Ep. 221: The Little-Known Neurological Link Between Music and Reading Skills; with Anita Collins, PhD

I'm Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhanced Life with Music, where we explore the practical ways music transforms everyday life, health, happiness, and beyond. I'm really excited about today's conversation for a couple reasons. Number one, today's guest is, I think, the first third-time guest I've had on the show. More on that in a moment. Number 2, today's topic is one that first came to my attention years ago, and it honestly was one of the catalysts for starting this show. What happened is I was teaching piano lessons, and one day a fairly new student's parent gave me a heads up that their child had dyslexia. Now, this parent went on to explain that she herself, the mother, had also had dyslexia as a child. She had taken piano lessons, her parents put her in lessons, and not long after starting piano lessons, her dyslexia magically resolved itself, and learning how to read at school just suddenly clicked. She didn't know why that was, but she knew that there was a connection there, and she was hopeful that piano lessons would be helpful for her child as they had been for her when she was a kid. And by the way, this mother had grown up to become a teacher, a schoolteacher, so she had the background to connect the dots and realize that this was not just a coincidence in timing. So I was I was really intrigued at the time. That was the first time I became aware of this connection between reading and literacy skills and music training. And it became just another reason that I wanted to start this podcast to spotlight this connection between music and so many other aspects of life that people don't normally connect and put two and two together. And since then, I have come across research connecting music training with improved literacy and reading skills. Enter today's guest who has the amazing ability to translate neuroscience into language that everyone can understand and into practical tools that put that science to use. The one and only incomparable Dr. Anita Collins joins me today from Canberra, Australia. Dr. Collins is an award-winning educator, researcher, and writer in the field of brain development and music learning. She is internationally recognized for her unique work in translating the scientific research of psychologists and neuroscientists. for parents, teachers, and students. Welcome back to Enhanced Life with Music, Anita.

Oh, thank you. It is, it's like coming back to talk to an old friend. I'm so excited.

It is, it is. It's so fun now that, I mean, the last time we talked was, I think, about a year ago. And I think at the time, I remember it was like dark here and it was light where you were because of the time difference. And then the very first time we spoke was pretty early in the podcast because your video which I won't go into now 'cause I did the last couple of times we spoke, but your video about what is happening in the brain when you're making music was just so awe-inspiring to me as a young piano teacher. And I remember sharing it with all my students. And so I was sort of awe-inspired and starstruck to speak with you the very first time early in this podcast. So great to have you back. Anita, I don't think most people need convincing that strong reading and literacy skills are foundational to academic success and to life in general. But most of us, like I said earlier, don't immediately think of music activities as a way to improve these skills. In fact, most people don't even realize there's a connection at all. I certainly didn't before this conversation with the student's parent that I talked about. So before we go any further, explain to us what exactly is the neurological relationship between music and reading?

Okay. I've only got a short—

Okay.

Let's do this question. Um, it is, they seem disconnected because in our life we go, well, music comes out of the radio or comes out of our computer or whatever. And reading is in a book or it's something that they seem really different. But actually the first thing I always say to parents is inside their brain, they're using exactly the same pathway. They're using an overlapping neural network.

Okay.

And that's the reason why they're connected. But then you get into, okay, well, how did this happen? And what we know now is that when babies are born, there's the most amazing study where they put tiny little EEG caps on 1-day-old babies, and then they got mum to hold them, and then they got mum to talk to the baby because what they were trying to measure is at birth, how do babies understand language? And the answer was the only network that was active was their music processing network. And that makes complete sense. Their language center of the brain has got no inputs or anything yet. It hasn't got anything. The library's empty. But the music processing network is active at birth, and we now probably understand it's active probably 3 months prior to birth as well. And what it is, is the brain uses that network to understand all sound. And at birth, sound is the most informative piece of information to our brain. And so what it does is we understand it for all its musical qualities, its rhythm, its melody, its tone color, all of those different things. So babies first hear their parents' voices as if they're music from birth and even beforehand.

Wow.

And what then happens over the next sort of 3 to 4 years is an amazing process where The language center, like I said, the library is quite empty. It hasn't got a lot in there, but the music processing center is wide awake and working all the time. It's identifying sounds it loves, sounds that are risky sounds or sounds I need to be aware of. It helps them understand the auditory signature of all their carers. So it says, who are you? That they understand it by their sound rather than their sight, which is not developed very much at birth at all. So what then happens is that music processing network feeds all of the other sensory processing parts of the brain and gives it lots and lots of information, one of which is the language center. So the very first thing that babies do is start to do this thing called speech in noise, which is literally, if you think of all other sounds as noise, it goes, oh, those are speech noises. They're really interesting. I'm going to have a separate little library for them, gather them all up and pop them into my language center.

So I start to learn That's interesting that you bring that up because I know Nina Kraus has done a lot of research on that, but most of the research she's done that I'm aware of is related to the opposite end of the lifespan. It's the elderly and their ability to pick out speech in noise, especially in a crowded room or a noisy restaurant or something like that. And musicians definitely outperform non-musicians in their ability to do that.

