
40:16 Chuck Nice? Instead of swearing, they're like, "Woo!"
40:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. That's right.
40:19 Chuck Nice? You know, something like that.
40:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Music can help that, too?
40:22 Speaker 02 It seems so. So I write about the musician...
40:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What do you mean "seems so"? You're a scientist sitting in my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.
40:31 Chuck Nice? Don't you know you're supposed to lie?
40:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't ask you a question saying, "Well, it seems to be the case." Anybody could say that. Tell me something out of your lab that has some statistical integrity.
40:45 Speaker 02 Well, so here, we're talking about a collection of anecdotes. And the plural of an anecdote is not data.
40:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, that's a good line.
40:55 Chuck Nice? That was a very good line. I liked that.
40:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a good line.
40:57 Speaker 02 But there are a number of cases that... From anecdotes comes studies. So the case of Billie Eilish is a perfect example. Popular contemporary singer, she has Tourette's. And she finds that when she's singing...
41:12 Speaker 02 The Tourette's seems to go away. Seems to, because she's not keeping a log, she's not being observed and monitored. But from these observations of people like Billie Eilish and others, grant applications will go into the NIH. I'm part of a panel that's been working with the NIH and the White House Science Office.
41:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? National Institutes of Health.
41:30 Speaker 02 Francis Collins has been a big promoter of this work.
41:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Though no longer head of NIH, is that correct?
41:35 Speaker 02 He's been in the White House Science Office now.
41:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, got it.
41:38 Speaker 02 And he's working on eradicating Hep C, but he convened a meeting of 50 scientists in DC last December on music and medicine.
41:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
41:48 Speaker 02 And he entrusted me to help him choose scientists who would be there. We also invited professional musicians.
41:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you get to tap some of that budget that's allocated to non-traditional medicine?
42:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, so there's an Institute for Alternative and Complementary Medicine, and Emmeline Edwards runs the place, and she is terrific.
42:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because the NIH has a budget line.
42:09 Speaker 02 Oh, they do.
42:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For that, right.
42:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, so they, but it's also the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the NIA, the Addiction Agency, National Cancer Institute. I think most of the 26 institutes now are interested in music as medicine. For one thing, because it's potentially a huge cost saver. And the best example of economy is this. If you go to get surgery, it's likely that in the pre-operating theater, they're going to give you Valium, a benzodiazepine, to relax you before they anesthetize you, because knocking you out and relaxing you are two different things. They're not the same thing. That Valium that might cost $5 at the CVS on the corner with the Duane Reade or whatever, in a hospital, the average cost is, you know what? $750.
42:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
42:56 Speaker 02 Same pill.
42:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Same pill.
42:58 Speaker 02 You've got compliance, you've got regulations, you've got all kinds of reporting that needs to be done, and you've got, you know...
43:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Overhead.
43:05 Speaker 02 It's ridiculous. But a number of studies have now shown that if you play people relaxing music that they themselves chose, this is an important point. You can't foist music therapy on somebody using music they don't like.
43:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting.
43:20 Speaker 02 That has the opposite effect.
43:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I'm intrigued that this is all in progress and it's active. It's an active field of research, all of this.
43:28 Speaker 02 Very much so.
43:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very much so. Last thing, just to close out where we're going here. Tell me about memory. How does memory work?
43:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like if I took a snapshot, as a physicist, and I come to your brain, and I just look at the state of every neuron, am I gonna know what memories lurk hidden within your neurochemistry?
43:54 Chuck Nice? I used to know, but I forgot.
43:58 Speaker 02 That was too easy.
43:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was really low hanging.
44:00 Speaker 02 That is beneath you.
44:02 Chuck Nice? Lowest hanging, that was.
44:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That was windfall on the ground.
44:05 Chuck Nice? Yes, that's not even, right, yes, that's called bending down and picking up an apple. It's not even low hanging.
44:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It matters when people claim, or at least hope that one day we can upload your brain into a computer. You have to upload the configuration of every cell that is storing information that we would call memory.
44:25 Speaker 02 Right, so this is the idea of the connectome, which Sebastian Tsung at Princeton and others have been working on.
44:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a recent term, right? The connectome, yes.
44:33 Speaker 02 And the idea is it's parallel to the genome. It's not enough to know where all the neurons are or what they do. You have to know how they connect to one another and what state they're in at any given time.
44:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what is it about the state of your neurons that preserves a memory?
44:48 Speaker 02 So here's what we think. I mean, this is speculation. When you experience something, for example, you're looking at a sunset, you're listening to music, you're drinking a nice glass of red wine. That's an experience, and the experience is delivered to you beginning with some stimulation impinging on your sensory receptors, setting off a cascade of neurochemical, neuroelectrical activity. And so there's some group of neurons that are delivering that experience. If it's wine, it's the taste buds and your olfactory system and the olfactory bulb, and it presents it to somewhere in your brain that has self-consciousness and awareness in the prefrontal cortex of what's happening.
45:31 Speaker 02 If you were to later remember that experience, as I say, my lab and other labs have shown that it's the same neural family, the same group of neurons, the same pattern, that are activated in the memory. So what allows you to distinguish a memory from an actual event? It appears, we think, there are neurochemical tags that get attached to an event when it gets stored in memory. So that when you pull it out, you know that it's a memory and not an actual event. This is evolutionarily very important because same thing happens when you dream. There are neurochemical tags that say this is a dream because otherwise I might dream that you punched me in the nose and then I come to see you and I don't know that that's not reality.
