Karen Barrett Seeing Creativity and Improv in the Brain

The brains of musicians are very different from non-musicians, you know, because we've done musical training for so long, you know, we have things that we do better on tests of like auditory attention, auditory working memory, things like this, executive function. But some of the work from Nina's lab has shown even if you took music as a kid and then you stopped lessons, but, and then you got tested as an adult later, you still kept some benefits even though you stopped playing for a while. So from other labs has shown even short-term music training, like you can be a non-musician and I put you through a study, hey, you learn some basic piano for like 20 minutes a day, that could improve perceptions and cognitive abilities. So really, yeah, basically it's a spectrum, right? Musicians who are expert musicians, professionals, do do much, much better than, for example, an amateur musician. But any musical training can be pretty helpful.

Welcome to RxChill Pill, the podcast that strengthens your resilient mind every time you listen to the extraordinary stories, expert tips, and meditations to elicit your relaxation response, the antidote to your stress response. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby MD. I'm a physician and mom specializing in mind-body and lifestyle medicine. Find out more about me, my personalized online courses on procrastination and mindset coaching for kids, teens, and adults at mindbodyspace.com. Hi, I'm so happy to have a conversation today with Dr. Karen Chan Barrett. I met Karen when she gave a fascinating talk as part of a special presentation called Music and the Mind with world-renowned soprano Renée Fleming at the Juilliard School in New York City. This program was inspired by Miss Fleming's other work, a collaboration with the National Institute of Health in association with National Endowment for the Arts called the Sound Health Initiative. The Music and the Mind series was created for general audiences, and the program explores the power of music in in relation to our health and neuroscience. On that evening at Juilliard, the highlight was Improvisation and the Brain. Dr. Karen Chan Barrett, PhD, represented Dr. Charles Limb's Music and Perception Lab at the University of California, San Francisco. She discussed the research on the neuroscience of musical creativity and improvisation. Karen tells us about the fascinating research on the impact that music and musical training has on our brain development. I'll give you a hint: it's not just about listening to classical music. She discusses how they gather data in the lab on creativity and even improv comedy and how it maps out on the brain. Karen also tells us the surprising reason she, a classically trained pianist, pivoted to become a neuroscientist and how her husband, a classically trained cellist, taught himself into a whole new career. If you have kids taking music classes or kids who are interested in STEAM, that's science, tech, engineering, arts, and math fields, get them to listen along with you. You may even get them to practice more and start the conversation about how all of these seemingly disparate fields connect.

Hi, Karen, thank you so much for being here. I know it's a strange time right now because you're home with your kids.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I have a I have a 21-month, 22-month-old baby now. And he's Theo. And yeah, we've been, you know, he had just started preschool this year. And so my husband and I have been catching every round of sickness that goes around in preschools. And so he's currently home with us. So like everyone, I think I feel, you know, the struggle of trying to be full-time mommy and daddy and then also try to every now and then take care of the house and work.

And tell us about what you do at this fascinating laboratory that you work with. With Dr. Charles Lim, where you investigate music perception.

Yeah, yeah.

And creativity.

Yes.

And improvisation.

Yeah.

That is so amazing.

I am a postdoctoral scholar. Uh, my PI, which is the head of our lab, Charles Lim, is principal investigator. Principal investigator. He is a cochlear implant surgeon. Just so, if in case you don't know what it is, a cochlear implant is a surgical device that's inserted into the ear of people who are deaf pretty much, and it helps restore their hearing. Charles is a— as a scientist, he is a scientist and a surgeon, but he's also a musician. He's a really great jazz musician. And so that's why he's in the Department of Otolaryngology, because that's where he does his surgery. But our lab is located there too. I'm a postdoctoral scholar, which means I am doing basically a research fellowship kind of with him after I've already finished my PhD. Our lab in particular kind of has two research interests. We study music perception in cochlear implant users because while cochlear implants are amazing at restoring speech for deaf people, what's really hard still is complex sound perception. So hearing, you know, in noisy environments or hearing music or hearing, you know, very rich acoustic information. So that's really hard for some.

And you just— and you wrote about cochlear implants in kids and how they process emotions and speech, right?

Yeah.

So that's a very subtle kind of brain function where you are able to draw emotions out of somebody's speech or the way they're talking or their tone.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, something like emotion perception can be difficult for cochlear implant users 'cause if you think about it, a lot of our conveyance of emotion is in the inflection of our voice, right? I can say something like, "I'm so happy," or, "I'm so sad," right? And it's the voice change, right? And that is actually pretty difficult for a lot of cochlear implant users to perceive. And naturally, during how much that's part of our human communication, that really affects their social development as well, right? So we in general look at everything from emotion perception to the impact of music training on hearing to how well cochlear implant users hear aspects of music, like can they tell different instruments apart? Can they tell rhythm? Can they tell differences in pitches, right? These are all parts of our research into complex sound perception and cochlear implant users.

That's fascinating.

Thank you. I think the more we know about how cochlear implant users hear very complex sound, the better we can hopefully inform evolving the technology. Something that's really interesting is that cochlear implants haven't been around for that long.

How long have they been around?

I would say maybe 30, 50 years. Charles is probably one of the second generation of cochlear implant surgeons.

Uh-huh. So when does one get it?

Well, it kind of, it kind of depends. Um, it kind of depends when, how you've had your hearing loss, right? Let's say you lost your hearing as an adult. Well, then you're probably going to get a cochlear implant later on. That's assuming you and your doctors want one, right? It is still surgery. It's invasive. There are, you know, it's a surgery, right? So I think, you know, that really they have to make that personal decision with their doctor. But I will say we are seeing better outcomes in terms of better music perception and complex sound perception if you implant earlier. So for example, in my study on pediatric CI users, right, if let's say you're a baby and you're born deaf, well, maybe you have your doctors talking with you about options and you implant right away within the first year. Then you, you know, your brain is more plastic when you're a child, right? It's more able to, you know, evolve and change and adapt. And so, you know, in general, I think there are many good outcomes if you can implant earlier rather than later, but it all kind of, it really is on an individual basis. It kind of depends on each particular user and their team of doctors.

Wow, that's so fascinating. And the other part of what you guys do is study creativity, right? In particular, improvisation. And you work with a lot of musicians and even comedians.

Yeah, so the reason we also study creativity is, as I mentioned, Charles is a jazz musician, so he's very into improvisation. That's something he does all the time. And so our lab does like to look at the neural correlates of improvisation. We mostly started with musicians just because music is the kind of stimuli that you can, you know, study relatively easier compared to other art forms. For example, if you're going to put someone in an MRI machine, they have to keep their body relatively still so that you can get a clear picture of their brain. And we were able to find ways to do that in the fMRI scanner with musicians. They basically held a special keyboard on their lap, and if you just play with your fingers, you can keep your head still. So you can see why studying music would be easier than studying something like dance, right? Dance has so much movement, you can't keep your head still. So basically, yeah, we study the neuroscience of musical improvisation, and Charles's previous studies have looked at what happens in the brain of expert jazz musicians when they're doing that versus playing something pre-memorized, or what happens in their brains when they're collaboratively playing with a partner instead of, you know, just play alternating memorized tunes. So that was—

someone is actually outside of the MRI machine collaborating with the musician inside, right?