Yeah.

But that's interesting that it's also such a high and awareness and, and, um, an important skill at the very beginning of our lives too.

And it's one thing that I don't think we think a lot about, which is the sound environment of a child's world. Like what sounds are we exposing them to? What sounds are we allowing to occur in their environment? And it doesn't mean in any, they don't need silence. What they actually need is a varied diet of sound. And that sound, um, can be something that they then learn from because Every time they're hearing speech, and particularly important is when a parent speaks directly to their baby, to their face, because the baby's taking in the sound from their mouth, for example, for the speech sounds, but they're also taking in at the same time their entire face. And they need to do all of that to actually understand speech because we do so many different things with our face when we speak. And we do it even more with babies. We do the same sounds we do with babies and puppies. It's the same. It's called motherese or parentese, which is this whole concept of, oh, hello, you're so beautiful. Can you smile for me? And you know—

Well, it's funny because those expressions in our face impact the sound that's coming out of our mouth. Like you can hear when somebody's smiling when they're talking.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you can also hear weirdly when you hear someone speak when they're smiling, but it's not real. It's fake. We can actually pick all that stuff up. And again, that's what babies do is they pick up all that sound and they go, do I trust you? Are you a trustworthy caregiver? Or are you someone I shouldn't trust? And it's really important survival steps for a baby. And it all comes through sound. And inside the brain, it is all understood for its musical qualities. So this fascinating question of did our brains make music or did we make music to make our brains? Like, that's a whole different area of thinking that is still going on. But it's It's really important. So over those first 3 to 4 years, the music processing network is more active than the language network. And it's sort of feeding it information the entire time. It's when, it's why that wonderful stage that toddlers go through that they're speaking, but it's very sing-songy and it's all run together. Like they just babble all their words together. As a parent, you can usually pick out what they're saying, but as someone who doesn't know that child, you're not quite sure what the words are, but that's the start, it's almost the period of overlap between when the music processing network is dominant and the language processing network is dominant. It's kind of, we're in that middle ground and we can see it in the way that they speak. And so as they sort of get to 4 and 5, their language network kind of goes, oh, I've got enough books in my library now, not enough sounds, you know, different things that I need. And it starts to take over and act for itself. And the music processing network doesn't need to feed it nearly as much. And it goes off and actually does a whole bunch of other tasks. It says, right, you're set, you're good, you're ready to learn. I'm going to go and work on these other parts of the brain and particularly the executive function or the parts that are in the frontal lobe. And that's as we go, you know, above 5 and 6 years of age. So it's vital at the start of life to, it's how we learned how to speak because we had song before we had speech. So we actually spoke in what we would call song first, which is intonation, different changes in our voices, not necessarily words, but they were, you know, sort of sounds that conveyed meaning. And that's how speech grew out of it from an evolutionary perspective. So the music processing network and the language processing network share a whole bunch of parts of their network together. And at different times in their lives, they separate and do some other things, but they always live together. Which is why when we're in, so it's why when stroke victims, we use song to help them learn how to walk again, because we're actually going back to their original language, not only walk again, but how to speak again. They can't, they've lost their speech depending on where the stroke has been. But what we do is we get them to sing first. So we go back to their first language in order to teach them what is really truly our second language, which is this speech that we have. So it's a really integral part of the brain and one we haven't really connected until we've done this work. And you mentioned Nina Krauss before, um, this, the research that a lot of the work I do is comes out of her lab based on start of life and end of life and all the way through life as well. So it's a fascinating thing to understand of how they're connected. Yeah.

It's interesting. You've been talking a lot about speech so far and As I was preparing for our conversation, I had this question. When we talk about literacy, what exactly do we mean? Because when I think of the word literacy and how music training affects literacy skills, I think about reading. But as I was preparing for this conversation and looking through the information, I thought, I'm seeing so much about speech and language here. Does literacy refer to both reading development and language development?

Oh, it depends who you talk to.

Very controversial, I guess, huh?

Very controversial one.

Oh, okay.

The question is, is to be literate in this world, meaning we also need to, it's not just about the written word, whether we're writing it ourselves. So it could be in writing, it could be in reading and reading includes comprehension, which is a whole different, not different part of the brain, but it requires, it's actually the hardest thing the brain does in terms of that language development To understand the letters, the words, the format of the sentences, how one sentence relates to another sentence, how we follow ideas through, that's incredibly complex. So, but then—

It's kind of the whole communication repertoire then.

Yeah. And then is it, we need visual literacy as well. What do we understand from images and what information does it give us implicitly? We need to understand sound literacy. What is the sound that we're hearing and how are we interpreting it? Literacy could mean an enormous amount of things or it could be the word, you know, what we hear in the educational sense which is that ability to read, write and comprehend and all the things that come along with that. So it is a really tricky area to look at. I mean, for me, because I work with school children and I work in school systems, it's about, okay, how does it relate to their definition of it? Which is usually the reading, writing, and comprehension aspects.

