Janae Marie Kroc - Off the Rack - Episode #57

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. Indre Viscontez is such an amazing person. She wrote a book, How Music Can Make You Better. Well, how does she know? She's both an opera singer and a neuroscientist. She's a professor of psychology, and we talk a variety of fascinating subjects on the topics of both music and neuroscience. What neurochemicals are triggered by what types of songs? How do you make a song that's a hit? How do you get better at music? Where where we talk about, you know, one of my favorite topics, the 10000 hour rule. And we just talk about music in general and really fun talk. Here's Indre. So I have Indre Viscon Tess, who is both a neuroscientist and an opera singer, and she's a professor of psychology at, was it University of San Francisco or San Francisco University? I always forget these things. University of San Francisco, USF. Yep. And you wrote this excellent book, How Music Can Make You Better. And I listen to music all day long, and I wanna figure out if it's making me better or not and how I can make it even, myself even better from all the time I spend listening. But, what I like about your background is that you've gone down 2 totally different fields, opera singing and neuroscience. I mean, you could, one could connect the dots and figure out how they're connected, but you've you did it. You went down both fields, which I think a lot of people are afraid to do. Everyone always says, oh, focus on one thing, and then, you know, do your do your thing with that. But you did a good job intersecting them, and you wrote this book, How Music Can Make You Better, and you talk about a lot of the neuroscience of music. And it's also part of your your podcast, which we could talk about, and I'm assuming your your studies and what you teach. But, and also, I like the fact that this is a small book. It's only around a 100 pages. How did this book come about? Yeah. It's only 15,000 words. It actually came out of a podcast. So a while back, I was just starting to think that maybe I need to be a little bit more, deliberate about how I bridge music and neuroscience. And, you know, I I kept for a long time, I just was, like, really reluctant to use neuroscience to to reduce music to a bunch of processes or, you know, brain regions or whatever. Just it just, like, took the magic away for me. And, then I decided to ask the question in a completely in the opposite way. Like, what what actually what can music tell me about neuroscience? What what can this love affair that we have with music tell us about what it means to be human and, you know, our behavior? And so I I I started to explore this topic by doing a podcast because that's how you can get people to talk to you. Right. You can't just call people up and Yeah. And, like, I can't call up, I don't know, the president or a presidential candidate, and they say, hey. I have some questions for you. Can you just talk to me by myself? But if you say, hey. I have a podcast, then you have a decent chance of them responding. Yep. Exactly. Totally the reason to do a podcast. So totally. It's a great reason. And so and you have great conversations with people. And so, anyway, so so I started the the podcast. And then at Chronicle, who's the publisher, they were creating this series of books about sort of art and culture and how it it sort of makes our lives more interesting. And so the first book in the series was called How Art Can Make You Happy. It's supposed to be kinda like the slightly nonintuitive way of looking at the the particular piece of culture. And so they were looking for someone to write a book about music, and they listened to this season of my podcast and reached out to me, which never happens to an author. Right? It's like, you're the one who's bank trying to bang down the doors of publishers. But they reached out to me and was, like were asked me if I would be interested in writing this book, and I I said absolutely. And so it was a real delight, to write this little 15,000 word book on a topic that, was very near and dear to my heart, but also to take it from the approach of, you know, what what can we learn about about ourselves through the process? And so as my mother says, like, how can music make you better at what? You know, I intentionally left it open ended because I wanted to learn, as I was writing the book, but also I want people to sort of bring their own kind of thoughts to it and and the sense that music is something that is ubiquitous in our lives. It's a tool that we use for many different purposes, and it can make our lives better in many different ways. Right. And I I think in this book, you start to get to the core of how primal music is. Because I think that's always a big question. Like, do we happen to just randomly like certain kinds of music and certain chords? Or is there something primal in us that makes something one piece of music a hit and another piece of music not a hit, and and so on? And you start to cover these issues and explain the brain processes behind them. But first, opera singer to neuroscientist, what happened? Did you were you were you, like, a little kid, opera singer, and then got interested in the brain? What how did you become an opera singer? I mean, yeah. Kind of. So I was, yeah. I was a little kid, who loved to sing. And actually, one of the first videos of me singing shows that I did not have any talent. I was totally off key. It's it's actually really funny how bad how bad it was. And, but my mom is a choral conductor, and so she always thought, you know, singing was a great way to spend your time. And she sent me out to an audition for the best children's choir in Toronto, where I was, a kid growing up. And I didn't get in because I clearly had no pitch. And, then there was, like, the Rugrat Choir, which happened to be the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus. That's where all the people who didn't get into the Toronto Children's Chorus went. Although if you ask them, I'm sure they would be, you know, horrified at that characterization. But the best part was is that these were all theater kids. It wasn't just, you know, people who, you know, sang perfectly in tune, you know, with wearing all the right robes and everything. It was kids who wanted to run around stage and, be actors. And so I really found my people in the Canadian Children's Opera course. Right. Right. Because opera is basically the intersection between music and theater. Yeah. So it's like, you have a bunch of intersections happening here. Yeah. Exactly. And and choral singing is very different from opera singing. Opera singing, you know, you're a soloist. You want your voice to be heard. In choral singing, you wanna blend. And so I was definitely more of the outlier. You wanted to be heard. I wanted to be heard. But my mom is a choral conductor. She was a musician, and she knew how difficult it was to make a living as a musician. Both my parents were immigrants. You know, there was no money in our family. And so this idea that I would go off and spend a whole bunch of money on a degree that wouldn't get me a good job was just not tenable. So, they said, well, you you know, you're smart. You should go and be a doctor because that's you know, doctors make money. So, and they help people. So it's, like, doubly good. And so I was premed for a while, and as I was, in high school, I found the writings of Oliver Sacks. And like so many it's now a cliche. So many people who go into neuroscience or neurology say, you know, his writings really influenced the way that I think about the brain and the passion passion I bring to neuroscience. Let let me ask you about that because I feel like what Oliver Sacks brought to the public perception of neuroscience is not knowledge of neuroscience, but knowledge of how much we don't know. So, like, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, for instance, it's it's not So, like, the man who mistook his wife for a hat, for instance, it's it's not so much that there's a man out there who thought his wife was a hat. It's that there's something in the brain that made it so that this person, no matter how you try to convince them, he thought his wife was his hat. Yeah. And and so there's this mystery that despite all of our thousands of years of science, we still can't figure out this basic obvious thing in the brain, which is, of course, his wife is not a hat, but he still thinks his wife is a hat. Yeah. And in fact, that's an opera that I just I recently directed it a couple years ago, and and it it's it's just a a brilliant look into both the life of Oliver and of, you know, this this whole Alzheimer's disease, which is what the character suffers from. But yeah. So I actually got to know Oliver later on in life, and he he always there was a part of him that that really always felt like an outsider in neuroscience and neurology and that he was never quite fully accepted into that kind of academic area because of the way that he questioned things and because of the way he sort of asked asked us what we can learn, from people who are instead of focusing on their disorder, what is it that is different about their behavior, about their experience after they have, you know, a dreaded disease or or something else? And that really resonated with me, this idea that, you know, every person has a very different experience depending on the the neuroanatomy of their brain, but also how they grew up and how it was all wired up together, etcetera, and what we can learn about ourselves by looking deeply inside the brains of other people. Well, you you bring up this point in the book about, I guess it was Gabby Giffords, the the congresswoman who got shot, and she couldn't