Yes.

And then you're measuring their brain activity.

Yeah. So in the Donne et al. 2014 paper from our lab, Basically, there we used a paradigm called trading fours. It's a jazz technique where, you know, you play 4 bars, then your partner plays 4 bars, and you go back and forth creating together. And we had the participant lie in the fMRI scanner, they play for 4 bars, and then Charles, or another researcher, was out in the control room also playing 4 bars alternating with them. So the one in the control room is not getting scanned, they just serve to be the partner for your playing.

Right.

But we looked at what happens in the brain of the participant when they're trying to do this improvised conversation with another musician.

So you have to be a musician to work in your lab?

I will say you don't have to be a musician, but you definitely have to have some interest in music. Well, I took piano.

I took piano when I was younger. Wait, so you're, you're a pianist also, right? I am. So actually, so Charles is at Peabody. Is he— he's a professor there still?

No, he— we, we were at Peabody and Johns Hopkins, but we moved to UCSF. But yes, he was faculty. He had like a joint appointment between UCSF Uh, sorry, Johns Hopkins Medical School.

And Peabody is the musical, uh, school, the conservatory, right?

So Peabody Conservatory of Music is, um, the music conservatory within the larger Johns Hopkins University. And that's actually where Charles and I met. Um, I am, I am a pianist by training. In fact, I would say, well, I've kind of always done both. I went, I started piano at age 5. Very, you know, did competitive classical piano. Um, and then when I went to college, I definitely still wanted to do music, so I did major in music, but I also was interested in neuroscience. So I was doing a double major at college, just kind of at Wellesley College, actually.

Oh, Wellesley. Okay.

Yeah, so I went to Wellesley College for my undergrad, and I did both music and neuroscience. And after I finished Wellesley, I love, you know, I really just felt like I wanted more time to really get better at my instrument, like really have time to practice and really focus on it. So that's when I went to Johns— uh, Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University.

Wow, so you went to conservatory after?

Yeah, I went to conservatory afterwards, and I did dual master's degrees at Peabody. I did a piano performance, also a conservatory, um, you know, master's degree, but I also did musicology, the academic musicology, as a master's degree too. And I loved it. I thought the whole experience of music school was wonderful. I got to practice all I wanted. I was around musicians all the time. It was fantastic. But in the end, I kind of realized that it wasn't quite the right fit for me. This sounds totally silly, but the reason was because all your performances are at night, and I'm a morning person. I remember falling asleep in the middle of one of my concerts. I was really struggling with the whole night performance thing. So I said, okay, so funny.

I mean, look, you have to look at these things.

It's a lifestyle thing, right? It's healthy. Yeah. Yeah. I find like I loved music, but I was like, gosh, I just don't like working at my worst time. You know, like if I could give a concert at 9:00 AM, I'd be golden. But they don't really do that. I'm kind of a homebody. So I was like, you know, if I become a performer, I'm going to have to travel. So I just realized, you know, lifestyle-wise, it wasn't quite what I wanted. Of course, it was a wonderful experience. I made amazing friends. I actually met my husband there. Yeah, so it was fantastic. He was a classical cellist, and he also had always dreamed of being a quartet cellist, but he, like me, is a morning person. So we both looked at each other like, maybe this isn't gonna work. Like, maybe, maybe as much as we love music, unless they switched to early morning concerts, this isn't gonna work.

Oh, well, you could always travel to another country and, uh, travel along a time zone.

That's true. Be like, now we're doing 9 AM concerts. You know, it was some great things happened, but I was like, you know what, this isn't quite working. But then what I wanted to do, I was like, you know, I really still love science. Maybe I should look about going back into, you know, being an academic musician. Like I had always wanted to be a professor. You know, I had my music professors at Wellesley College, Martin Brody, Charles Fiske, Lois Shapiro. They were amazing and so inspiring. And I always wanted to be a teacher back then. And so it's like, well, maybe I'll look into something else. And then And then as I was Googling around, I was like, oh, there's this new field called music cognition. I could do both music and science.

Wow. So you just figured that out on Google?

Yeah. That's your Google, you asked.

Yeah.

I was just like, I wonder what I should do. And this is my second year of the master's is when you start applying to schools. So I was like, okay, well, I was looking into music perception and there were a couple of programs and I applied to do a PhD. And ultimately chose Northwestern University where they had a PhD in music cognition that was centered in music, the music department. Now people study music cognition from a lot of perspectives. You can be in psychology, you could be in neuroscience, you can be in linguistics, computer science, right? It's a very interdepartmental field, so you can kind of do it however way you want. I, at the time, really thought I wanted to be a music professor, so I was looking for a music-based music cognition program. And so I got into the PhD at Northwestern. Will came with me. We moved there together. And yeah, it was lovely. I mean, it's interesting because it became kind of a music cognition and music theory program because not many departments at that time were advertising for music cognition teachers, right? More likely, you become hired as a musicologist or a music theorist, and you teach basic music theory, basic musicianship classes, and then also get to do music cognition.

So sure, most people haven't even under— don't even realize how many different music cognition fields there are.

Exactly. Exactly. So at Northwestern, you know, we were taught how to teach music theory, you know, music theory pedagogy and, you know, ear training and all sorts of stuff. So I did the very fundamental music theory training as well as music cognition. And at the same time, I was still a neuroscientist. So I was— I got a co-advisor named Nina Kraus. She runs one of the big auditory neuroscience labs that was doing music perception research. And I joined her lab too. So I was kind of in two departments as I was doing my degree. I was with the music department, but also working with Nina's auditory neuroscience lab.

Uh-huh.

Well, at Nina's lab, what they really study is subcortical. So it's kind of these— they use EEG, which are the brain scalp responses. And they look at subcortical, so low-level responses from the brain, as well as cortical, you know, higher-level responses of the brain to music. My research there at the time during my dissertation was more focused on the impact of music training and neuroplasticity. So I think I mentioned before, plasticity is how the brain changes with learning and experience. And I at the time was really interested in how musicians, through their musical training, change their brain, how, how our training alters our brains compared to non-musicians. So that's what I was really working on with her, as well as my own dissertation was on attention. Like, if music is such a complex acoustic phenomenon, how are we able to perceive it, especially if you hear multiple voices at the same time? Think Baroque polyphony, like Bach, Bach canons or fugues. You know, how can we hear something that rich? Like, that's all hitting our brain as a massive sound. Do we listen to different parts of the music differently because they are very perceptually salient? We mean they pop out in the music, they're very attention-grabbing. Or do I hear polyphony different from my husband because we play different instruments? What is the impact of our training on our attention? So these were kind of the things that I was looking at in terms of—

What did you find different about musicians' brains at that time?