Okay. And when you mentioned comprehension, that was interesting because I was looking up what are the most common reading challenges or delays or disorders, and one of them that came up was the ability to read so you can sound out the words, you can read what's written on a page, but you don't comprehend what you're, what you're reading.

Yeah.

So for purposes of this conversation, when we refer to reading challenges or delays or disorders, what exactly are we talking about? Dyslexia, um, the inability to comprehend what you're reading, which I know there's a name for it, but I don't know what it is.

Yeah, exactly. I think the best thing to think about is what we would call a typical reading journey, which is usually in Western education systems, it's starting around the age of 5 and finishing around the age of 8. Which is that period of time when we, the coining the phrase, which is learning how to read versus reading to learn. So we're in that first sort of 3 or so years of school when really the focus is on the learning how to read to reach that point of comprehension.

Sure.

And the comprehension needs to come afterwards because we need to read something to get information out of it. So the first 3 or so years of school in our Western systems at the moment, look at that ability to read. And of course that starts with letters, then it goes into words, then it goes into ordering of words, which is syntax. Um, and all of it, then it becomes to that ability to not only read those words, but to then write those words down, which is a slightly, was a quite different, um, uh, experience in the brain. And then there's the ability to be not just write words down, but then to create meaning from words, which is kind of like composition or, you know, the writing with the creative part to it that you're expressing ideas. So there's a whole bunch of things that come into that. I think the work, a lot of the work I do, which is when we talk about reading delay or disorder, really covers students who very simply take a little bit longer to read or a lot longer to read. Sometimes that is just delay and it has a lot to do with their sensory processing because For survival, we're built so that we get a whole bunch of things in place before we do really hard cognitive activities because we have to stay alive. And part of the being alive thing is actually that our sensory processing is working to a level that we're like, okay, I can take a drink, I can feed myself, I can move around with intention, I can hear for threats and move away from them. All of that stuff is about survival. So the brain's really set up. At the start to make sure that's in place. And then it goes, oh, here's this tricky cognitive thing that I'm going to do. Yep. I'm totally ready because I've got all this other stuff sorted.

Would you say that dyslexia is the most common of the reading delays or challenges?

Yeah, it is. And again, dyslexia is being relooked at very carefully, not relooked at. I feel like it's with all of these things, as we learn more, we're just developing and refining our understanding. And we're doing the same with dyslexia, which is no longer, this is dyslexia. It's dyslexia, like everything is a spectrum. You're somewhere sitting on the spectrum. Um, and it may express itself as dyslexia to begin with, but it's a sensory processing problem underneath. When that is resolved, then the dyslexia resolves itself, which might get back to that original story that you had.

Yeah.

And it would, it would be my story as well, which is, you know, I struggled to read until I was 9. I learned how to play the clarinet and more importantly, I learned how to read music. And suddenly a lot of the sensory issues issues I was processing, issues I was having were resolved because I did this challenging thing, which is learn music. And then the brain went, oh, great. I can make sure your reading can now jump along. Now reading is still hard for me, but it's not nearly as hard and difficult as it was before I learned how to play music. So your student and the mother's story is exactly the same as well as the brain adapts. The brain figures it out, goes, this is not working so well. I'm going to find another way around this. So that you can function as well as you can in the world.

Interesting. So if that mother would ask you, what was it about taking those piano lessons that made my dyslexia suddenly resolve itself? All of a sudden, learning how to read just clicked for me. How would you explain that to her?

I would explain it that the triangle of senses, which has our auditory, visual, and motor cortices, so our ears, eyes and our body, for that student may not have been firing on all cylinders, may not have been working as effectively as it needs to. And so it's particularly interesting with piano because piano is the most cognitively challenging thing to do because your hands have to coordinate, but they have different jobs. It's a bit like learning how to use a knife and fork. It's a bimanual movement, meaning they have different roles, but they have to work together. Then she would have been reading music, which is a symbol to sound process, which is exactly the same thing as language learning, which is, here's a symbol, it is related to a sound. You have to connect the symbol to the correct sound to, in order to, if you're speaking, make that sound. But if you're playing, in order to put the right finger in the right place at the right time. Now with music, it's so much harder for the brain to do that because you're not just playing one melody, you're playing 2 things and sometimes 3 things at once. And it goes, oh, this is really tricky. It goes, and as soon as it gets presented a challenge, it goes, okay, I have to grow because you presented me this challenge and I have to learn how to do it. So I'd say for your student, what happened is her sensory processing triangle wasn't working as well as it could have. She presented her brain with a really tricky challenge that involved making that triangle work really, really well together. And also you would have, and she would have, there was a massive reward network impact of it. Meaning every time you went, you got it, well done, she had this big little explosion, big little, this big explosion that went, oh, that felt good when someone told me I was doing it right. I, and then what the brain does is I like that feeling. Let's do that again.

Sure.