speak. She had trouble, saying words. But then when the doctor asked her to sing the words, she was it was it was like a different part of the brain got activated. So she was able to sing, you know, you know, understanding this about the brain allowed her to basically communicate again. Yeah. She couldn't say the word light. Light. And so all you know, her music therapist or speech therapist started singing, this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. And she sang it perfectly. I mean, not in tune, which is kind of interesting, but she said the word light multiple times in a row perfectly well. And there's actually a video of this that your listeners can can watch. You know, and so so that's really interesting because it suggests that it's not a motor problem. It's not like she can't you know, her her some there's some paralysis that she can't control the muscles. It's just that when she's trying to access that word that using her speech centers, there's a block. But if you use your, you know, music network, it it it pops in there, and it's it's fascinating that the brain has all these redundancies. But we shouldn't be surprised because mother nature is a tinkerer, not a designer. So, you know, there's a lot of things that our brains do that are redundant. But in this case, you know, that's why I talk about music. I I really like how Ani Patel talks about it as a tool rather than, you know, something that our brains evolved to do. It's like we use fire to make food and keep ourselves warm, but, ultimately, it's what also allows us to not have to spend all of our time searching for, you know, foraging for for raw food, and kind of, you know, set the set the ability for us to become civilized. I think music has a lot of that in it when it comes to how we understand each other, how we can process each other's emotions. You know, if you think about, like, when you're teaching your kids, to speak when they're infants, like, they don't know what you're saying. It doesn't even matter what language you use, but what matters is the cadence of your speech. Right? The melody in it. That's what That's what matters when I'm teaching my kids to speak? Well, when they're babies. Yeah. Right? Because you can start you can say anything to them. But if you say it meaningfully, and by that, I mean, the the they know the meaning of the emotion by the way you say it. Right? Like, if you say it in an angry way, they know it's they did something bad. If you say it in a sweet, loving way, they know that it's something rewarding and good. It doesn't matter what words you use. You could make up your own language. And they Man, I wish I wish my parents had taught me to read using music then. I remember my mom I was, like, 4 years old, and I distinctly remember my mom just throwing a book in front of me and screaming, read. And that really didn't work. Took me a while to read. Yeah. I mean, so so reading is a whole other thing that's much more evolutionarily new compared to music. I mean, we've been singing probably, you know, for 100 of 1000 of years. We've only been reading, most of us, for, like, 600 years. Right? Well, which makes sense because, like, sound obviously has been around forever. And one one thing that, occurred to me I mean, you you write about this in the book, but is that the human brain wants to find patterns in the chaos. And so, you know, you could look at storytelling, you could look at comedy, you could look at music, but music's very pure in this, in that there's a bunch of sounds, and we find the pattern. We find the melody. We find the parts that we like and dislike. We find some meaning in the music. And I thought that was very interesting because you figure the entire universe goes towards entropy, towards chaos, and yet what makes us human, what get which gives us what gives us power as a species is that we can despite everything chaotic, we can find this this pattern in the thing in the sounds around us, for instance. And we can find meaning in them. I I mean, to me, that I think it's really interesting to take that, you know, even a step further and think about the fact that until it has meaning, it's not music. Right? Like, you can turn silence into music by ascribing meaning to it or, you know, any you can you can say a phrase over and over and over again, and it becomes music because of the pattern, because we've sort of found the meaning in it. So you're referring to, for instance, to John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds piece, which is all silence, and so you hear the audience's, sounds and moving and coughing and whispering. And so we're ascribing meaning to that musical piece, but I sort of feel like that's more intellectual. Like, we say, okay, silence is music here. And we intellectually think, oh, that's cute that he's doing that. But that's a little different than, like, Hotel California, which is somehow, you know, by the Eagles, which is somehow like, primally this classic song that's, you know, survived the past few decades is one of the the the almost cliched best songs, around. Yeah. And but I so I think maybe even a better example, is Diana Deutsch's speech to song illusion where she says a phrase, the sounds as they appear to you are not only different, and and she says it over and over again. And the last part of the phrase is, but sometimes behave so strangely as to seem quite impossible. And if you repeat that loop over and over and over again, eventually it sounds as if she's singing it. And then if you hear the whole phrase again, your brain makes the the, assumption that she begins singing the phrase when she gets to those words. And that's only because you have now found a pattern in and that the meaning of those words has changed. It's no longer just the actual semantics behind what she's saying. It's the pattern and the melody and the rhythm, you know, that that now you're like, oh, well, that's music. A lot of us probably did this as kids where we just start I mean, look at baby shark. Right? Do do you know, like, it's it's it's not it's not music until you kind of repeat it over and over again, and then it becomes this pattern. And then it becomes more than just the doo doo doos and the baby sharks. Right? It becomes this, like, other thing. Yeah. So so, I'm curious. What's what's primal in music? So for instance, when we hear minor chords in a song, we think it's like a sad sound. Is this does this hold over all cultures? So, like, no matter where you are, if you're, an aboriginal in Australia, or you're, you know, live in New York City, do you do you feel sad when you hear a minor chord no matter where you're born, no no matter where you're from? Yeah. So these kinds of studies are really hard to do because there's so few people that have never been influenced by Western culture. So, yes, if you ask people who, you know, come from different cultures, you often will find agreement on things like, minor chord sounds sad or, you know, slow music, is more likely to be sad than uptempo music, and certain characteristics. But, there's some evidence coming from people who have, like, virtually no, no no contact with the western world where they don't even hear octaves in the same way, which for you and me, for our ears, octaves, we can we can find we can agree that they are essentially the same note, but in different octaves. So if we can't even agree on the fact that octaves are primal, I don't know how well we can answer your question because I just don't think that there is enough there are enough people out there that haven't been influenced by Western music, and music is everywhere in Western culture. What about if someone was deaf and now suddenly they can hear? So they have some surgery and now suddenly they can hear. Have there been any studies done on, their musical tastes or abilities? Yeah. So interestingly, for one thing, it they don't just immediately they're not just immediately able to hear and make sense of noise because a big part of your brain's ability to process sound is learned and happens with experience. So, like, for example, if you restore hearing in a person who is who is deaf, regardless of whether they were born, hard of hearing, like, with a cochlear implant, for example, there will be a period of time when, in fact, noise is very aversive to them because they can't make sense of it. It's almost like restoring vision and everything looks blurry. You can't tell the difference between, you know, shapes. So they have to be trained to listen. And cochlear implant patients, interestingly enough, even though they eventually can, often listen hear speech, quite well and and respond sort of you wouldn't even notice necessarily that they're hard of hearing, music remains elusive to them. And so, you know, I I've actually interviewed a couple of these patients, and I've worked with a few of them, and everybody is different. Every person's individual experience is different. But for example, one of the, patients that really stuck by me, was this man who lost his hearing when he was a teenager and then eventually had a cochlear implant. And he could you know, you we had a podcast conversation with him. And so he could hear me perfectly fine. I could hear him perfectly fine. Like, we had a conversation. So imagine, like, how much auditory discrimination that takes to be able to do that. Like, you that's pretty amazing that he could do that. And that he could he could never understand why anybody would pay a dime for music. He was just like, I don't get it. He's like, I I I don't you know, it's like if I'm gonna go outdoors to a a a orchestra concert in the park and I'll have a picnic, well, that's kind of nice, but why would you pay for that? Like, he just couldn't understand the value that