46:15 Speaker 02 And that could lead to another punch in the nose.
46:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would say where's the evidence?
46:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of you getting punched in the nose?
46:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what then of the, what's that movie with Arnold was in it?
46:25 Speaker 02 Total Recall.
46:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Total Recall. Instead of paying for an expensive vacation, you would sit down in some doctor's chair and they would implant the memory of you having had the vacation.
46:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
46:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that would be just as good. Oh, remember we were on the beach and we found the shells? And yeah, that was great. And it costs you 20 bucks instead of $2,000.
46:45 Speaker 02 My colleague Danny and collaborator Danny Kahneman recently passed away. Nobel Prize winning psychologist who won the Nobel in Economics for his study of, studies of how human beings are irrational, how the brain is irrational and he documented.
47:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did he need to have a study to show that we're irrational? Come on now.
47:04 Speaker 02 Well, he had, he catalogued the different kinds of irrationality.
47:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's pretty cool. Okay. It's not good enough just to know we're all irrational. Right. What category irrationality are you? That's good work there.
47:18 Speaker 02 And one of them was that when studying vacations, people were told you could have the most fantastic vacation of your life, but you won't remember it, but it'll be free. Or it'll, it'll be not as good a vacation, it'll cost you a lot of money, but you will remember it, which would you prefer? People prefer to have the one they can remember.
47:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
47:40 Speaker 02 A big part of going on vacation is not just to have the anticipation of it, but the memory for years or decades later. So you get to an interesting point. If you could just have the memory, but not the experience, I suppose that would be something. But I am still, as a musician, as an artist, I can't defend this scientifically.
48:04 Speaker 02 But I feel like a virtual vacation, an implanted vacation, would be like AI-generated music. It would be like fake flowers at a hotel lobby. Looks fine from a distance, but when you get close enough to realize it doesn't have a nice scent or a nice texture. You've got this uncanny valley between what is real and what is not, and you don't want the false one.
48:26 Chuck Nice? Well, I've had enough experiences in my life where people told me I had a good time.
48:33 Chuck Nice? But I for sure cannot remember.
48:35 Speaker 02 Was single malt scotch involved?
48:39 Chuck Nice? Very much so.
48:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One last thing about memory, I heard about this when I was in college, and I assumed, but then I didn't hear about it again, that you are more likely to remember something you learned by reproducing the state of mind you were in at the time you learned it. So if you're studying your chemistry book while you're high, you're better off taking the exam while you're high.
49:04 Speaker 02 Yep.
49:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that true?
49:05 Chuck Nice? And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, I failed out of college.
49:10 Speaker 02 You didn't smoke enough, Bob.
49:11 Chuck Nice? You didn't smoke enough weed.
49:13 Speaker 02 This is called state-dependent memory retrieval. It was discovered by my, one of my teachers, Gordon Bauer, at Stanford.
49:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And when, when did that happen?
49:20 Speaker 02 Oh, we discovered it in the 70s.
49:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm, I'm, I'm old enough to have been in college in the 70s, and that's when I remembered this coming out.
49:28 Speaker 02 This was a big finding. I mean, the idea is if you study in one classroom, you're going to remember the material better if you're tested in the same classroom. And it has to do, again, with retrieval cues.
49:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And he called it what, he had a term?
49:39 Speaker 02 State-dependent memory retrieval. One of the experiments they did was parachutists. You learn a bunch of unrelated words while you're falling out of an airplane, and then you try to recall it either on the ground or falling out of an airplane again. And it turned out, the finding wasn't as strong as they thought, because it was not the actual physical state of being in an airplane. It was the state of arousal, of being that energized and...
50:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so not a complete duplicate of your scenario?
50:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a duplication of your emotional state?
50:12 Speaker 02 Emotional state. But this is the reason why depression is so hard to treat. People who are depressed only remember the sad times of their lives.
50:20 Chuck Nice? Right.
50:21 Speaker 02 It's very hard for them to get access to the happy memories. And they think, "Oh, I was never happy."
50:25 Chuck Nice? Which means they can't draw upon those good times
50:28 Speaker 02 Right.
50:29 Chuck Nice? in the face of bad times to counter it. It's just like, "Oh, it's, everything's bad all the time."
50:35 Speaker 02 But music can help here. One of the promising things that I'm working on with a group at UCLA is treating drug-resistant depression with drugs and talk therapy and music. And if you play somebody who's depressed a happy song, that makes them feel worse. If you're depressed, usually it's because in some sense you feel misunderstood by the world, or by others, or by people in your life. And you put on a happy song, and that's just one more person who does not understand you, and you're furious.
51:05 Chuck Nice? Why you rubbing it in my face?
51:06 Speaker 02 Right. You put on a sad song, and suddenly, there's somebody there staring into the abyss with you, at your side. And not only do they understand how you feel, but they've been through it, and they came out the other side and created a beautiful work of art.
51:25 Chuck Nice? So Daniel, this has been a delight.
51:26 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me here.
51:28 Chuck Nice? And...
51:28 Speaker 02 At the Hayden Planetarium.
51:29 Chuck Nice? Good luck with the tour.
51:30 Speaker 02 Thank you very much.
51:31 Chuck Nice? Chuck, always good to have you here.
51:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Always a pleasure.
51:33 Chuck Nice? And Gary, get well soon. Thanks for taking us into this topic. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.
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