Podcast Episode 21: Our Brain....& Music

Hello, my name is Ana. I'm a fifth year medical student in Barcelona, Spain. As well, I am a soul and blues singer. So, let's going to talk about music. Last time we spoke about how brain reacted with music and we could see how powerful it is. Now, we're going to see how it affects our body, our well-being both physically and mentally. Let's focus with the studies that reflect that idea. Let's start with autism. Autistic people can be described as shut off from others in varying degrees. Their empathic limitation makes their social relation difficult. Can music modify or help them with that? Well, last episode we said that when we are doing tasks that require empathy we activate the same areas that we activate when we listen to pleasant music. With autistic people, the aim is creating a sonorous dialogue with improvisation technique. Three button points out how musical improvisation in autism stimulates emotional sharing, regulates anxiety, increases motivation and encourage the patient to have the pleasure of contact through more understandable communication. Also, another article called Autism and Music Therapy reflects how non-verbal behaviors emerged during music therapy sessions, such as physical contact, looking at each other, attuned movement and approach to the other increased. Moreover, McLaurin-Jones et al. showed that music therapy helps autism by improving language comprehension, encouraging the desire to communicate, making creative self-expression possible, reducing non-communicative speech and decreasing echolalia, which is an uncontrolled instant repetition of the words spoken by another. So, music is a communication bridge for them as well as for all of us. Let's forget about autism now and let's gonna talk about dementia, how music can help people with dementia. Dementia is a general term for loss of memory, language, problem solving and other thinking abilities that are severe enough to interfere with daily life. Can music peel back the dementia fog and bring people's memory back? It has been seen that when people with dementia listen to the music they used to listen in the past, they remember the title, the artist and even more the lyrics where and when they listen to it. Music allows them to reconnect with their family members. In addition, a study from Stanford University California have shown that music can reduce agitation in patients with Alzheimer. It may even reduce the need for antipsychotics often prescribed for agitation. What is unique about music in the brain is that it's everywhere from emotional centers to memory centers to movement and that helps explain why even when much of the brain is gone music can wake it up. Let's focus on movement and music. From just as soon as we can move we want to move to music. it's something irresistible, it's innate. We pick up the rhythm and run with it. It's an ability that simply doesn't exist in even our closest animal relatives, gorillas. Let's make an experiment. Pick your fingers like that, whatever you think you should. are you doing that? Isn't it? It's incredible that we are on beat but what's more incredible is that these two beats aren't even being played in music. The only place we can hear those missing beats is in our heads. What we do is called entrainment. Our brains pick up on that beat instantly and then we hold it in mind and then we are able to synchronize our movements to that beat. Our ancestors, when they wanted music, they had to do it themselves and there was no way to make music without moving. Even more, it has been seen through an EEG that when two musicians are playing the same music often show some synchrony between their brainwaves. That's why music is now being used with Parkinson. Parkinson disease is a brain disorder that leads to shaking, stiffness and difficulty with walking, balance and coordination. There's a lack of dopamine. Music can help with freezing, that is, it can help them moving. Music is thought to act as bypass to the defective basal ganglia to activate what's trapped inside. the music provides an external rhythm to compensate for the defective rhythm inside the brain. So, does music impact on mental and physical well-being? Of course! Just put your favorite song and see what happens. The more you love music, the more you love feeling. Music is the soundtrack to our lives.