Definitely that I was mostly looking just within my own dissertation group was— so there's two studies that I did. In terms of attention to polyphony, for example, musicians tend to pay preferential attention to the line played by their own instrument. So if you're a cellist, you have to hone in on your own instrument. If you're a cellist listening to a duet between a cello and a flute, you're going to automatically pay attention to the cello because your training has kind of honed your brain to pay attention to that. We also discovered is that the brains of musicians are very different from non-musicians. Because we've done musical training for so long, you know, we have things that we do better on tests of like auditory attention, auditory working memory, things like this, executive function.

So how long did musicians have had to done music to show these changes? Was it like 5 years, 10 years, 15 years?

You know, any training. I mean, like the more training you did, the more of an expert you were in terms of your, you know, obviously a highly trained musician will do better than an amateur musician. But some of the work from Nina's lab has shown even if you took music as a kid, and then you stopped lessons, but, and then you got tested as an adult later, you still kept some of the benefits even though you, you stopped playing for a while. So wow, research from other labs has shown even short-term music training, like you can be a non-musician and I put you through a study, hey, you learn some basic piano for like 20 minutes a day, that can improve perceptions and cognitive abilities.

So really improve your brain functioning.

Yeah, essentially.

Yeah.

And it's not, you know, widespread, it's not everything gets better, but things that might be related to music will get better, like, you know, auditory, you know, attention and auditory working memory and, you know, motor control, right? This makes sense because—

What about emotional control?

I don't know if anyone has actually tested that. I don't think we've done much about our own emotional control and things like that. But yeah, basically it's a spectrum, right? Musicians who are expert musicians, professionals, do do much, much better than, for example, an amateur musician. Any musical training can be pretty helpful. Okay.

So all those kids out there taking music lessons, don't give up. Don't give up.

I'm speaking to the choir here, but like, yeah, it's good for your brain.

And then you went on to— how did you meet Dr. Lim?

Yeah. So it was my last year of my master's degree. And Charles was just starting his lab at Johns Hopkins. He had just published his first paper on musicians and creativity. And I just met him through a colleague. And we just kind of got along. I actually didn't have time to work with him while I was at Peabody because I was already on my way off to the PhD program. Like, I had already gotten in and was about to leave Hopkins. But, you know, during my PhD, I just kept in touch with him because he was really nice and very friendly. Actually, so I was 5 years in at Evanston at Northwestern when Peabody asked me if I would come teach a class on music cognition. So basically, I moved to Baltimore while I was still in my PhD, and I was teaching a class on music cognition, both at— it was a Peabody graduate class on an introduction to music cognition. I also taught the Johns Hopkins undergrads during their winter session. So I taught a couple classes, but I was also writing my dissertation. Yeah, so I was, I was just— so I reconnected with Charles again because he actually, um, he sponsored my class on music cognition at Peabody. So we've just kind of reconnected while I was finishing my dissertation there. There was— we also hosted the Music, Mind, Meaning conference at Peabody in 2014. It was a music cognition conference. You know, I was thinking, oh, you know, maybe after I finish writing, I would love to keep working with Charles. He and I just get along so well. And we had talked about doing a postdoc with him, but then he got this amazing offer here at UCSF. He was, you know, he's like, oh, I'm considering it because, you know, it's a great opportunity. He's like, but I'm sorry if that affects your plans. I'm like, I was like, you know, could we talk about me coming with you? And he looked at me like, what? Is that a possibility? Like, you could come with me? I'm like, you know, yeah, my husband is a software engineer. So, like, he went into software engineering. So I was like, you know, Silicon Valley is the place he wants to be anyways. Maybe I could come with you. I finished my dissertation. Charles actually came out to San Francisco first and set up the lab. And I, I took a brief break after my dissertation to work for a nonprofit academic psychology organization, um, for a year. And then I followed him out here, and yeah, I started my postdoc with him. Amazing.

And he did that, uh, TED Talk in 2011, right? I remember seeing that TED Talk. Can you tell me about what, what the groundwork he laid down in that TED Talk was about?

So the TED Talk, if you see it on YouTube, Charles basically talks about some of his seminal studies, his beginning studies on creativity. The first one, Liman-Brunn 2008, is where he took expert professional jazz musicians, he put them in the scanner, had a specially created fMRI-safe keyboard. To be fMRI-safe, it basically has to have no metal, right, because the fMRI scanner— So he figured out a way where he created this very special keyboard that could sit on your lap, you lie down and play and keep your head really still, and basically he looked at a condition where people were allowed to improvise, on a given piece. Or they played— for the control condition, they played this piece that Charles wrote. He wrote a 12-bar blues piece called Magnetism. He gave them to them all in advance of scanning. For the control condition, they just played it as is, just memorized it. And we gave them a blues bossa backtrack so it sounded, you know, more musical. And then for the improvisation condition, they were allowed to improvise on that same chord progression. So now they played whatever melody they wanted, but same rhythm, same tempo, like actually, no, they were allowed to improvise with the rhythm too. But basically, I took the chord progression because they're still at the same backtrack. Now they just improvised. And what that paper found is that improvisation is a distinct brain activity— shows distinct brain activity from playing something that's memorized. What you get is you have this activation of medial prefrontal cortex, which is kind of up here in the front of the area. And that's probably because, you know, it does take, you know, goal orientation, and, you know, you have you have to be paying attention and things like that. But you also see this really interesting pattern of deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and that was thought to be associated with, you know, hitting flow, with kind of like turning off that judgmental, like, area of your brain and just letting yourself go and trying to just, you know, mind wander. So that's what was really interesting, is that it's not just associated with, like, activation or deactivation, it's that those two work together. Together. You know, you have like this kind of goal-oriented behavior, but you also have to not be very judgmental of anything that comes out. You also have to be very like mind-wandering.

So that's very interesting because most of the time they've shown that our default to mind-wandering is towards negativity.

Yeah, and we're showing that actually that mind-wandering is maybe imperative and necessary for something like improvisation. Like maybe great improvisations come out of all this mind-wandering. And letting your brain kind of just be at rest.

But you added that there's a goal, like in a goal-oriented mind wandering at the same time, right, in musical improvisation.

Yes, because in our study you still have a goal, right? You still have to stay the same chord progression, you're still in a scanner, you still know that you have 12 bars to improvise, there's still constraints, right? So it's, you know, it's still a complex musical activity, right? So that's why you know, there is some goal-oriented— you have to stay in the C minor blues scale, you know. So that's why it's interesting, is that there is this, you know, the necessary brain activity to perform your music, but you also have to, like, deactivate parts of your brain to hit flow. And, you know, you don't judge yourself, you just let your music come out. That was actually Krause's first study. That was from 2008.

So is there any way, from what you know, how to apply that into general life, like to be able to hit that flow state?