So that's what would have happened as well. And so after a period of time, it was probably 6 to 12 months, I'm guessing. That's when her brain sort of responded to this challenge, worked, started to work far more efficiently and far more, um, malleably or flexibly. And that would have then gone to the reading part of it. We've gone, oh, okay, let's go back to this other challenging thing I've been working on for a couple of years. And they went, oh, it's not nearly as hard as it was. So they're not using nearly as much cognitive energy. Because they've done this other hard thing and the brain's going, oh, I'm going to rise to that occasion. So it is truly doing hard things helps you do hard things because the brain has responded in that way. So I'd say that's what probably what happened.

Okay. And another example of neuroplasticity in action and stimulating that neuroplasticity, is that correct?

Yep, absolutely.

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I'm almost frightened. Um, I feel like a more useful thing for your listeners would probably be the behaviors that they would see.

Okay.

Because it really should be left to someone who diagnoses it and has all those tools to do it. However, they might do things. The typical one we're used to is writing Bs and Ds backwards. So having reverse letters and things like that.

Yeah.

Dyslexia can express itself through all sorts of ways. And that's why we now sort of are looking at it as a spectrum. Sometimes it expresses itself as a sight issue and it's a, you know, they, they're seeing the shapes, but the shapes are a little bit either turned around, upside down, back to front in their brains. Another one might be that they, the sounds are going in and it's not like they're not hearing the sounds, but the way they're filing it in their big language center of the brain is kind of unusual. So if it's unusual, sometimes pulling that information from the language center when we need to read it can be really difficult because it's kind of like you've put something away and, you know, when you sit and you go, I would have put it in a sensible place. Where did I put it? And you have to think about it. But if you do that all the time, it's really hard to pull all that information back. So sometimes it's a decoding and a memory issue, and it can be a verbal memory issue and a word memory issue, for example. Other times it can be as easy as an idea that Their working memory and then their language memory is not strong. Now remember, we went back to survival. If their sensory processing isn't working well, it's— the brain's going, I need to put a whole bunch of energy towards making sure that you're taking in all the information from around you to make sure if there's a threat there. I don't have very much energy left over to file all these new bits of information that you're bringing in for me. So they— They kind of learn that a student like this will learn something one day and will have understood it by the end of the lesson. And they will come back the next day and it just won't have been stored in a way that they can retrieve it again. So they, they're delayed purely by the fact that they can't pull back and retrieve that memory in order to learn the next thing they have to learn.

Sure.

So it's not that they can't learn it. It's just that the memory processes they go through, um, are not working as well as they could. That could be the sensory processing. It could be a whole bunch of other issues as well. So. Dyslexia can be a slower version of reading. Dyslexia can also be, um, an inability to recall, remember, retrieve, use again, um, issues of language and sort of words and letters and things like that. It can be expressed in all sorts of different ways, but generally in a school system, it's like they're behind in their reading level. They will, when you watch them, they will actually struggle to start a word. So, and weirdly with a, um, they've directly related that to a rhythm keeping ability. So students who you go, let's clap together, 1, 2, 3, 4, and every child will clap, but they will actually struggle to start that process. And they will see that in their reading that they struggle to start a word. So they really struggle at the beginning of it. It can be all sorts of other things. A lot, there's some fantastic research again from, um, Nina Krauss lab where they've shown that sort of reading impaired students basically are processing everything a little bit later. And that means, and I talked to them when I was there with the researchers and I said, okay, what would this feel like? And at the end of the conversation, she said, well, have you ever started a YouTube video where the sound and the picture's out of time, out of sync?

Sure.

I said, she said, that's kind of what we think it would feel like. And, and she said, and I said, hang on a second, but when that happens, I have to stop the video straight away and try and restart it because I can't stand watching it be out of time. And I said, does that mean as a teacher, I'm speaking and this child's hearing me like an out-of-sync YouTube video? And she said, yeah, probably.

Ah, interesting.

That's awful. And then it's got me thinking about the fact that if you're in a classroom and you're doing an hour of literacy, for example, The cognitive load you're having to use, the energy you're having to use is being used up so much in trying to line these 2 things up that no wonder 15 or 20 minutes in, you're done. You have no more cognitive energy to put towards the task that's being done. And then—

Sure.

We see avoidance behaviors and we see distracted behaviors and all these sorts of other things. So it has so many ways it can manifest itself. One of the reasons why I'm so excited to share the research in a way that teachers can use is music learning and beatkeeping in particular has been found to be incredibly useful at aligning those senses so that the typical reading journey can sort of begin for those students.

Yes. And let's talk about that next. But first, one thought that I have, I know you primarily work with school-aged children and that's what the demographic that we think of when we think of kiddos who are learning how to read, but As we're talking about this, I'm thinking about someone I know who's my age, and when she was— she really struggled to read as a kid. It just never really clicked for her. School didn't come easily. When she was an adult, her sister, who by then was a school teacher and was working with all these elementary school kids, said to her, you know what? I think you have dyslexia, and it was never diagnosed. And really, our generation wasn't really diagnosed with dyslexia, at least here in the US we weren't. It just, it wasn't a thing. And same with autism. I'm 50. And so people in that generation just weren't diagnosed with that. There wasn't the awareness of that. So can adults benefit from music training too?

