Professor Sarah Wilson (part 1)

Speaker 1 00:03

With information on the latest developments in assistive technology and initiatives, 2RPH in Sydney brings you AbleQuest. Hello, I'm Marnie Roper. Whatever your personal preference in music might be, classical, blues, pop, country, techno, et cetera, listening to music enhances the lives of most people. And it has been proven that those who engage in singing with a solo or in groups, experience elevated levels of emotional satisfaction. Recent research conducted at the University of Melbourne validates the science behind this pleasurable activity. And our guest on AbleQuest today, Professor Sarah Wilson, is the driving force behind much of this research.

Professor Wilson is an internationally recognised expert in cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology. Of particular relevance to this programme, she is a pioneer of music neuroscience in Australia, showing how music can enhance brain function in healthy individuals and facilitate recovery after brain injury. She explains that music and singing include areas that control complex motor activity, auditory processing, language, emotion, and memory. And in choir singing, higher level executive function is also involved. In the first of two programmes, Barbara Sullivan spoke with Professor Wilson about the effects of music and singing on the brain.

Speaker 3 01:49

Welcome to Ablequest, Sarah, or Professor Wilson, I should introduce you as. It's wonderful that you've managed to find a little bit of time in your very packed schedule to be with us today.

Speaker 2 02:00

Thank you. It's great to be here to have this conversation.

Speaker 3 02:03

Now you're considered a pioneer of music neuroscience in Australia, exploring how music enhances brain function and aids recovery in people with acquired or degenerative brain injury. So I'd like to talk specifically about this area of your somewhat extensive neuroscientific research. Firstly, could you give our listeners some brief context and tell us what neuroscience is?

Speaker 2 02:28

Yeah, sure. I mean, that makes a very obvious place to start when we're talking about music neuroscience. So neuroscience more generally is the systematic study of the human brain. So from the basic building blocks, the neurons themselves, the gray matter and the white matter, but then how they form networks and interact and underpin different functions of our mind. So our thoughts, also our feelings, our emotions and our behaviors, how we act, our motor and outward facing activities. So it's a very, very big field and most people will specialize in a particular area of the field.

Speaker 3 03:18

And one of your areas of specialty is the neuroscience of music. So what happens to our brains when we just listen to music?

Speaker 2 03:27

It's really interesting to see what happens to the brain when we put people in the MRI scanner and we do what's called a functional MRI. And this is where we look at changes in blood flow that show us where certain areas might be more active, they've got more blood flow, other areas less involved, or they may even shut down. And we can analyse the pictures of the brain in real time while the person's lying in the scanner. And what we see is that when people lie still and listen to music, that it largely activates the auditory cortices.

So these are the areas in the brain that specialise in sound processing. And they're in a region of the brain called the temporal lobe. We don't just see that though, we also see some activation of the back of the brain in the occipital lobe, which processes visual information. And if you think about it, sometimes when you listen to music, you'll get visual and mental imagery that will come along with the sound.

Speaker 3 04:33

And memory kicks in because that music or that sound triggers certain memories often, doesn't it?

Speaker 2 04:40

That's right, which is another system yet again, so we may see some activation in what's called the Autobiographical Memory Network, which is that network of the brain that keeps a bit of a record of our lives and forms that sense of continuity to who we were in the past and who we are now. And, of course, has those salient emotional memories, you know, maybe a birthday or a wedding and the music is often core to triggering those salient memories for us so we know music plays a really important role in Autobiographical Memory.

Speaker 3 05:20

Does something different happen to our brains and body when we actually sing rather than just listen?

Speaker 2 05:27

Yes, because of course singing is a productive activity whereas listening is a more passive. It's got an active component in that we're actively processing the signal, but we're not engaging motor systems to the same degree as we are when we do immediate productive activity like singing. So additionally what comes online is activation of the motor networks, areas of the brain that control the vocal cords, our breathing, synchronous movements in time for the music, but also there's a lot of additional activity around anticipation. So if you think about when you're singing and you've got to work out when you've got to come in or there might be a break and then you've got to rejoin the music, you need to hold the music in mind and anticipate and blend with that.

So there's a range of what we call executive functions that are also drawn upon. They're like our CEO of the brain that coordinates the other networks in the brain. So it's what we consider to be a really complex human skill that we don't see to the same level in any other species.

Speaker 3 06:42

Now Sarah, is your work only with adults or do you also research how music and singing affects babies and children too?