Do you— we kind of thought that maybe that brain activity we were seeing, this very pattern of activation and deactivation, is the brain activity that allows flow, that that is the same brain activity that's associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow definition, that if you hit flow, you're in this state where you are able to do these very complex tasks, but at the same time, you're also, you know, you're in the state of kind of free-floating attention that you can just observe and let it go through.

Um, so yeah, so again, you have to have some sort of like goal, direction, and a challenge to be in that state of flow, right? So you have to be a little bit challenged but not overwhelmed.

Yeah, you also have to let your creative juices come out, right? And so, I mean, if I had to extrapolate from that, I would say, you know, if you're trying to improvise, yeah, let go of that critical side of your brain. Just, you know, you, you have the technical— you've been practicing all that time, you have the technical expertise to actually play your instrument. You know the scales, you know the rhythms, you know the licks. Then you just have to let it take over. And I think if you could just let yourself be in that state of flow where you're not trying to judge or criticize or anything, your own work, then things will come out.

Do you think that's harder for, um, classical musicians?

Yeah, so, you know, I'm a classical musician. Yeah, right.

So if you think about it, I think that it's really hard for classical musicians to riff or play jazz.

Yeah, I will say that part of the reason I'm attracted to improvisation is that I'm not very good at it. But then part of that is that our musical training, at least when I was going through conservatory, I mean, we were very much about performers, right? It was about really knowing your music, getting the notes correct, interpreting, you know, in a positive way that honors the score, right? So I think that the training is kind of set up for perfectionism in some ways.

Yes.

But that being said, there's a very new wave of scholarship that shows that classical music was actually always very improvisatory. Like Bach used to improvise tons of fugues. And then you get to the classical era, the galante era. In fact, how they learned to compose was that they learned a lot of these stock partimenti. So a partimenti is like a stock phrase. Or stock chord progression that you use. And the way you compose is by putting a lot of these little stock phrases together and suddenly have a composition, right? So actually, historically, classical music was heavily improvisatory. But over time, you know, when we— the rise of the written notation score, various social cultural factors that changed, it became less improvisatory. But, um, music theorists and music historians are saying that maybe we need to recapture some of that improvisatory spirit in classical music. And so there's a new rise of learning improvisation in classical music. And actually, we just published a paper this year, 2020, um, in NeuroImage on Gabriela Montero, who's an amazing class— she's a classically trained pianist, a classical piano prodigy.

Yeah.

What's really interesting about her is she not only performs your standard canonical concert classical repertoire— that's like the first half of the concert— but then she does these very beautiful improvisations for the second half of the concert. And in fact, she's been improvising since she was a child. She's a very unique case study, I would say, because she is both a very well-trained classical pianist, but is also very comfortable improvising. And so we— improvising. And so we studied and put her in the scanner, and we're just looking at what happens in her brain when she's doing these improvisations. And, you know, for her, improvisation is really about activation. So, right, our jazz musicians show that really interesting dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deactivation and increasing activity in in the medial prefrontal cortex area. For Gabriella, what we found is that improvisation is really about activation of the brain, and moreover, she activates all over her brain— auditory areas, motor areas, emotion areas. So for her, improvisation is a really multimodal experience. Now, of course, we can't generalize.

So she's like an expert improviser?

Exactly. Like, she's an amazing improviser. She's this classical prodigy. I mean, we don't know how much of this is just her brain is really unique, right?

Uh-huh.

You know, yeah, maybe it's that classical music improvisers will improvise differently from jazz musicians. You know, that's something we could in the future probe more carefully or more extensively. There have been some studies that have done it, but people who have looked at this difference between jazz and classical training have looked at more limited improvisation, like shorter, you know, 5-melody segments or smaller segments of stuff versus we just let Gabriella do many more extensive open-ended kind of improvisation. So look at in the future. But yeah, I, I think the reason I'm really drawn to this lab and to studying improvisation is because I suck at it, you know. And, you know, every time I try to do it, I'm, I'm very scared to like make a mistake, you know. Oh, okay. And, you know, like, but the thing is, and, you know, my husband Will is both classical chess but also has some jazz training. And he's like, you know, if you make a mistake, do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again until it's no longer a mistake, you know. So awesome.

And now he's a software engineer.

And now he's a software engineer.

My son is a cellist, um, and now he's studying computer science as well.

You know, I actually think that there is a lot of similarity between music, um, and computer science because I was gonna ask you about that.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I think they're both complex systems, right? I mean, if you think about it, a musician keeps track of this very complex system of music, right? We're really into understanding the architecture and the architectonics of the compositions we're playing. And computer science is also about holding these logical structures and having memory for how they all work. So my husband has found that he thinks it's a very natural connection to go from music to computer science. I mean, a lot of the best mathematicians in history were also amateur musicians. So I think any complex system is very related to music. Um, okay.

And, and sciences too. I mean, like, I know so many doctors who play music.

Exactly. Yeah, I think there are a lot of doctors and a lot of scientists who play music. Maybe, you know, maybe like your, your main career is being a doctor, but you still enjoy doing music. Because I think music, you know, the one thing that's really cool about music is that literally stimulates all parts of your brain, right? It's about emotion and sound and motor detection and pattern recognition, and you're reading a score, so it's visually stimulating too. Not to mention it feels good, right? Like, music that's really beautiful actually activates the limbic system in a way that feels rewarding, right? So I'm not surprised that there are a lot of scientists who are musicians as well. In our lab, it just happens to be that we made that our research interest, you know. We're studying how music like, you know, is perceived and activated in the brain, like what the activity in the brain looks like when we're doing certain musical activities.

Uh-huh. Yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by how many amateur orchestras there are by doctors.

Oh yeah, like the Longwood Medical Symphony and the Massachusetts, like, the hospitals. They're really good. So yeah, I mean, and you know, I know Charles— Charles probably plays more than I do. He plays almost every night because it's soothing to him and it's a really important part of his life. I have a baby, so I don't play March anymore.

But you're going to teach your baby music, right? From what you're talking about with the brain development and cognitive advantages.

Yes, absolutely.

So you, as a scientist, you're a total believer in that, right? That music will increase cognition and help kids.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, there's a lot of debate on this because people— yeah, correlation is not causation, and that's very true. A lot of studies are correlational. But the—

Can you say that in layman's terms?

Right. So correlation and not causation means just because something is correlated doesn't mean that one leads to the other. So for example, like, let's say that on the full moon, more people wear red. Okay. See, those are correlated, but that doesn't mean that just because it is a full moon, that makes people wear red. So that's what I mean about correlation, not causation. So a lot of the studies in music cognition have been correlational, right? Like, well, we noticed that if you have a lot of experience in music, you tend to be pretty good at X skill. So the way around these correlational studies is to do something called a longitudinal study. So a longitudinal study is that when you like randomly assign people to different groups, say someone that's doing music training and someone that's doing drama training or something like that, and then you measure what their what they're like before they start the training, and then you keep checking on them as they go through the training. And that way you can say, no, now this is more, more causal. Like, we did this, we saw that they weren't good at it before, and after they did training, they did this, right? So more and more people are trying to do longitudinal studies, but, uh, pragmatically it's very hard to do, right?