people place on music. Well, I guess he makes sense now because I I don't I can't remember the last time I paid for music. So I just listened to everything on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I mean, there's there's there's that side of it. But I think, you know, for him, he just he just couldn't it didn't feel it didn't sound beautiful to him, and I think that's because in these patients, there is a lot of work that the brain still has to do to to find the patterns, to find the meaning in music that for those of us who have grown up with, you know, decent hearing and in a culture in which we're exposed to music, it it it feels natural. It feels intuitive because we don't have to think about it unless, you know, we're listening to John Cage or, you know, some 20 20th century composed music, whatever you wanna call it. But, Well well well, you mentioned you mentioned in the book that, you know, babies like very simple musical structures and a lot of repetition. You know, you can think of, like, Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. And then, And then on the other end of the spectrum, there's stuff that's too complex that you have to really know music. Like, you have to have studied music to really appreciate it. And then there's the huge landscape in the middle, which is what we hear on the radio, and it's music that we can appreciate after, you know, 1 or a few listens, and so on. And I like this idea that, it's, I was thinking of this while reading your book, is that music's almost this safe way to experience both tragedy or heroism or all these other emotions that might be complicated in real life, but music gives us this tiny experience of it in the brain. Like, when I hear a really sad song, you could even cry when you hear a sad song. So it's like a safe way to experience sadness without any event happening that's that's sad. So may maybe that's, like, a purpose of music in our in our lives. Yeah. I mean, I absolutely think so. I think it helps us, understand the emotions of others and empathize with them, figure out how they're feeling, and therefore feel more connected. I mean, I think I think, ultimately, the the the reason that we have music is for social bonding. It's it's a glue that connects us all. Even when we are by ourselves, you know, listening to music with no one else, we still feel connected to the world when we can connect with the music that we're hearing. And and so, yeah, I think it's very much, for the most part, the majority of music is really about sharing this emotional state, that that we have, and I think that's why I was sort of really interested in in in using it to sort of understand human beings more because sometimes a really great musician can express a feeling and experience that they've had in ways that, you know, other other genres, other media fall short. Yeah. I mean, if you think about how popular music is versus other genres, like, you can't write a short story that's gonna be as read as the best music is listened to. Like, when you go to a concert from your favorite musicians, there's there's, like, tens of thousands of people there, a million like, on YouTube, if there's a good song, 100,000,000 people, a 100,000,000 people will listen to that video. There's no, like, short story in the New Yorker that has a 1000000000 people reading it. It's almost like the primal story, and it has the arc of the hero. And you talk about that in the book, that there's this kind of rising tension, which is either caused by, you know, dissonance in the chords or these minor chords. And then somehow it's resolved, and the story is over. Like, there's there's consonance versus dissonance. And, again, it seems like some aspect of, you know, taking all these disparate noises and finding a pattern in them, and then there's there's something primal, as Joseph Campbell even pointed out, there's something primal about storytelling, but even more primal in music where there are no words per se. Yeah. And, you know, it's it's this interesting phenomenon where when we feel bad or we feel sad, we we've just, you know, experienced a breakup, we go and listen to a bunch of breakup songs. Like, that doesn't seem like the best, you know, way to get over. But it does. It does, and it helps for a number of reasons. I mean, we can talk about why it helps in terms of the hormones. Right? Like, why does a good cry feel good? Well, because it releases a hormone called prolactin, which is tied into, you know, your kind of sense of attachment, but also, like, other aspects of of, you know, your brain function. And we see the same thing when you listen to sad music. We see levels of prolactin rise. And so it's So so pro prolactin helps you to feel more attached to the people around you, so you get over the lack of attachment from the loss? Yeah. I mean, well, I think it it it makes you yeah. It makes you feel less alone, makes you feel more more connected. But more importantly, I think it gives you the release. Right? Like, so much of of our emotional state, so much of our brain is really about balance, whether it's, you know, like, this explains why we have tolerance to drugs. Right? The brain is trying to rebalance the the neurotransmitter levels when you take a drug that boosts one particular neurotransmitter. And so, you know, when you're when you're in fight or flight mode, you're really angry and you're upset and your heart is racing, etcetera, eventually, you're gonna go into parasympathetic rebound where, you know, your parasympathetic nervous system is gonna take over. And and this is one I think one of the reasons why we see Olympic athletes crying on the podium. Like, they're not sad that they won a medal. It's this big release of, you know, the and and the nervous system, like, resetting in in terms of balance, and I think that's one of the things that music can do for us. It can give us it can help us process those emotions, first of all, and help us understand them, and then it can get put us in this state of release afterwards where we just feel better because we've kind of gone through this emotional experience. But in a safe space, as you said, you can always turn the music off if it gets too much. You can always leave the concert, but you can't always leave the pain of being rejected. And so, you know, music kinda helps you navigate that a little bit. And what's, yeah, what's the, in terms of getting better at music, like, you mentioned when you first started doing opera, you were you were, you know, not able to sing, opera so well. And, obviously, you learn, and any musician has to go through, you know, hours and hours learning. And you talk about the 10000 hour rule with with Andrew Anders Ericsson that it takes 10000 hours to be truly great at something. And and his own experiments, he's really focused on music and and in particular violinists. And, you know, both he and Malcolm Gladwell referenced the the Beatles when talking about the 10000 hour rule and how they put in their 10000 hours creating music when they were performing in in Germany in their early years. But what's what's the story? Like, how can I how can I get better at music? Yeah. So I think, one of the reasons that actually Anders Ericsson pushed back against, Malcolm Gladwell and and and that more recently, Malcolm Gladwell has also, you know, found this as true, is that as we're learning more and more, it's not the hours you put in, it's what you put in the hours. And you still you need those hours, but they need to have certain characteristics that we now think are really important for, developing a high level skill. And when you're talking about, like, learning the violin, we've been playing violin for couple 100 years really, really well. So to become a virtuosic violinist today, you actually need to be better than the best violinist was, you know, a 150 years ago. So and that's because we have much better coaching. We have much better training. We have and and so in deliberate practice, there are a number of factors that come into play. Probably the most important is that you have a goal that you you that is achievable and that you know what that is. So so it's not like, okay. I wanna become a better violinist. I'm gonna pick up the violin and try to play. It's like, no. Today, I'm gonna work on my bowing, and I and I my goal is to be able to bow in this particular way, by the end of the session. And then you need to try a bunch of things. So you need to be open to a variety of of tools, and you need to have feedback that is relatively immediate to see whether what you're doing is working. A good coach can can have a big impact there, and a bad coach can have a big impact there too, right, in the in the in the wrong way. So it's this it's this interplay between motivation and, you know, being able to keep up your motivation while still evaluating, you know, how well you're doing in the moment and whether the, this the the way you in which you are practicing is actually getting you closer and closer to your goal. You know, when I was listening to one of your previous episodes with Jeff Lerner, and he was talking about how he, you know, picked up the piano at 17, and by age 20, he was a professional jazz pianist. One of the things that you know, he he mentioned how, like, it was hard for him, in in his hands because if you start much earlier, you have a lot you know, you can you can have a lot more malleability when you're going through puberty, etcetera, and and your your growth spurts are happening. It becomes harder to do some of the work of, say, playing the piano, and so he had to catch up. And he had to do that very mindfully. And I was thinking, you know, the whole time I was listening how he really used these deliberate practice