Speaker 2 06:49

It's a great area that needs more work, looking at infants and children. We don't do it in our lab, we specialise in adults because we know that the infant, the neonate brain and the developing brain is very different from the adult brain. It has different relationships between the networks and it really still growing out those adult networks. So it's an area of specialty in its own right, but we do know broadly from the research literature into children and infants, that music essentially constitutes an enriched environment for the brain because children just naturally love music.

It's like a natural way of shaping the brain and scaffolding its healthy development. So it's highly recommended and we would be strong proponents that there should be music programs in all preschool and primary and secondary school education programs that are run. There's strong evidence that it really does enhance brain and cognitive development.

Speaker 3 07:56

So all mothers, fathers and grandparents sing regularly with them. Yep.

Speaker 2 08:01

Absolutely. And it doesn't matter how poor a singer you think you are. It's the shaping of emotional and property or, you know, intonation patterns. It's the help for working memory functions and executive skills. It's motor and auditory integration and coordination. It's doing all of these good things for the infant developing brain. And we know it's really important for bonding and social attachment.

Speaker 3 08:31

Moving on, what is it about singing in harmony in a group or choir that is different from solo singing, as you've explained it?

Speaker 2 08:39

So there's a whole additional layer now where we've got a social interaction. And before when we were talking about neuroscience, I talked about the individual brain, but of course each of our brains connects to everybody else's individual brain and that's the social neuroscience aspect, which is a much more recently emerging field of inquiry and it's a very exciting field of inquiry. And in thinking, what we see is that the parts of the brain that are important in blending are those same parts that are important for empathy and, you know, being able to put yourself in somebody else's shoes and that we've seen from work that we've done in our labs, for instance, that when we're in sync with other people rhythmically, that we are more likely to help them out.

It facilitates our empathy, it increases our social bond or connection. And so I guess this speaks to the evolutionary power of music and perhaps why we've carried it through is that it's been really vital for social cochlear and social bonding and that ability to really connect at a deeper level with each other than we might without music.

Speaker 3 10:01

Is it reasonable to think that somebody that has issues with empathy that might not have the same sort of ability to communicate with people, would they get a lot of benefit from joining a choir or joining some sort of group music exercise?

Speaker 2 10:18

Well, that's a really good question, you know, and I don't think there's been any specific studies looking at that per se. So I'd say the evidence for that is still out, but if we can take our understanding of the functions of music, we can certainly say that it leads to what we call pro-social behaviours as opposed to anti-social behaviour. So yes, if you're a more anti-social person and you're wanting to become more less anti -social, then engaging in an activity like singing together in a choir would certainly be something worth trying.

And the reason is because, you know, if you think about music, it's considered the language of emotions and how we connect to each other as human beings is predominantly in terms of our emotions. I love this idea, most people say, oh, you know, where it's all about our thinking and our cognitive abilities, but actually we are hardwired for emotions. And that's the mainstream of our experience. And then occasionally we might have a good thought, right, rather than the other way around. And music is that way of harnessing those emotions and being in shared emotional experiences together.

Speaker 3 11:36

The beneficial effects of singing in a group, choir singing or whatever, is the effect more noticeable when people are in a very emotional state, for example grief or they're very stressed or suffering from anxiety?

Speaker 2 11:49

That's a really good question as well. There's this paradoxical effect in the literature, which hasn't been fully explained as yet, but it's this idea that people seek out sad music, and why would people do that? I mean, why would people seek out wanting to be sad? And it's not true of everyone. Not everyone has a preference or a liking of sad music. It's a subgroups of people in the community. But the kind of idea that's emerging from that research area is this notion that music is quite cathartic, so it can allow us to experience emotions that are very hard to put into words.

And we can have that shared emotional moment with someone through the music that we might not have otherwise been able to. Now that might be an intense emotion of grief, or it could be singing the soccer team victory song together with everyone in the crowd after our favorite team has won the cup. So I don't think the bonding so much is dependent on the emotion per se, although there is something still yet to explain about this musical paradox of what draws some people together to want to share their grief that way. And we do know that's a really powerful way of processing emotions, because music has this direct line in to emotions that you wouldn't have otherwise, so it can be very therapeutic for people to do that.

Speaker 1 13:31

Barbara has been speaking with Professor Sarah Wilson, renowned music neuroscientist. It was the first part of the conversation. Join us next time to hear Professor Wilson explain how music therapy can help the language recovery of people with acquired brain injury, such as stroke.

You have just been listening to AbleQuest, a program that looks at developments in assistive technology. From Barbara Sullivan and Marnie Roper, thank you for listening and goodbye till our next program.