Well, you could compare kids who had musical training versus kids who didn't, who are— yeah, it'd be hard to match up, but yeah.

So those are known as group studies. That's really —us tend to do is we do musicians versus non-musicians, or people having musical training versus non-musicians.

You have to make sure they're like, um, socioeconomic background and all that is very similar to control for all that, right?

So in those group studies, you have to control their age, the amount of extracurricular activities they do, their gender, their socioeconomic status. But even then, like, let's say when you do a group study like that, it's hard to tell, like, those kids who do music training, is it because they are innately you know, drawn to music. Maybe there is already something in there innate that we can't control. Yeah. Or they just had more access. They lived in a place where it was easier to get lessons compared to somewhere else. So a group study is still not perfect. It's what we do because—

and also environment, their parents, like, are they driving them, you know, hours away to get the best music lessons or tennis lessons? And then, you know, and you have a teacher that you connect with, right?

Like, what if you don't have the right teacher to nurture your talent, right? So you can see why it's a very complicated story. It is. I can't just, as a scientist, like, it's a much more complicated story than that. But having seen a lot of the research, I don't think it hurts. I'm not seeing any negatives doing musical training, right?

Only, but you have seen positives, increased activity and integration of—

Yeah, uh, Geza Szlag at Boston, um, at Harvard Medical University showed that, for example, musical training, if you have had musical training, you have a bigger corpus callosum. That's the white fiber tract that connects the left and the right.

It's like the highway between— like that.

So they're thinking, oh, well, that's because musical training increases communication between the left and right hemisphere, right? You know, they also have higher gray matter in certain areas of the brain. So there, there are some positives, and I'm sure there are also some negatives to doing musical training. We just haven't maybe explored all of them, right, because the research is still evolving. But in general, I've seen benefit from doing musical training. I mean, and it doesn't—

we don't know about the dose, or maybe you overdose. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think it can go badly. I wouldn't want to do music. Yeah, I have to be a little circumspect in it. I would never force someone to do it if they don't like it, but if they're naturally drawn to it, then I think it's generally just like, kind of like there are always let's say sports, right? Sports are good for us because the exercise makes us stronger and stuff, but it's not good if you like develop injuries or you overdo it or you don't, you know, like it, right? Right.

But also they've shown that with kids who do gymnastics or ballet, it's the same kind of training, you know, that a classical musician might have on instruments at a very young age. They also have increased cognition. Ability. Yeah, yeah.

And I would think that's probably because it's enrichment. If you think about it, music, dance, sports, you know, drama— these are all— if you think you're spending time outside your school environment, you're going to be more kids, you get a lot of one-on-one attention, you have this, you know, structured training regimen. There will, there will be benefits to all these types of training, which, you know, which, um, yeah.

And but it's neuroplasticity where, you know, when they're using a lot of motor skills, for example, in gymnastics or ballet and/or a musical instrument, you're increasing the gray matter and white matter in that area.

Yeah, and you're just having to use all parts of your brain in this kind of concerted way to do— yes, right, exactly, right? So you're using all your sensory brain, you're using all my senses, you're trying to do something complex, you have to practice hard at it, right? Like, you know, when you start, you're not good at it. So the fact that putting all this structured time in. Erickson, who's a researcher, calls it deliberate practice, right? You very— yeah, they can get better at it, and that takes effort and attention and discipline. Those are all good things too. Now I should say, now that I think about it, there is one thing that has been shown to be, um, bad about music, which is if you overdo it, something that can happen is known as maladaptive plasticity. And what happens is you develop vocal dystonia. So it's a muscle disorder where it's like your, your hand or other parts of your body spasm. So Leon Fleischer is a famous pianist who had focal dystonia. His whole right hand seized and he could only play left-hand concertos for a long time. They're thinking, although again still being researched, but they think that stuff like focal dystonia is due to overuse, is due to practicing in not a healthy way, you know, and that you might by just straining your muscles. So that is one negative side of too much movement. You can cause yourself injury and focal dystonia. But again, it's all, you know, as a scientist I have to say it's all being researched, but generally I think recent training is positive.

And as a mom, you would definitely—

Yeah, if anything, I think my bias is because I'm a musician, it's easy for me to do that with my child. I think for balance, I should increase his, you know, playing around with with more athletic skills or visual arts or dancing or something else, right? But I mean, in general, any extracurricular activity is good. It's enriching, right?

It's enriching for your brain, literally. Yes.

But I, of course, I think music is particularly what it does for you. Uh-huh.

So, so going back to somebody who's really drawn to music naturally, let's talk about Matthew Whitaker.

Yeah, Matthew Whitaker is this, uh, jazz prodigy He has a really amazing story. He's blind and has been blind his whole life. And, you know, his parents were very worried about him because he was, you know, at the time he was born prematurely, he had a lot of surgeries and he was, you know, they were worried about how he would do developmentally. But they noticed that he gravitated to music. And from a very early age, he had this prodigious talent for music. And now Matthew is an up-and-rising star in the jazz world. He actually just started at Juilliard. Matthew is a really interesting case study, right? This is a blind musician who's so talented.

I had a chance to watch him play. It was incredible. Yeah. So did he, when he was a kid, did he start playing, noodling around on a family piano, or did they take him somewhere?

No, he kind of moved towards a toy piano and just started doing it, and his parents like, we didn't teach him that. I don't know, like he could listen to something and play it, right? Right, and his first piano— so they found him a piano teacher, and it was this amazing piano teacher who actually worked, I think, with a lot of other students who are blind. And so they have different teaching techniques, right? You learn— first you learn to develop your ear, but then, you know, Matthew also learned to read musical scores with braille, right? So it's a different kind of learning from maybe how a sighted classical musician might learn. And, uh, yeah, so we actually scanned Matthew in the our fMRI scanner. He's part of a study that we're doing. We have a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and we're studying improvisation across art forms. So we're looking at what happens in the brain of expert musical improvisers who are looked at as case studies, um, comedic improvisers, and then visual artists. So Matthew—

no wonder you guys are having so much fun in these pictures you sent.

I know, it's like, I can't believe I get to do this. Yeah.

Especially as a scientist.

I know. Yeah, it's amazing.

Okay, I'm gonna be around really amazing creative people, and I want to come visit your lab when, when this is all over.