skills where he had clear goals. He was gonna memorize all the intervals. He was gonna learn all the chords. You know, know, he's gonna be able to do them, and and there was you know, he knew he could see and hear whether what he's he was doing was improving and getting him closer to his goals, etcetera. And so it was a really nice way of looking at deliberate practice. And he was 17 and spent 10 hours a day practicing the piano. How many 17 year olds do you know that could maintain that kind of focus and deliberation and have the time to do that? Yeah. I think he even dropped out of high school to do it. Yeah. Right? So so that makes sense why it would only take a few years for him for him to catch up to some of his peers. So, you know, I think part of the problem with music training, especially classical music training, is this pursuit of perfection and this idea that, like, the teacher knows exactly what it is that you need to know, and every kid learns the same. And so if you just do these, you know, rote repetitive exercises, you're gonna get there. And now we know, like, brains aren't equal. They're not they're not created equal even at birth. Their people have, you know, different experiences, different genetics, etcetera. So the same tools aren't gonna work for all people. And so I think that, when you and when you have this sense that there's a perfect way to play music, that actually turns a lot of people off. And a lot of a lot of students, like, for example, you know, I teach now at the Conservatory of Music in San Francisco, and I think one of the biggest problems that I see in my students is this burnout of finally they come into a conservatory where everybody was the best that they, in their high schools, and they're faced with all this competition. And now it's like, well, you know, your perfection isn't what's gonna make you a great musician. So you need to find this internal motivation, and that can be really hard when this this entire time you've been practicing to be perfect. Right. And, also, maybe it's you mentioned the growth versus fixed mindset. So fixed mindset, they might have been told, oh, you're a genius their whole lives. And growth mindset is is this mindset that, you know, never listen to people saying some fixed thing, like, oh, I'm a genius, and instead always assume there's there's room to grow. So, it makes you much more, inclined it makes it much easier to handle mistakes and to to correct them and to grow from that. Yeah. I mean, I remember how many times, like, I would I would walk off stage and somebody would say, you're so lucky. You have such a gift. You're so talented. And I would be like, what about all the all hours I put in? And what does that mean that, like, I you know, I'm only so talented as as I am now, but, like, it's not under my control for me to become better at my, you know, at being an opera singer. That was really damaging to me, actually, when people would say that. The role of talent? Like, what what how how much what percentage of a skill do you think is talent, particularly among the best? Well, you know, I would push back on the very idea of what what do you mean by talent? Because usually what we mean by talent is either genetics. So, you know, is it how tall you are or how good your ears are? Or, you know, in the case of a singer, what your skull structure is like in your face, which, you know, tells you how much resonance you can have in your bones. Or is it the the aspects of our experience and our education and our training that we haven't characterized yet? Right? Because, like, I have 2 kids. 1 kid was really into sound right from when he was born, And, you know, he he oriented to sound all the time, and the other kid didn't. So is is my kid who was oriented to sound and then who we put into music class early because that's just what he liked to do more talented than my kid who was, like, more interested in visual stuff? Right? I think I think when it comes to talent, people mean, under the same circumstances, the person who is talented will learn faster, you know, make fewer mistakes with less effort. Right? Just see it feels like it comes more easily to them. And as a neuroscientist, I have to say that things that change your brain are hard. And, you know, the more effort you put in, the more likely you are to have lasting change on your brain that we see. Like, so for example, spacing out, you know, practice or study sessions is harder. It feels more effortful. It's more effective in the long term than cramming and and, you know, mass practice. So and yet cramming and mass practice is sort of more akin to what a talented person would would look like. Right? So so I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I I the the talent question, I feel, it just means that there's aspects of their training or their experience or their brain that we just don't understand yet. And if we keep studying it someday, we might understand it, and then we'll be able to say, ah, No. What it actually is is, you know, the way that they image the music or, you know, something like that. You know, you're, an example of of so what people say, well, okay, perfect pitch. Some people are just born with perfect pitch. And, there's been some interesting work, out of Japan showing that you can train a 100% of kids with this particular training method to have perfect pitch if you catch them between ages 2a half and 6. So after ages I can't I can't learn it now? It's a lot harder. It's not gonna be a 100%. You probably could if you tried really hard, maybe, but maybe not. But there does seem to be this sensitive period between ages 26 where of all the kids who finished this cord identification method of training, a 100% of them had perfect b***h. And so it suggests that there there, you know, there is training to it and, you know, when when people say, like, well, you know, I didn't do that. I was just I had perfect pitch. I wanna say, like, well, how did you learn the alphabet? How did you learn to read? And most people can't remember. But the truth is is that having perfect pitch means assigning a letter to a sound. So at some point, you had to learn what the western world thought of those letters and which sounds they match up with. You know, just like the other one. Or at least you learn to distinguish that this sound is different from this sound. But then you have to name it too. Right? It's not enough to just be able to say those are different. You and I could do that. You and I could, you know, but you but then you have to add the perfect pitch means, oh, but I know that that's a or that's a b. Right. Right? So yeah. So I wonder if I wonder if then talent might just be some accident of preverbal preverbal days or almost preverbal days when you're young, and you just happen to stumble into some way of thinking that lends itself to x, y, or z. So, like, for instance, take chess players as an example. There's if you take the best chess players in the world, like the world champion, he was already great at, like, the age of 5, 6, 7. Like, these people, you know, seem to emerge from preverbal days with with a preexisting talent, but maybe there was just some way of spatially looking at things that they learned by accident when they were 1 or 2, and that translated into, you know, so called talent at at chess or math or whatever. Yeah. I mean, hearkening back to Oliver Sacks. I mean, when he describes people on the autism spectrum, they too could do amazing things. Some of them, you know, who couldn't who couldn't speak using language but could count or paint or, you know, reproduce things in in amazing ways. Would we say they are talented? I think we would just say their brains work differently. You know? I think we would say that the way that they experience the world, the way that, you know, is is different. But for some reason, we don't describe talent unless it's somehow, like, doing something that we, as a society, value very deeply. You know, and you mentioned in when you were writing about the 10000 hour rule, one of the aspects of deliberate learning or deliberate practice that you mentioned is getting a little out of your comfort zone on some of the repetitions. I'm not totally sure that's really in Anders Ericsson or his original definition of deliberate learning because there was so much repetition involved, for instance, in memorizing sequences of numbers or or being a violinist. And so I'm wondering, getting out of the comfort zone seems a way to skip the 10000 hours a little bit. Like, for instance, take your example. You're a neuroscientist and an opera singer, so you you've you you have professional training at both. And then to write this book and to do some of your research and and and so on, you're the best in the world take at at taking the intersection of these two very complicated areas. And so you didn't have to put in 10000 hours becoming the best musical neuroscientist. Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that. I I yeah. I I think I need a plaque made, with that with that quote. Best musical neuroscientist. Nobel Prize for musical neuroscience. Awesome. I I will take that. I mean, I will say that, you know, Anders has been working at this for decades, and so his thoughts have become more and more refined. And now I think he he actually does talk about the fact that it is important to push yourself and that if you just do the same thing over and over and over again, we don't see lasting brain change. Right? It's like you're learning a scale. You play it 10 times in a row. The 9th 10th time, you're really just relying on residual memory, you know, or or facility with your fingers or whatever. But that's not what you're gonna be asked to do on stage. On stage, you're gonna be judged on the first time you play that scale or that, you know, melody or whatever. So that's why, you know, it's really important to kinda space out the practice because, ultimately, you're you're mimicking the situate the the conditions of performance more closely than, you know, when you're just kinda learning the scales. But, you know, there is there is a there is a slippery slope here because there's also some nice work showing that the more errors you make when you're first, you know, learning a piece, the the harder it will be for you to play that piece, you know, without errors later on. So you you need to not and and so people, like, debate about what that sweet spot is. Like, how much out of your comfort zone should you be? Is it, you know, 80% correct? And, you know, we don't I think there just isn't enough research now across different domains for us to say a definitive answer. But, like, for example, if you're learning trivia and, you know, you're trying to generate the answer to a bunch of questions, that's a much better way of learning than just reading and rereading and highlighting, right, where you're just basically, you know, tracking what's familiar as opposed to having to generate the answer yourself. And when you're generating the answer yourself, it's best to sort of get to the point where you forget about 20%, and then, you know, you relearn it. And so, Bob York, who is one of my mentors in my PhD at UCLA, who's done a lot of work on this, talks about desirable difficulties in learning. And by that, he means that when you have conditions during learning, that slow down the rate of of learning, that actually leads to more lasting change. That's interesting. So, like, what's a what's an example? Yeah. So an example is that, like, let's say I wanna learn a list of 10 words, and, I'm going to, you know, read the list of 10 words, and then I'm gonna just read it over and over and over and over again. And I'm gonna study that list of 10 words for an hour, and then I'm gonna come back tomorrow and and test myself. Well, it turns out that at the end of that hour, I'll be really good, but I will have forgotten a lot the next day. If instead I take that list of 10 words and I study it for 10 minutes across the day, 6 times, every time I come back to that list of words, it's gonna feel harder because I, you know, I will have gotten to a little bit of forgetting. And so, you know but that's a desirable difficulty is that you like, almost to the point where you've forgotten the list and then you retrieve it again. And that's actually a really good way of of solidifying the memory, and I'm much more likely to be able to remember that list 10 days from now, than I would if I had just studied it for an hour. That's really interesting. So let me ask you this. Like, when you're do singing opera, if you feel like you go on stage, and then you feel like it's just rote singing, like, it's just kind of I I I imagine there's times when you hear yourself singing, you feel yourself singing, but it feels almost rote as if it's almost as if you're, doing the singing without really putting yourself in it. I bet you that's not as good, or the audience does not respond as much as when you're putting yourself into it because maybe you forgot a little bit or you're you're you're it feels more new to you even if it's the 100 thousandth time you've sung it. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a certain element of that. I mean, I think also if, you know, as professionals will say, like, it it doesn't real you know, ultimately, it doesn't matter how you feel on stage. It's like you still have to do your job. So I I wanna push back on this idea that you need to feel every emotion that your character is feeling in order to emote it. You just need to know what the audience needs to see you feel in order to do it well. And I'll I'll give you one example is that, know, I played the role of Beth who was the sister that dies in Little Women. And, you know, the the aria that I had to sing just before she dies is like this you know, has all these high floating high notes, and, like, I couldn't get through without crying. And I thought, like, oh, you know, I'm I'm emoting so much. This is so meaningful to me. Like, I can't even get through without crying. But the truth is is that crying closed up my throat and did not sound good. So I had to learn to do it without crying, but still have the same effect. And so that was a a sort of a hard lesson to learn. But I have another experience to tell you about, which which is where your, you know, suggestion rings really true. I was playing Iolanthe in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, and it was, like, the 4th night out of 6 shows. So it was, like, you know, I'd already done the show three times. This was number 4. It was right in the middle. I didn't have anybody in the audience that, like, you know, I I I knew or that I really, you know, cared about. And I think in a part of me was just kinda dialing it in a little bit that night, and it came time for me to sing my aria. And I I will never forget this. Ice I I'm kneeling because I in in the staging, I was kneeling, and I'm right in front of the conductor. And the intro to the aria starts, and I cannot remember the words. I have no idea what to sing. And I just remember looking at him going, like, oh, s**t. And I just, like, opened my mouth and hoped something would come out, and what came out was verse 2. And I sang verse 2, and he was looking at me, like, what are you doing? And then I went back and sang verse 1. And, afterwards, someone came up to me and said, you know, you need to fix the super titles because, during your aria, they were in the wrong order. Oh my gosh. But, you know, that was just a moment to me where I really realized that, like, I can't you know, this is not just in my body. Like, I can't just, you know, let it go. But yet there's something there because if I had really thought hard about trying to find the words, they would not have come. Right? Like, I needed to But what what if you had what if you had, like, looked for the meaning, like, the why of why you were singing it at that point? I mean, I knew the meaning, but it's Gilbert and Sullivan. It's all about rhymes and, like, you know, clever I mean, it all means the same kinda thing. Like, it wasn't you know what I mean? I think I think of something, like, similar it seems like I'm gonna make a parallel between music and stand up comedy, even though music is obviously much more universal and worldwide and and so on. But in in stand up comedy, you create this tension, just like in music, and the tension could be, you know, excruciating. Like, everybody wants it to, you know, resolve. And at the end, it resolves in a way that, you know, either you laugh or you cry or you feel good from the musical piece or whatever. But I've seen comedians who've done, like, 4 or 5 shows in one night, and by the 4th or 5th show, so many of the jokes are wrote. They're just, like, they're just kind of it's almost like they're doing them on automatic without really feeling it that that you could tell the audience is not responding as much. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I mean, I you know, what is that? Right? So so fascinating to think about, like, what is the difference between performance 1 and performance 5, and, you know, how the person what what they bring to it? And, you know, I think the answer in part I mean, there's probably if we analyzed, you know, the the the, either the the visual or the auditory, you know, stimulus. We looked at the sound way. We could probably find differences and and see is it in the timing, is it in, you know, the emotion in the voice, whatever that means. But I think that, you know, ultimately too, we are so sensitive to body language and to, just we can tell immediately whether an actor or a musician is present in the moment. How how? It's like the the the way their eyes where their eyes are looking, it's to me, that's really interesting that we as humans are so good at reading each other that we can tell if someone is looking at us but bored versus Like, they could they could sniff out the the bulls**t the audience can. Yeah. Yeah. For instance, if you're doing opera, you're just doing it rote, they might not they might be able to see, oh, she's just acting. This is not how she really feels. She's trying to pull one over on us. You know, it's the same thing with comedy. You're not supposed to think the audience is not supposed to think this is written material, that it's just sort of conversation to the audience, like, legit on the fly conversation to the audience. And if you could tell it's an act, and again, it's just like it's like being a magician. If you could tell, oh, this is just an act that this person's done a 1000000000 times over, it's not as interesting. Yeah. We're not wowed by it. We're not there. You know? It's like yeah. A magician is a great example. Yeah. It's like, you know, some of those great magicians, like, make you feel as if they're screwing up and you wanna help them because they're doing so badly on stage. Right? They have this whole shtick of, like, oh, I'm just bumbling. But then then they bring the awe and the magic and the wonder to the stage, and you all experience it together. And then you go home realizing that they do this every single night, and every single night it works out that way. Right? I think that's really interesting that we as human beings don't wanna just be told or shown. We wanna be part of the journey. We wanna watch it. You know, we wanna be there with you, and, we we don't wanna know the ending because the whole fun part is finding out, you know, what what happened. And I guess I I guess that's part