Yeah. So it's exactly the same process in the brain. The, the, when you were asking the question, I was, the immediate one that came to mind is there's a, a large number of studies that have been done in prisons, because one of the main issues they find in prison is illiteracy. And, you know, they're leading, they even decide how it's done in the US at the moment, how many prison places do they need in 15 years' time based on the literacy levels that they're seeing in 5 and 6-year-olds in the same state, which is extraordinary connection to put those 2 things together. But yeah, what they do in prisons a lot of the time is they do, um, for not just literacy, for actually self-regulation. Um, team building, all sorts of things. They do lots of stuff with rhythm and lots of stuff with drum circles, all sorts of things. And it's all rhythm-based because basically it's the same process. Um, so it can be useful at any age. There are also, there's great studies that are done in high school students who are 14, um, who've really, the literacy interventions have come to the end. They're like, we don't know how to help this student. And they've put in place music interventions, rhythm-based ones, very short. Like I think it was 10 minutes for 10 weeks, which is no time at all. And they saw extraordinary changes in the ability, the reading abilities of these students. So it's a wonderful intervention tool as well as an enhancement tool. It can do both.

Love that. Okay. So if you're listening to this and you're my age or just an adult in general, and you think, man, I think I had that as a kid and it was never diagnosed and I still struggle with reading or dyslexia in some form. You could take music lessons now. It's never too late to learn and never too late to have that neuroplasticity stimulated in your brain and to stimulate growth and development in that overlaying network that we use between music and reading or literacy, which includes the reading and speech. That's really fascinating. Well, I know already we're going to go over time here, but I do want to talk about using music as a diagnostic tool. And you talked about the research that shows that strong link between literacy and rhythm. And I know I've seen this many times, research showing that kids who have trouble with rhythm, like clapping, keeping a steady beat, often have difficulty reading. How is music, how can it be used as a reading diagnostic tool for early intervention?

Well, one of the— because I've visited lots of labs and I've sat with lots of researchers for many, many hours, and it's a wonderful experience. I still remember when I heard about this research for the first time, which is they tested children between the age of 3 and 4 and they tested them for their ability to keep a steady beat. They then followed these students into school age and then they followed their reading journey. So was it a typical reading journey? Was it a delayed reading journey? Was it an accelerated reading journey? And what they found is that those who could not keep a steady beat between the age of 3 and 4, were very likely, highly likely to struggle from the age of 5 onwards with their reading. It was an indicator that their sensory processing, all of that survival stuff we talked about, was not where it needed to be at the age they were and that therefore it showed that their reading journey would not be a typical one. Whether that was from dyslexia, whether that was just a delay, whether it was a disorder, You know, there was all sorts of other things that came into it, but it basically was a point in time where we could watch a student and say, okay, how are they going with this tiny, inexpensive, easy to deliver diagnostic tool? And then—

Not intrusive.

And part of that—

It's fun.

I know, part of our natural sort of, a lot of things that get done at that age are around clapping. It's a really common activity. But what I wanted to provide is the research lens over the top is they're not just developing a clapping skill, they're developing a sensory integration skill. Because if we think about it, to clap, we have to put our hands together. That's the first thing that's actually quite hard. If we've ever watched a little toddler do it, the number of times they miss their hands and they go either side is incredible. So first of all, getting your hands together, then you have to have your hands go out at certain distance, then they have to travel back in at a very specific speed in order to hit the next beat in exactly the right place. And then it needs to be continuous. And then when we're doing music learning, it needs to be automated, meaning we just go, everybody keep the beat. Now we're going to sing a song. That's really hard for the brain because it's got to actually do the clapping part and then put another activity on top of it. And so What I loved about the research is it was for me as a teacher, the immediate one to go, hang on, if we could do this with every 3 and 4-year-old, it means we have time between 4 and 5 to actually do music interventions for these students so that we can, as rapidly as we can, help their sensory processing to integrate so they're ready when they are at the age of 5 to start that school journey and that reading journey.

Well, the beautiful thing about that is you're doing a preventative type of, you have a preventative model instead of an intervention model where there's already been frustration and challenges and bad experiences and you're trying to correct, go in and correct that after the fact.

Yeah. You're not waiting until it's these delayed or disordered learners emerge and then going, now they need intervention. You have the potential. To see them beforehand and do some activities that will help them. It won't necessarily mitigate it, you know, very significant disorders, but it will at least help them along the way. And it does a whole bunch of other things. You just kind of mentioned it. When we clap together, it's very similar when we sing together, our heartbeats align. So, and our body temperatures begin to align as well. And our cortisol, if it's up, it comes down. If it's low, it comes up. So it normalizes.

It's a treatment. That's so amazing. Exactly.