Yeah, let me know. Yeah. So Matthew Whitaker is one of our case studies, and the reason we're doing is that we think that maybe eminent musicians, right, like we've been looking at all these group studies, like if you average all these professional musicians, what happens in their brain. But maybe, you know, really amazing musicians have this very unique voice, a very unique voice, very unique talent. And so maybe it's not serving us to average all their brains together, because if you average all their brains together, maybe we're getting rid of all the variability, whatever makes their brain unique, right? So for the musicians, we're getting very high, like the crème de la crème, very eminent musicians, and looking at each of their brains individually. Okay, really tailor our tasks to that particular musician. So I can't say, you know, Matthew's data is still being analyzed, but one thing we did is we, you know, played something he finds very interesting. So Snarky Puppy is one of his favorite bands. Snarky Puppy versus the monologue from Ferris Bueller. Like, anyone? Anyone? What happens in his brain when he's hearing stuff that he gravitates towards versus stuff he doesn't? It's interesting. Like, his whole brain lit up when he got to listen to Snarky Puppy, and that did not happen when listening to Ferris Ferris Bueller's model, the Ferris Bueller monologue. And moreover, what was really interesting is that his visual cortex was kind of taken over when listening. So it's almost like— and this is also part of—

oh, that's so fascinating.

Yeah, there's a lot of portable reorganization.

Talk about neuroplasticity, right? Exactly.

When you lose some part of your sensory abilities, another part of the brain may take over.

And so let's reel back for the non-science listener. So Matthew is non-neuroscientist listener. Matthew is blind, so his visual cortex is physically there, but it doesn't work the same way as our visual cortex. And it's a huge area in the back of our brain, and his visual cortex is activated with sound, right? With music.

His visual cortex instead gets activated when he listens to really interesting music.

So he not only has his auditory cortex, which is the listening part, but he also has this visual cortex that is now part of his auditory cortex.

Yeah, it's like his whole brain is going towards— wow, wow, I just got chills.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And like I said, we're looking at all of our data, uh, we've done a couple different scan sessions with Matthew, but yeah, so the brain, like literally you can change the physical components of the brain to do something else.

Yeah, and that's the amazing thing about neuroplasticity.

In general, we've seen when someone loses a function of something, like you're deaf or you lose your sight, you know, that part of your brain is still there. It's, as you said, not being used for that sense anymore. So another sensory function may take over, which is exactly what happened to Matthew. He's like, he loves music so much that his visual area of the brain got dedicated towards sound instead.

Amazing. So you actually, you can see that? On him when you scanned him? And I know you can't tell us all of the, um, data, but in general, was it fascinating working with him?

Oh yeah, he's the sweetest person. I mean, I just love Matthew and I love his family. We've worked with him a couple times. If you're interested in seeing our work, he was just featured on the CBS 60 Minutes. There was a segment on Matthew Whitaker.

Not only— yeah, Dr. Lim, Charles was showing the MRI data.

Yeah, so if you want to see our preliminary data, you can see Charles talking about it on that 60 Minutes section. So Yeah, Matthew is one of our case studies. He— Gabriela Montero was one of our case studies, right? Because she's one of those amazing classical musicians who can improvise. And so we love this because we just feel like it really allows us to tailor our experiments to each individual, and we get to see what's really unique about each other.

And then they just wanted to, um, do it out of the goodness of their heart for science.

Yeah, like, that's what's amazing is we actually don't have our grant from NEA is so generous, but fMRI scanning is very expensive. I mean, it's $600 an hour per scan. Wow. So it's very pricey. So we couldn't— we can't afford to pay any of our participants, but they're all doing it to help science. And so I, I want to take this moment to thank all of them for doing this, because if we don't have artists buying into this kind of scientific research, then we won't be able to do it, you know. And so part of, part of being able to find out more about the brain and why the arts are so important does mean buy-in from the artists. And so yeah, everyone has volunteered to do it just out of the goodness of their heart. So that's amazing.

And Colin Mochrie.

Yeah.

So Colin, tell us about him. That must have been fun.

That was so much fun. Colin Mochrie is— he is a comedic improviser from the show Whose Line Is It Anyways. I would say he's one of the great, great, great comedic improvisers. And, um, uh, there was a documentary film being filmed about his life, and they heard about our study and asked if they could participate. I Oh, really? Yeah, we would love to.

Wow, so they reached out to you?

Yeah, well, I mean, we were very interested already too, but then it was all very, um, uh, synergistic, I guess. Yeah. Let's talk about Colin. Colin is one of our case study participants, as I was saying. Um, he's an amazing comedic improviser. We can throw things at him that— and he just handles it so beautifully. Things that would really throw off a lot of other people, especially when trapped in a huge loud metal tube while you're, you know, um, but what was also really interesting is that that Collin could do some musical activities too. We had him do a task where he had to alter the lyrics to famous nursery rhymes on the fly. So that's both musical improvisation and, you know, verbal comedic improvisation. So we're really excited to see his data. And again, that's preliminary. I'm still analyzing it, so I can't say much. But yeah. So we're gonna have to have you back. Yeah, sorry. Stay tuned. And as for Sammy, Sammy is the CEO Sammy Weejent. Yep, Sammy Weejent. He is the CEO of Speechless, which is a local San Francisco improvisation group, and they do a lot of consulting for the big companies like Google and Facebook and things like that, teaching improv and public speaking.

Why does Google and Facebook want to learn improv? I mean, I can guess, but I'm just asking.

I think improvisation really improves your communication skills. Like if you're, if you think about public speaking and communicating your ideas, these are fears people have, but it's also imperative to be good at it, right? If you are giving big talks or even department meetings. So they hire, uh, speechless to help work with their workers to get them better at learning to speak and communicate on the fly and things like that. Um, so Sammy and— oh, are you clicking something? Sorry.

So I feel like such a wicked person when I do these. I'm like, stop that, you're clicking something. Sorry. So Speechless, is it improvisation comedy or is it just everything? Improv, everything. Okay, so they're bringing comedy into it. I want to take that class.

Take it. Anthony Veneziale is the co-founder of Speechless and he's amazing. He was just on Broadway, Freestyle Love Supreme with, um, Lin-Manuel Miranda was just on Broadway and Anthony was on that with him. So. Wow. Well, I think really right now everyone's finding that with coronavirus and the kind of uncertainty and stress that we are all feeling that we could use some humor, some, you know, improvisation is really important for how well we are able to adapt to our changing circumstances, right? Like right now we are all having to improvise in our lives on multiple levels, right? So I think really part of, we find improvisation to be a creative process and it's certainly amazing when elevated to art the way these artists do, but at the same time it's also ubiquitous, it's everyday life.

I mean, and it's a human process. If we didn't have improvisation, we wouldn't have anything around us, like including everything we're using right now.

Exactly, like it's the foundation of invention, right? It's the foundation, it's the foundation of our being able to speak to each other right now without a script, right? So I think improvisation is this very fundamental human activity actually. Sammy and Anthony reached out to our lab and we decided to do an fMRI experiment on comedy improvisation. And so Sammy, because he was one of our pilot subjects, because he helped design all the paradigms with us, we essentially adapted real-world improvisation, you know, warm-up games and actual, you know, activities that they did, and we adapted them for the scanner. So stay tuned, that data is also coming out soon. That's lovely. Fun. Yeah, sneak preview is improv— verbal comedic improvisation is definitely different from saying something by rote or by memory, and you see kind of different patterns of brain activity depending on the particular, um, game you're playing.