of, our enjoyment is part of how much are we safely experiencing a real emotion. So if it's a sad song, I don't benefit from it if unless I'm sad also. Unless I get to experience this emotion that the song is trying to get out of me. Yeah. Exactly. And I you know, I think that, though, there's this there it's method acting. Right? There's a there's a moment too where, like, the actors just there's there have there has to be some acting in there, and a good musician will know too, like, how to how to do how to how to do what they need to do consistently night after night, you know, to get the money. But to to really skate that line, you know, between complete disaster and and, you know, vulnerability and opening up and and, you know, potentially being rejected. But then I'm gonna take the the opposite angle for a second. You ever you ever read the book The Hit Factory? No. So it's a book about this group of producers in Sweden, and apparently, they've made, like, I don't know, 19 out of 20 of the top songs in the world over the past 10 years. And they just have this formula, and and it's like, they produce I'm gonna make this up, but they produce, like, Adele songs and, I don't know, who whoever the top singers are, they produce all of their songs, because they have this, more or less a formula of what makes a hit. Mhmm. And I think that's interesting too that that's another way they're skipping the 10000 hours is because they could basically compose anything. And maybe with the right auto tuning, I can have a hit if I use this this Hit Factory group. So, you know, what makes what makes something a hit right now? Yeah. So it it's interesting, and I I think it does change generation to generation. Right? Like, I think that, you know, if The Beatles came around today, I would hope that they would still be just as, you know, famous and and Well, according to the movie yesterday, they they would be. Yeah. Right. Right. But, you know, I don't know because we we've our expectations have changed, etcetera. But I will say that there are certain elements in hits that do, well, at least as neuroscientists, we can begin to understand why they have the effects that they do. So, you know, we know that, music does affect our pleasure set system and our motivational system, and so there are ways in which, we can craft a song or a piece of music where it sort of hits, some of the some of the ways in which we know that we will be stimulated by our nervous systems. Now that isn't to say that every single person in the world is gonna react the same way because music still has a very subjective component to it. But hits tend to be, you know, highly popular across a lot of people, but that doesn't mean that every single person is gonna react the same. Not everybody loves Adele. Right? So so, you know, but but there are certain features, like, for example, you know, building up the tension and then creating a release. There are features of music that are more likely to give us the chills, you know, the the the goosebumps, the the shivers, and that's a that's a nervous system response that is easily, tracked, using physiological tools like, you know, respiration rate and heart rate and, galvanic skin response, which is, like, how sweaty your palms are, etcetera. So how how would you use that? Would you say, okay. In Stairway to Heaven or Hotel California, oh, this you're you're tracking someone while they're listening to it. Oh, during I I see they're experiencing the chills, however you define that. Would you then say would you then try to correlate that with what chord they had just listened to or what sequence of chords they had just listened to? Like, well, how would you study this to to make a hit? Yeah. So there's a couple different ways. One way is just to look at the physiology and watch it, when it peaks. And then you can do the same physiological measures, or you can play the same piece, when a person is in a neuroimaging scanner and you can see what's happening in their brain. And you can even use a tool that tracks dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter involved in, motivation and reward, and and how it it, increases in volume in different brain regions that we know are part of the reward pathway. And this is why, you know, peep neuroscientists who said to music love the chills because they're really reproducible and they're measurable. We don't need you to tell me that you're getting the chills. I can see it on my measures. I can literally see little peaks, and and valleys on my, you know, in my data that tell me that you're having the chills. And and it's 77% reproducible. So So if you listen to the same piece, you're gonna get the chills in the same spot, 70 you know, 3 quarters of the time. And the dopamine, that's rising up during the anticipation of, resolution? Yeah. So yes. Exactly. So in the in the caudate, which is a part of your brain that I like to think of as what's tracking the environment that predicts reward. Right? So the caudate is, you know, it's part of your learning system. It's what's able to tell you, okay. You know what? It's time for your coffee because you're you're about to walk past your favorite coffee shop. So, you know, here's a little boost of dopamine. Go grab your coffee. And then when you actually drink the coffee, you get a shot of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is, like, the liking area. It's, like, the part that sort of gives you pleasure. So if you, like, implant an electrode in the nucleus accumbens of a rat and you teach it to press a lever, it'll sit there and press the lever until it dies. Right? Super pleasurable. So in in music, what we see is that in the in the buildup of tension in a piece where we know usually, you get the chills at the climax of the piece. So a really great example of a piece that gives a lot of people the chills is Barber's Adagio for Strings, which has this long, slow, meandering, you know, melody that eventually climaxes at the end. And, Which I listened to after reading your book because you said it was, like, the most the saddest piece of all time. Yeah. What did you think? It was pretty sad. Yeah. So and it's really effective at giving a lot of people the chills. Not everyone, but a lot of people because it has this like, we all know where the melody is trying to go. Like, once you start listening to it, you're like, okay. Yeah. Just resolve. Just resolve. Just and it doesn't. And it doesn't. And it doesn't. And so the tension builds and builds and builds and builds until you finally get this release, and that's when we see this boost in of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. And so so we we know how this works. And another way of looking at this is to have people, pay money for a song. And we see that when you get this boost of dopamine and the nucleus accumbens, people are more likely to spend, you know, their money on paying for a song. So you can design songs that have the features, that we know are more likely to give a person the chills. So ballads versus uptempo pieces, when you have a a treble voice, whether it's a soprano or a guitar or something else coming out of a cacophony of other sound, that also, tends to give people the chills when you have a big change in terms of the texture or, you know, a big resolution of a key, etcetera, that you know, so so you can kind of figure out if you put in a whole bunch of these tools in the right way. Eventually, you can build an algorithm that can give you the Hit Factory. Well, what, what's an example of that second one where you have a voice, that comes out of a cacophony of sound? Yeah. So, Hotel California, the guitar solo. Right? Or, Whitney Houston's, I Will Always Love You, you know, when there's that big key change, and all of a sudden. Right? And it goes on there. There's another one. Adele in hello. There's a moment where she does that as well. I don't know. There there's a in a in a lot of different genres of music. I mean, in opera, it's all over the place. You know, the big soprano moment, as they call it. But yeah. I I would also think another way to, come up another formula for hits is take 2 songs that were popular in different genres and maybe combine them in a 3rd genre. Yeah. So, like, if if I were to take, I don't know, the song Oklahoma, alright, from brought from theater and, put a rap beat to it, a hip hop beat to it, and then have some rapper, you know, rap over the song, I bet you that would be an easy hit. And people do that all the time with remixes. Right? Yeah. And one of the reasons that people and or even when they just use licks from other places or they sample. Right? This is why, you you know, DJ culture has become so popular in part is because what they're doing is sampling music that is already familiar to you, but giving you a new, listen to it, you know, a new way of of putting it in. So so that actually hits the sweet spot because oftentimes, you need to listen to music multiple times for it to, you know familiarity breeds preference for you to like it. The more repetitive it is, the easier it is for you to get that early on, but then then you're bored of it just as easily. Right? So that that's where that sweet spot we talked about came in. But if you're sampling something that a lot of people will already be familiar with and you layer on something else, it it hits, like, the sweet spot twice. 