And it makes children feel safe and like they're in a team. And it's, it's, but it's not from a head cognitive point of view of like, I feel like I'm safe at school. It's, I physiologically feel safe at school. And that is incredibly important to make sure that they, when we ask them, because school and any kind of learning is all about risk-taking and being uncomfortable. And we keep putting our students into that place, but in order for them to take that risk and learn that new thing, they have to feel safe and comfortable to start with. And that's what music learning does. And then it also acts as this intervention to make sure the sensory processing is better. So it has, it has, you know, it's like the best multivitamin in the world. We can tick off on all these wonderful things that it does. The thing I love about it, as you said, is it costs nothing other than training your teachers well. And it is just opening their eyes to the fact that the clapping activity is more than just clapping. It's so much more. It's, it's really an indicator of future development and something we can focus on. Sure.

Well, what I love so much, as I mentioned in your introduction about your work, is you're so effective at translating scientific research into words that laypeople can understand, but also tools, translating that research into tools that we can use. And we just sort of touched on how music can be used as a diagnostic tool. You've come up with a tool that schools, caregivers can use for using music as a diagnostic tool and as a preventative tool, as a therapeutic and developmental tool. It's a fairly new program that's called BeatRead Insight. And since I've already had us talk longer than I thought before we got to this, instead of taking each of those diagnostic tool, therapeutic tools separately, I'm just going to let you talk with whatever time you have about the Read Insights program and how it addresses some of these things, how school teachers can use it, how people outside of a school setting like parents, grandparents, caregivers could use it. Just tell us what you want us to know in a little quick Crash course on it.

Okay. It's taken me a very long time to do because how can you put something down on paper that is a live activity, which is a really difficult thing. So basically, I've created a series of activities where you can have a group of students come in, you can do 3 very simple diagnostic tools with them. So one is about keeping a beat, one is about keeping a rhythm, and another one is about spotting the difference with the rhythm. And it needs to be videoed basically because you have to go back and you have to watch every student and you go, okay, how are they going with this particular thing? How are they going with this particular thing? And you video it, you sit down with a small group of students and I'm suggesting that it's done either between the age of 3 and 8. If it's between 3, you're starting to be a diagnostic tool for issues that need to be addressed. If you do it later on, it can start to be that therapeutic and self-regulation, helping them prior to going into their reading reading and language learning experience. But basically walking them through, it's— and I've tried to make it super quick and it should be somewhere between 4 and 6 minutes long, very, very quick. And it walks any teacher through how do I do these activities, what am I looking for in the different behaviors of the students, and it will help them come up with a list to say, all right, I think these students potentially are at risk. Just that knowledge is so incredibly important to go, all right, I'm going to put some extra things in place for these 4 students out of my 15 in the class, and I'm going to make sure that we do beatkeeping every morning, and I'm going to sit them in a certain place, work with them. I can see that they're a little bit slower, their beatkeeping falls off, and I'm going to watch them really, really carefully. But I'm also going to use beat when it comes to when I'm teaching them reading or teaching them words or anything else. Using our voice and having beat in it is another way of actually helping out as well. So—

So this isn't you're adding extra time to your teaching day to add this as a separate thing. This is an integrated component that you're integrating with teaching throughout the day, just recognizing that it gives you exponential results, kind of a dual benefit.

Yeah, and in some cases you can just do it once because all you're really trying to get out of it is who are my students that potentially are going to be delayed in their reading, what can I do for them to help them improve that sensory processing. Music is one of them, but you can do a whole bunch of other things as well. So it can be done just once, it can become a regular part of your day. A lot of the teachers I work with, they do it once and then they go, hang on, if I do this every day, I'm finding they're more settled when they walk in the classroom. I get through more material in the same amount of time because of that settling and I've synchronized their brain prior to when we've started. So they're starting to see the knock-on effect of this tiny activity that can then help them with everything.

Yeah, I could see that entrainment effect really affecting that result as well. I mean, if you're starting out with this activity where the kids are sort in training together and they're feeling sort of bonded to one another and they're just syncing on the same wavelength, I could see things falling into place more efficiently moving forward from that activity.

It's as simple as, you know, children who are coming into their preschool and, uh, don't want to leave. They're having separation anxiety. If you're doing an activity where they go, oh, I feel really good when I'm in the group, that separation anxiety changes. So it's so effective for so many different things. And is really easy for teachers to learn. So what I, what I tried to do, it took me a very long time, which is to boil it down to as short as it could be, as simple as it could be while being effective, and as effective as it could be to give teachers that information they need. And then when I've talked to— is it okay? I want to share some stories about how it's been used already. Yes, please do. So I worked with a whole bunch of school teachers and they had a day when the next year group coming up would come for the day. It was like half a day and they'd come and experience the school and meet their teachers and do all those sorts of things. What they did is that they did these activities with that cohort. So one teacher was watching and she had a list of the kids. She didn't know them, so she had photos of them so she could tell which child was which. And then they did this activity, they did some clapping, it was no problem. But the other teacher was sort of going, oh, I can see this one is struggling and this one is struggling, this one's great. So it was literally as simple as ticks and crosses. But then what they did, so clever, when they got to sorting out the classes and they had 4 classes that they had to work out, they looked at this list and they said, okay, potentially these are going to be our kids who are going to struggle with their learning. We're going to distribute them evenly across the classes so that— and we're going to let the teacher who gets the class know that these kids potentially are some of your low readers. And so from the very beginning of the year, they made sure that one class didn't have all of the low readers in it just by chance and they also knew that so the teachers could then look at this list and go, okay, as soon as I learn these kids, these are the ones that potentially are my low readers. I'm going to keep watching and helping them and I'm going to put interventions in place far earlier. We're talking weeks earlier in to help them with their reading because potentially they have a problem. They then went back and checked a whole 10 weeks later to say, did we pick the right ones because by then the teachers knew them and they were right to the child. They had exactly the right list to say, here's the issue. So that to me is a real life version of how you can use this to make the teaching so much better, enable the teachers to have great information that can make their educating easier and they're doing less detective work because we've kind of done it beforehand. So that's one example of how it can be used.