So, okay, so when we find out more about this, will we be able to, let's say, teach someone how to do it on purpose, deliberately increase your level of improvisation?

I don't know, like, I don't think we have that kind of volitional control over our brains per se, but I do think that, you know, what we hope from having studies, that this shows people that improvisation is good for, you know, your life, for— it is a different brain state, and that hopefully everyone will want to be interested in learning.

Well, you can increase it. I mean, all these people who are excellent at doing that, right, they've been practicing for many, many years, and they've been deliberately doing these improv classes. Exactly.

And yeah, Sammy and Anthony take students who are complete beginners, and they teach you how to do— I mean, Sammy has even been helping me, like, I now improvise all of my scientific talks because—

You improvised the one you did at Juilliard, you said? I did. I did.

And nobody would ever know. I kind of knew what I was going to say. Like, I knew what the scientific content was. But yeah, the words just kept changing each time I said it. So—

Uh-huh. And so he's teaching you— what does he do with you? What does he do?

So basically, one thing I've learned, like, if you're going to give lectures and you want to improvise them, is you have to practice. It sounds weird to practice your improvisation, but that's true. You kind of definitely know what you're going to do it, but you do several runs several times. And yeah, maybe it comes out slightly different, but something he does is you will maybe record yourself as you're doing it those couple of times and you'll figure out what soundbites sound good and maybe you work that into the next practice run that you do. And over time, with more practice, even though it's not scripted, you start to get better at communicating your ideas. You kind of knew what phrases to use or the pacing you need to use, you know. And so, um, interesting.

I used to, um, when I started giving lectures, I used to record myself and listen to myself. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's the kind of thing, learning how to learn, like just recording yourself and using it, practicing. You practice your improvisation. Um, did he have you visualize things? Not so much. I think it really depends on each individual. Like, if you're the type of person that the visualization really helps, I'm sure he would. For me, it was mostly just practicing the cadence of my speech. I mean, something you can probably tell from how I talk right now, I'm a fast speaker.

Yes. And you're really brilliant.

Thanks. That's very kind of you. So I have to learn to speak slower. And to all your podcast listeners, I'm sorry if I speak fast. I am from the East Coast, so I still speak really fast.

No, but you also speak very fast, but, uh, it's scientific language. I mean, you're so smart. I guess he was teaching you how to slow it down a little.

Is that what he was doing? Yes, I think that's really what a lot of these improv teachers are great at, is that, you know, scientists have a way of talking to other scientists. We use jargon, right?

Of course, we like to abbreviate everything.

Yeah, but we need to learn how to communicate a story to people who are non-scientists. And so really, it's like teaching me how the story, the narrative, like how to make it sound, um, when I'm communicating, like I'm not just speaking to a bunch of other scientists, you know. So like really how to tell a good story, how to not use jargon, you know. Something when I was doing the Juilliard talk, I had people helping me in our, in our warm-up session. We had we practiced me giving this speech, and it was, it was funny. I was joking that I felt like I was delivering a monologue because I had a huge concert hall, and I was like, I don't know where to look. Like, where do I look? Where do I move? And I, and, you know, and they were like very much emphasizing that, make sure you deliver your consonants. Do not drop your consonants. If you use a scientific word like functional magnetic resonance imaging You need to say it and then pause a little so people will understand that scientific jargon. So yeah, I've learned a lot of tips from working with drama coaches and improvising coaches, and I've been very lucky. I mean, that's also one of the reasons I love this work. I love, I mean, I just love creative people. They're just so fun.

You have an amazing job. Thank you, thank you. But you're amazing too. But so they coached you. Before you went on stage, just that same day though?

Yeah, that same day at 3 PM.

And how long did, how long did Sammy and Anthony coach you?

Uh, but that was for a different talk. That was for— oh, okay. That was probably under an hour. Oh, okay.

So you had short coaching sessions basically that helped you. And I mean, you were amazing on the Juilliard stage, and you had nothing. You were just walking around. There was no, you know, props or anything.

I mean, part of what's helped is that, as we talked before, I'm a musician and I'm a performer, and I love giving talks. I actually love public speaking, which I know is really weird. My job is to entertain and educate and communicate, and I love that. I mean, that's what's the basis of being a performer as a pianist, right?

So you used to be on stage all the time, performance, right, as a competition. So this is— is this easier than a piano competitions, speaking in public then, relatively?

I mean, I was— I'm not a nervous performer. I was actually a pretty calm pianist, but I would have memory slips, which is awful.

Oh yeah, I know about those. Yeah, that can be kind of difficult. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, I find it much easier to give a talk.

That's like the musician's nightmare, right? Memory slips. Yeah. How do you recover from that?

Actually, I used to improvise. I would just make it up until I came back to where I'm supposed to be. I love it. I just learned to cover. Maybe because I made mistakes so often, I actually got pretty good at covering them.

So you don't suck at improvisation. I guess not in that sense.

If I'm forced to, I will.

Okay. All right. So the last thing I wanted to talk about was this summer college student rotating through your lab. That looks like fun.

Yeah, what was that about? Well, Charles is an amazing mentor and he loves nurturing the next generation of scientists. And so, uh, in the past we've had a lot of, uh, medical students and summer students who are interested in music cognition work in our lab. Last summer was a particularly busy summer. We had, um, 5 college students. And wow, yeah, so it was, it was pretty busy. Um, but yeah, how long were they there for? About 2-3 months. Wow.

Yes. And did they help you or did they hurt you? No, I'm just kidding. Were they interns? Were they helping you?

Yes, we had them help us on things that had to get done, scoring, you know, the cognitive assessments. With each of them, they each kind of took one of these eminent artists and I said, well, dream about it. If you could test X artist, what would you have them do? What do you think plays to their strengths, you know? And So they got kind of a taste of what it's like to be in a lab.

So important that you have— you're mentoring people like that.

I think it's, you know, we're hoping to encourage them and that maybe they'll come back to work in the lab.

And what do they have to be interested in to qualify if someone listening is interested?

Well, I would say in general, you know, people who want to do music cognition tend to have an interest in music, like have some music background as well as some science background. But I think both Charles and I think the most important quality is not only intellectual curiosity, but also that you are an independent thinker, that you can work independently. Charles' mentoring style is that he kind of wants to see how we all do. He's not going to hover over you. He kind of expects—

He wants you to improvise.

Yeah, he wants you to be independent. And part of that is too, Charles is really busy. I mean, he's a full-time physician. So he's a surgeon. He is the head of our ENT, our department. He's the head of the cochlear implant. Center. Wow. He expects all of us to work very independently. And so I think, I think in general, and maybe this is just true of being in academia, I think you need to be an independent thinker. You need to learn how to— you have to be— learn how to learn. You have to learn how to teach yourself, how to take initiative, how to work independently. That's all stuff that I feel like I— there was every day in research I confront something I don't know how to do. And if you think about it, my postdoc is in doing fMRI analysis, and my PhD was in EEG, so I knew nothing about fMRI. In fact, when I started working with Charles, I knew nothing about fMRI, and I knew nothing about cochlear implants. So I had to sit down that first year and learn as much as I can, right? So I think—

And fMRI, we're saying functional MRI scan, magnetic resonance imaging, where you can see inside someone's brain and see what parts of your brain are lighting up due to the blood flow.