1st, it's already familiar, so people already like that part of it, but it's got a sense of novelty, so we don't get bored. And 2, if you're if you you're clever, you can you can kind of track and find extra meaning. Right? So the person you know, the the really great musicians will sample things or or use sounds that already have meaning. They're like it's like a little Easter egg, for their fans to find, and then their fans get a lot of joy out of, like, understanding the the hidden meaning in that particular piece. Yeah. That's so that's so interesting. I always like this idea of quickly skipping the line to with with an intersection to kinda make the best hit on the planet or whatever. And and this is this is sort of related, but, a little different. You know, when I listen to let's say you go to a bar and you listen to some band, they all kinda sound the same. But then when you hear listen to, like, the best bands of all time, they all sound really different. And so I always wonder. This is just a basic question I'm asking you, but, why doesn't every band realize that? That the only way they're gonna really make it big is if they bring a new and unique sound to something. Like like, for instance, u 2 sounds completely different from every band I hear in a bar. Sounds completely different from Pink Floyd. Sounds completely different from Led Zeppelin. You know? Sounds completely different from the Beatles. Like, these these bands that we know and remember don't sound like any other band. They have their own unique sound. So why does any band just launch themselves sounding like everyone else? Maybe this is a totally naive question. Well, I mean, I think I think actually it's not naive at all. I think it really speaks to a lot of the changes that are happening in the music industry or that happen with streaming and and sort of distribution, changes. But, ultimately, I think it's really you know, in in the beginning, when you're just trying to get people to come to see your band, if you listen, if you sound like other bands, they're more likely to come. If you sound, like, completely strange and people don't know your sound and they don't know what to listen for, like, it's harder. It's harder to to get an audience. But you're right that if you want to have longevity, you need to have this novelty factor. But you have to have gone through a period in which you've built a fan base and also figured out what your sound is. I mean, that that requires a lot of creativity. I think that's hard for a lot of people because a lot of people start they pick up music because they wanna sound like something that they've already heard before. Most people don't hear, I think, a unique sound in their head and then, you know, try to replicate it with the instruments. They want to participate. You know, music is is participatory. It's group making. You know, you wanna you wanna get up and bang the drum to the to the sound that you're already hearing. So I I think that that's part of the answer. You know, I think there's a lot of people who who now are starting to use the the digital tools that we have to become songwriters in their living room and sort of craft new songs. That's hard. You know? A lot of songs have been written, so how do you find that new sound and and that hasn't been heard before? I mean, this is why John Cage wrote a piece that is silent. Right? I mean Yeah. I guess always but, like like and and this works in careers too. Like, again, look at look at your career. You're neuroscience, but opera, so you're able to kind of explore, you know, the music and its effects on the brain. So, you know, your that that becomes this unique, voice that you have in your field. So as opposed to kinda getting very specific, in some area that's been really, you know, well researched, that that's a lot more difficult. No. I'm not saying what you're doing is easy. I'm I'm saying it's just different. No. It's in in some ways, it is low hanging fruit because it because it is, you know, unique. But at but it's not I didn't I didn't get here by, you know, always saying right from the outset, I wanna be the you know, it's like I'm only gonna do music. Yeah. No. I I I towed the line, in both domains for a long time. And, and and then and I felt like I I needed to do that in order to develop the expertise that allows me then to come back as an expert and say, okay. Here's what I can add to the conversation. But also, yeah, you have to be accepted by that culture, and that's, you know, that's part of it. It's like it's a fine line, I think. Yeah. I think it I think it's tricky because I I don't know how to pronounce his name. The guy who wrote Flo, Mikhail. Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi. Yeah. Yeah. So he says about creativity that you need to not only be kind of, you know, practice your own personal creativity, but then you also need to know the language of the domain incredibly well so you can go to the cutting edge. And then you need to know the field of the domain so if you have ideas, you know how to get those ideas accepted. So you learn the domain of neuroscience, but then you also need to you also learn the field of it, which is, okay. Here's how papers get accepted. Here's the professors I need to impress. And and that, you have to you have to go the full route, like you said, of learning neuroscience. And then later, you can you can start to play around and, you know, use these other tools like music and other things that you've become an expert in. Yeah. And I think that, you know, same thing with singing. If I didn't speak the language of singers, I would not be able to show them how neuroscience can help them. And and if I didn't speak the language of neuroscience, like, certainly, I wouldn't be respected amongst other neuroscientists if I couldn't, you know, tell the difference between recollection and familiarity or whatever it is that we're talking about. And and, ultimately, you know, creativity is something that is judged by your peers, by your group. Right? So you have to, like, have some belonging to that group unless you are, you know, unless you bring something completely novel. And, again, that's rare. So for most people, that's probably not how it's gonna happen. But, you know, on the other hand, if you develop a domain expertise in one domain and then you some people can successfully transfer that to another domain, but a lot of people can't. You know, there's a lot of a lot of neuroscience that gets gets, thrown around amongst musician groups that is just totally wrong. Right? It's pseudoscience. Like, the left brain, right brain myth. You know, like, one example is I remember, like, you know, being a student and, being told, like, oh, if you wanna access your creative right brain, like, you need to work with your left the left hand side of your body because, you know, that's it's, like, represented in the right hemisphere. And I'm like, you don't know basic neuroanatomy because there are far more connections between the two hemispheres than within the hemisphere when you're talking about what it is that we're doing. So, like, you know, but it sounds great. And it the truth is is that stepping outside of your comfort zone and using your nondominant, for most of us, left side is actually a good way of getting over fixedness or, you know, having the courage to do something different, which is at the core of creativity. So so how could the title of your book is How Music Can Make You Better. How Can That Music Make Me Better? Well, so it depends on what it is that's ailing you. Okay? So the first, the first part is really talking about sort of music and education, music and and sort of, you know, how it can make us smarter. So I actually also just wrote a white paper on the importance of music education in every child's education because I really think that and not just listening to music. Like, participatory music making is is just it develops your your hearing. It makes it easier for you to learn language later on. It can overcome some of the difficulties that, at risk youth face, whether it's, like, just getting them to come to school because it's much more fun if there's band than if it's just no band. But also, like, kids who are born in noisy urban environments, they send tend to tune out sound. But if they learn to play a musical instrument, they can attune to sound again, which makes it easier for them to hear speech in noisy environments, which is, you know, one of the reasons why we have language disabilities and kids who are at risk because they just they don't process it the same way. Anyway, so that's the first part. So it's, like, kinda like the idea is, like, what's true about the Mozart effect, this idea that music can make you smarter? And the the short answer is listening to music probably won't help even if it's Mozart. But trying to play a musical instrument has all of these benefits, that that go beyond, and and that also taps into you know, it's motivating. We it's enjoy it's intrinsically motivating. Right? It's enjoy it's it's joyful. It's you know, we can enjoy learning to play music. So that way, it hits that part. The middle part of the book is really about music and medicine. So if you have Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's disease or you have Williams syndrome, it's a developmental disorder, or you're on the autism spectrum, there are ways in which we now know music can actually help, some of the symptoms and, you know, help help the brain rewire after injury as was the case of Gabby Giffords. And then the last section is really about music and society and how, you know, music has the power to connect us, but it also has the power to divide us. And so, you know, we need to sort of be careful about how we use music so that, you know, if the goal is to really be accepting and to be a society in which, you know, we, have have peace and and are conflict free, then, you know, music can help us get in that direction if it's used strategically. Like, for example, Live Aid, you know, or a lot of these musicians who, do these incredibly successful fundraising campaigns for