Well, and this detective work that you're talking about is very subtle. It's like stealth mode. Like, I know we, last time you were our guest, we talked about stealth advocacy, and this is sort of like stealth too. It's not like nobody, none of the peers of these students who are having trouble clapping in time, none of the peers need to know, or even the student themselves need to know that they're being sort of evaluated with this, this activity. It's not like when you're in high school and everybody's like, okay, let's time and see how fast you can run a mile or see how many pushups you can do or something like that. It's like the kids who can barely do one pushup, everybody can tell, you know, that they're sort of failing that physical fitness test. So I like that about it too. It's, it's so subtle.

Yeah. And I think it has great power in sort of those preschool, 3 to 4 year old ages of going, of talking to parents. And this is again, another story, another way it's been used. So I've been using it in lots of different ways. I've just I've just come to the point where it's now in a format that everyone can use it kind of thing. Parents, you know, especially parents for children for the first time, so it's their first experience through it. And you can say, look, you can say to the parents, I think your child's having, you know, a little bit delayed in here, doing a few more activities at home, making sure they're working with a knife and fork for their fine motor skills, everything you can do. But often parents will go, well, you know, are they really that different We don't know and we're not sure, but then I've seen parents come in, they've done a beatkeeping activity with the class and they've had parents watching it. The one I'm thinking of, they did it sort of like an end of year thing and they just did a beatkeeping activity. And suddenly this set of parents watched their own child and, but then watched them in comparison to everyone else and went, oh, I see it now. I see that they're really struggling to clap. They're struggling to maintain beat.

Yeah.

All of these kinds of things. Now I get it. So it's a real-life example of students when they need support and parent— it can help parents to go, okay, we need to do more things at home and working more, you know, in a more interactive way with the parent to actually help co-parent the child so that they're developing as well as they could. So it's those real-life examples which really fuel my desire to help everybody have this, this skill within, you know, these age groups, um, so that they can use it as much as they can.

And you've made this program available for free, I believe, right?

Uh, yes, sort of.

Okay. Yes. Explain where listeners can find the program, access it, what the pricing is, that sort of thing.

Yeah. Great. Um, so it's really important for me that I make sure the educators are prepared to deliver the diagnostic tool so that they get the most out of it. So absolutely, the program itself is for free, but it does have a session with me online just to talk through all of their questions about it. I have made a whole bunch of videos that go along with it that sort of explain it. So as they go into doing the test itself, they can watch the videos. They can even test it out with each other to make sure that it's as effective as possible. As I said, it's only 4 to 6 minutes long. So it needs to be quite, it's almost like a little performance. And I want to prepare teachers to give that little performance as quickly as they can and as confidently as they can, because once they learn it once, they've got it forever. And that's so important to me. So having time with me and making sure I'm preparing them well in just one session online, which is why I'm really excited that I can share it all over the world and make sure that as many educators are using as well. It's on our website, Bigger Better Brains, and it is called Beat Read Insights. And there's different pricing for the different options you would like because there's also some help with the data analysis at the end if you would like it. And just having somebody to talk to in myself to go, okay, we've seen this. What are we seeing? How do we help? What do we do next? So it's really important to me to be there as a resource for educators all over the world to help Sure.

Wonderful. And we'll definitely have a link in the show notes to that page. So it's really easy. That website will be at people's fingertips if they just go to the show notes page and they can quickly access that information. In my day job, I work a lot with university music faculty and administrators, and I think that this information would be so exciting for them as they're teaching our next generation of music teachers, because if their students who who become our next music teachers have this information, it would be so helpful for them to be collaborating with other non-music teachers in their building, in their school, so that they can work together in this preventative type of a model. And then also just kind of working with these other teachers to incorporate music and rhythm activities in non-music classes to help with literacy skills, Do you have a quick word of advice to college faculty who may be listening to this on how they can be using this program with their students who are going to become teachers?