Yeah, as you're doing a particular activity. Activity, right? Yeah, functional compared to a normal MRI. So a medical MRI, maybe they just want to look at your leg or your brain or your neck or whatever, but for us we want to say what's happening in your brain as you're doing a particular activity.

So, so you sat down and you learned all about it?

Yeah, and I think that's just part of being an academic. Every day I'm doing things I don't know how to do, you know, you're always learning. Wanting to be in research in general or science in general, you have to be really curious, you want to have to want to learn, and You know, even if you don't know how to do it, you accept the challenge and you try it anyways and you figure out a way.

What about during the COVID time now? People are having to learn on their own. All the kids are doing school online.

I know. I mean, I think that is— Right? Yeah. And it's a huge change. And I think, you know, we've talked about our mental health and I think it's adjusting to all of this change has been huge. And I think learning online—

Right. You were mentioning you were about to scream about your little— I love my baby. Baby more than anything.

He's my life. Trying to take care of him and work and my husband work, it's like more than 3 jobs trying to do that. It's really hard. Like, for us to do this podcast, my poor sick husband is trying to watch the baby, and like, we're throwing the iPad at him to be able to find some quiet time to talk, you know. So, but that's also maybe the reality of being working parents nowadays.

Um, so you're working full-time from home? Yes. So they, they've shut down the labs?

All the labs at UCSF have been shut down, but we're all being— whatever activity we can do that don't use our labs. So writing, this is a good time for people to learn different skills, you know, statistical stats, analysis, Python programming. I mean, we're just learning again, we're all learning to adapt. Like, we— this is the time to take opportunity to maybe do something you wouldn't normally have time to do. And as for all the kids, yeah, I totally sympathize. It's really hard to go from seeing your friends every day, being in school, having a structure, and then trying to do it all by yourself. But it's also an opportunity. I mean, you may learn more this way, you never know. Like My husband, for example, I'm someone who loves school. I would be a permanent student forever if I could. Me too. He hates formal education. He is an amazing autodidact, so he teaches himself stuff. When he pivoted from cello to software engineering, we basically went to the Baltimore Public Library, checked out 10 books, and he sat there and taught himself everything. What? Yeah. So he has no formal training. He's just taught himself everything, then learned on the job, keeps learning new languages, programming languages. So I think what I would say to everyone is you don't have to— you can, as long as you're a good learner, as long as you're curious and you're willing to learn however way you learn, you will, you will find a way to do what you need to do. And so for all the kids, you know, we both— Will and I are people— I mean, I probably rely more on formal education, a structure, more than Will does. Will is a very good autodidact.

But I mean, well, I think that, um, with all the online schools these days, it's so much easier to get all the information and learn what you want to learn. And I have to be honest with you, I'm probably better without that structure as well, maybe because I'm older. I mean, different—

and also temperament, right? I'm sure different people work— like, some people don't like structure imposed on them, or this very, like, rote approach to learning. And you're right, part of it is that we now have amazing resources— YouTube, Coursera, you know, we can— you could access the live cams on the Monterey Aquarium. So I'm still trying to teach teach my baby about tropical fish, you know? Like, in some ways, yes. Like, I will say too, like, what is that— necessity is the mother of invention. Like, being forced to have our old structure, our old habits go away, in some ways can be good. You can form new habits, you can explore new ways of doing things. And I mean, someone like me who's very much into habits finds it very— like, there's— temperamentally, I'm like, oh, I missed old way of doing things, but at the same time, what we've learned from improvisation is that it's a lot of good that comes out of changing your path, not having set expectations on how things should be. At the same time, I think I would tell everyone, be gentle on yourself. You know, life has changed a lot. Even we're all trying to make do. There are days where I find I'm struggling to do anything, you know, so I think that's just normal.

So fascinated that your husband taught himself, um, software development. I know, he's an inspiration.

Like, I wish I was that smart, but I'm not. Did he get his major in music? He has a bachelor's degree in cello performance. So all those musicians out there, you can do whatever you want. You can be anything you want to be. And he, and he just went to the library and he went to the library and started. That got him his first internship, and then he worked really hard, and on the job he always been makes sure to learn new languages, learn new skills. He's always— he's a learner. That's basically what it is.

To get a job or an internship, you don't need to have a computer science degree, at least back then.

I think times have changed. You have to remember, back then it was 2000— yeah, it was 2008, so the times are different. But let's say you don't have a bachelor's degree, you know, then you can do— there's all these boot camps, you know, short-week boot camps to teach you. You can teach yourself via Coursera. You could teach yourself. I'm time was trying to learn Python through Learn Python the Hard Way, you know, so by Zed Shaw. So like, you could teach yourself too and at least have some basics, and then you can always fill it in. I think we're all just, you know, finding new ways to adapt to the new— like, this, this is the new norm.

Oh my gosh, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm like, what's happening? Is it over?

Like, is this a dream? No, that's something I've been struggling with too. Like, Will's much— he's much better. This is Justin, you know, he's an introvert.

Okay, so he's happy. He seemed really happy when I met him before.

Oh yeah, yeah, he's fine. He's like, you know, I'm an extrovert, but I'm actually fine too because I'm a homebody and I always have ways to find ways to occupy my brain and learn something. But like, I think, you know, I think it's just, I think we all are feeling that overarching anxiety, the uncertainty, right? We all want to know, well, when will this end? And I miss the old normal, but More and more, I think I'm trying to find peace with this is the new normal. Where can I find my joy and happiness in right now? And at least for most parents, and I think most of us are just saying, what can I do right now? Like I say, what can I do this one hour? What can I do right now that will make the next moment better? You know, and if I keep it down to just that and not trying to project to the future, it's a little easier to deal with.

Well, you have given me joy today. Oh, so you've given me joy today too.

It's so nice to talk to another adult. Hi, baby. Hi, baby. Oh, bye. All right. All right. Well, we'll talk soon. Okay. Let me know if you need more.

That was Dr. Karen Chan Barrett, mom, neuroscientist, classical pianist, also faculty at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, showing us that STEM is really STEAM. And you can definitely definitely excel at more than one thing in life. And yes, lifestyle matters. Find out more about Karen and Dr. Charles Limb's Music and Perception Lab and Renee Fleming's work in the show notes at mindbodyspace.com, podcast episode number 62. Thank you so much for listening. As always, you can email me at podcast@mindbodyspace.com with questions for myself or my guests for the new Tuesday Q&A segments starting in 2021. This is Dr. Juna signing off, wishing you and your loved ones wellness.