causes that are dear to them. And I just also, talked to someone who's doing a project called Climate Music, which is a way of using music to sort of illustrate the effects of climate change and to get people to act on it. So I feel like it can it can be useful that way, so it can make society better. But what about, like, tuning my neurochemicals? Let's say I want a little I'm feeling a little down, but it might be for this reason or that reason. So I want a little boost of serotonin instead of dopamine, or I want some oxytocin instead of prolactin. Like, what Yeah. Is there is there ways I could tune my neurochemicals by listening to the right music? Yes. And and I don't know how good Spotify is at this, although I think they're trying. Because when I look at my playlists, they're they have particular person I want a dopamine playlist and an oxytocin playlist. Yeah. They call them, like, focus or sunny days or happy music. So yeah. So I will say, you know and all of these neurotransmitters act they don't act in as islands. Right? So they are part of a bigger bigger thing. But let's let's just get a little more specific. So I think that's what you're asking for. I mean, I think if you wanna feel, connected or you have you have some cathartis cathartis coming, you have some emotions that you need to work out, you wanna listen to music that will boost your oxytocin and prolactin levels. And so that'll be music that, a, you feel a connection to, that you already feel is, like, part of your identity, that you belong to the group, you know, people who listen to this music. So, for example, if you're a Phish fan or you're a fan of the Grateful Dead, like, that's those those kinds of bands, like, have a whole community, built up around the band. And so, like, that sort of can help you if you listen to the music that you really think of as your music. If you don't like those bands, there might be music from your late teenage years that where your identity formation happened when you're when you actually started realizing who you are as a person. And so going back to that kind of music can can sort of boost those levels. Dopamine is interesting. It it it is we as I mentioned, we see it in music that, creates tension and then has a release, or music that you just generally find pleasurable, but it also has this interesting relationship with movement and, synchrony. So, so we know that dopamine is involved in sort of, you know, helping us get moving. So, like, you can listen to music with a strong beat, that that potentially can can get there. And then, you know, when it comes to other sort of mood regulators, monoamines, you know, I think that's probably you know, we we do know that, part of the pleasure that we get from music also comes from endogenous opioid release. So we have, you know, mu opioid receptors that that get stimulated through music. But all of this depends very much on your subjective experience. That being said, I have a friend, Ahmet Sternberg, who created, an app called Rubato, and the and I think it's just in beta now, but but they the idea there was to use artificial intelligence to sort of figure out whether there are specific pieces of music, that can have these physiological effects on a large group of people. So I think that as neuroscientists, we might be getting closer to giving you a prescription for whatever it is that you wanna titrate, But for now, I would say those are the basic principles. Yeah. That would be great. If I could figure out, what's gonna be my, you know, my dopamine song versus my oxytocin song versus my, oh, I'm gonna be smarter song, that would be that would be good. Yeah. And you know what? Honestly, it'll probably change, because, you you know, it's like your brain is does not like the same thing over and over and over again. So what works today might not work 2 weeks from now. Although although you're right. The stuff that I liked, let's say, at the age of 13, I still like. Yeah. Like, you kinda get stuck with that. You do. And even when you're 80 and, you know, even if you have Alzheimer's disease and you're at the nursing home, when they start playing the music of your teenage years, that will make you come alive. And then I and also, you know, some people or all people like to listen to the same song over and over again. So, like, I could listen to the same song 50 times in a row if I like it Yeah. Like a new song. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. But I can't, like, read the same short story 50 times in a row. It's only music. That's true. Although we do sometimes go back and read some of our favorite novels, but you're right that, like, it's not the same experience. Like, yeah, it's like yeah. How many times can you read Pride and Prejudice or, I don't know, Game of Thrones? Well, you know, Indre Viscones, so you have you have 2 podcasts. Which one do you like to win more? Well, The Inquiring Minds is my weekly show. It's my bread and butter show. Cadence, we're about to launch season 3, hopefully, in the next couple weeks, and that's how music what music can tell us about the mind, and it's in in seasons. But, James, I have to say, like, every time I listen to the intro to your podcast, I think I'm just an average podcast host. No. I'm sure you aren't, but, maybe you could maybe you could help me figure out a good intro music for my podcast. Your podcast is sort of depressing, so maybe you need this intro music to improve it a little. That would be a good that would be a good kinda, like, new sort of job, like, having music that fits the podcast better and have it scientifically, like, matched. Yeah. We can use an algorithm. Yeah. That that Roboto maybe might might work. You could see how people feel when they listen to my music and then use it to, you know, pick the music accordingly. But, anyway, Andre Viscontas, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was really great and informative, and I learned a lot more about music. And, you know, I'm I'm not a big believer anymore in the 10000 hour rule just because I think that comfort zone issue and experimenting will improve someone a lot faster than just, deliberate practice. Well, I totally agree, though. I I would argue that that is part of deliberate practice that, like so one one last thing before we go. If you just go into your room and you try and try and try, that's not deliberate practice. That's just inefficient. Right. But you need the feedback. You need the goal and the feedback and the coach. Yeah. And all the other specific features. Exactly. Exactly. You need you need the efficiency. You need to do it with with, in fewer tries with fewer errors. So whatever gets you there. But, like, if you were trying to learn a note let's say there was a note that was very hard for you, and you were trying to learn it, and then you wanna and then for some reason, you could do it in practice but not in front of an audience, what would you do to practice? Well, I would try to mimic the conditions of the performance as much as possible. So what I tell my students when they suffer from stage fright, for example, is I say, well, what are the actual physical things that you that happen to you? Your hands get sweaty and they you can't grip the, you know, violin? Is it that your throat closes up? Is that your breathing gets shallow? Like, what is it? And then we can mimic each of those conditions in the practice room and figure out strategies to overcome them. And the other thing that I would say is, like, the quick fix though is understanding that the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are acting in a balance. So if you try to hold your nerves and not get nervous and you're keeping your sympathetic nervous system at bay, you're not letting yourself get into the parasympathetic rebound, which is a great place to perform from. And so if you just let the nerves wash over you, you can't stay in that state for very long. So How do you let the nerves wash over you? Just you you go there. Like, if you see you're feeling nervous, you start thinking about, like, all the bad things that could potentially happen, and you concentrate on your heart rate and let it race up because you know that that's gonna last a minute, and then you're gonna be fine. Or you could make it, you know, simmer for an hour. So Yeah. Like, whenever I have to do any kind of performance, I'm always, let's say, a a public talk or a podcast on stage, or I do stand up comedy, so that makes me incredibly nervous. I'm really nervous right beforehand, but then once I'm on stage, I'm not nervous at all. Like, I'm so nervous. I feel like quitting everything and running away 10 seconds before I go on stage. And then once on stage, I don't know what happens. I'm not nervous at all even for a second. Yeah. And and and so I so some people say, well, I need to, like, learn to deal with those nerves. And I said, no. You don't. You need to learn to get over that hump faster so that by the time you walk on the stage, you're there because it's not gonna go away. You know? It's like stage fright doesn't go away. It's just that you need to understand that as soon as you get out on that stage, it's gonna be fine, and you're gonna be there. But you can't tell that to yourself backstage. I always say to myself Right. I always use the same term, which is I'm never doing this again. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly why I say doing this again. And that gets me out on stage, and then it's fine. Yeah. That's a good one because then it's like the pressure's up. Oh, it's the last time I'm doing this, and then I'm quitting. So I might as well just have fun up there. Well, thanks again, and, come back on the podcast again anytime. I'd love to. Thanks for having me. Excellent.