Yeah, exactly. I think, and I taught in tertiary education for 12 years, so I believe it's so important that we help our next generation of teachers to have as many tools as they can to use. So again, it's a very quick and easy diagnostic tool to use, but also understanding how rhythm and music work together, particularly in those first 8 years of life. So anyone who's teaching in those early years, I think it should be a part of any college curriculum to have this research, but also to have this tool in there that can help them to, again, send their teachers out as prepared as possible to do the best job that they can. And it would be wonderful to have newly graduated teachers heading out into schools and being able to teach other teachers how to use this tool as well. So I think it's a wonderful place to start. And as I said, I've got a very, very, very warm place in my heart for beginning teachers and wanting to support them as much as I can.

Love this program. And just, I'm so thrilled that again, you've taken this complex information and distilled it down into something that's easily understandable, easily applicable in a very practical tool. For teachers in particular, but also other caregivers. So thank you so much for doing that. If people are listening and maybe they're not in a K through 12 school, but they're in a preschool or a daycare, this would be a great tool for them as well. I know I've kept you longer already than I said I would. With whatever time you want to share, is there anything else that you want listeners to know about this program or about this topic before we close things out with a coda?

I think just for music teachers or anyone studying music, I think understanding not just this research, but all of the research I look into, which is about how music learning affects brain development, is a really important— it's so important for us to all understand because we are— music teachers often understand it intuitively. We know this stuff works. We possibly don't know how to explain why it works. And that's the bit that's really interesting for me is I, if we know the why, we not only get better at what we do, we get better at explaining it to other people as well. So I think—

Definitely.

Actively engaging in this research, and that's my passion, is to make it so accessible that it's really easy to interact with. And to then be able to learn more about it and to use the language around the science I think if we have as many music educators all over the world who can do that, it will actually have an amazing impact on education in general because we're bringing in a tool that, yes, may have been used many, many decades ago far more effectively and far more integrated in everything, but we can bring that back. And it's a tool we already know and it makes music teachers also really incredibly vital to the education of every child. And that's what I want to see happen.

That's a beautiful point as well. I mean, some people might put it a little bit more crassly, like job security, but yeah, you're totally right. I mean, that's part of advocacy is explaining to others the value that music education and music training brings to our shared human experience. And we can't just assume people understand that if they're not in that world. It's on us to communicate that. So love that. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Anita.

This is—

you did an even better job than I knew you would do a great job at explaining the connection in our brains between music training and literacy, and you did even better than I expected with explaining that connection. So thank you, and thank you for putting this very practical tool out there for people to utilize. As you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda, by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. Do you have a song or story you can share with us in closing today?

Not really a song or story. There's a thing that is tickling my brain, I think is the way I would say it.

I like that description.

And it's sort of talk about going completely like, you know, off script into something else. But I've been really interested about all the talk and rhetoric and everything around AI and about where music learning and music teaching sits in that world. Like where does it happen and why is it important? And there's 2 things that have come up for me. One is in the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report, but also with a researcher here in Australia who I adore called Dr. Diana Tolmie. She's looking into what are the skills, what are the transferable skills that come from music learning that we then use and are most desired in the coming future world. And then there's been this World Economic Forum report And the list is exactly the same. And it's about critical thinking. It's about resilience. It's about teamwork. It's about creativity. And I sit there going, okay, can AI do all those things? And the answer is no.

Right.

But if we as a human have those skills, we can use AI far more effectively and in ways which are for the betterment of society. So all of this rhetoric and talk around the fact that, you know, we're going to be living out all the science fiction movies in the world that have been made about, you know, the robots taking over. I think there's a promising part for us there in music education, which is about the fact that there's no other or better way to learn those skills. And the other part that I'm sitting and thinking with a lot is it might be the last truly hard thing that we have to learn. That you cannot learn music through an AI app. Like, you have to teach your own brain how to do it. Everything else has become easier. Getting food is easier. Transport is easier. Communication is easier. Everything is easy.

Yeah.

There is no easy way to learn music. And if we're going to develop these other skills, this, you know, critical thinking and resilience, teamwork, creativity, We have to do the hard thing and the hard thing is learning music. So in my thinking, music education has never been more important than it is now for this AI age that we're entering into. And that's what's tickling my brain because it's like, I never saw this coming, but gee, this could be incredible for us.

Amen. Preach it, sister. I love it. Thank you so much to Dr. Collins for sharing these incredible insights and for distilling them into a practical, low-cost, easy-to-use tool for supporting reading and literacy. There are links in the show notes to this brand new Bead Read Insights program, as well as my previous interviews with Anita and with Dr. Nina Krauss, who we mentioned. You'll also find all episodes related related to education. All Enhance Life with Music episodes are evergreen, so be sure to check out the back catalog for more ways that music can make your life better. I hope this conversation has left you inspired to take advantage of the dual benefit of music training to enhance the reading and language skills of the littles in your life, whether you're a teacher, parent, or grandparent, or if you're an adult it's never too late to stimulate the neuroplasticity of your brain with music. Take that music instrument back up and see where the resulting brain development takes your reading or other areas that may be feeling stuck or stagnant. You can always connect with me on email, mindy@mpetersonmusic.com, Facebook, Instagram, X, or LinkedIn. And by signing up for my monthly Thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing this show. Until next time, may your life be enhanced with music.

Thank you.