Ep 65: Music and Mind Series – Part 1 with Renée Fleming: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness

How personal and meaningful are music and the arts to your brain health, mental well-being, and quality of life? Renée Fleming, World Renowned Soprano and Global Arts Health Advocate shares the latest science behind the intersection of arts and health with BrainStorm host Meryl Comer. 

Fleming’s new anthology, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, is a collection of essays about the powerful impact of music on health and the human experience. You won’t want to miss this first episode in BrainStorm’s six-part series that explores the findings and speaks to scientists featured in Music and Mind.

Support for BrainStorm by UsAgainstAlzheimer's is provided by Genentech 

Transcript

Renée Fleming (00:01):

Instead of seeing the audience as judgmental and grading me in a situation where I could never succeed, I began to see myself as sharing something with the audience. The energy, instead of coming at me, was going out from me to them as a gift. I felt like my voice was a conduit for what other people had created. The composers

Speaker 2 (00:23):

Welcome to Brainstorm by UsAgainstAlzheimer's, a patient-centered nonprofit organization. Your host, Meryl Comer, is a co-founder, 24-year caregiver and Emmy Award-winning journalist, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Slow Dancing With a Stranger.

Meryl Comer (00:40):

This is Brainstorm. And I'm Meryl Comer. Our guest is World Renowned Soprano and Global Arts Health advocate, Renée Fleming. She is the editor of the new anthology Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. Welcome, Renée. Thank you for joining us.

Renée Fleming (00:58):

Wonderful to be with you. Meryl.

Meryl Comer (01:00):

You're celebrated worldwide as a superstar. Can you share your personal journey to becoming a leading advocate for research at that intersection of arts and health?

Renée Fleming (01:10):

I can. It goes back a long way because what I've done my whole career is really challenging. We sing without microphones. It's physically quite demanding. Also, we are judged with the yardstick that is send a result. It's hugely competitive. And so I had difficulty with stage fright from time to time, and then one instance, it was so debilitating I thought I would have to stop singing, but I also had pain as a kind of a distraction from this performance pressure or an additive to it. And so I kept trying to learn about these things and looking up, you know, researchers who were looking at the mind body connection. Dr. Sarno's work helped me for a while, and I saw along the way at some point that researchers were studying music in the brain.

Meryl Comer (01:54):

Renée, everyone has stage fright if they've ever stepped in front of an audience. Can you share your secret and how you manage it now?

Renée Fleming (02:02):

Three ways really. One is I had a voice teacher at the time who would not allow me to stop singing because a lot of times you tell yourself, I'm just going to step away and try to sort this out and then I'll perform again. But what happens, and we've seen this with Barbara Streisand and Sir Lawrence Olivier and other people, is that you don't go back. People knew that I had to keep going, and then I also had therapy to understand the underlying root of it. Then also behavioral therapy, which is important. I didn't quite understand that I could reframe performing instead of seeing the audience as judgmental and grading me in a situation where I could never succeed. I began to see myself as sharing something with the audience. The energy instead of coming at me was going out from me to them as a gift. I felt like my voice was a conduit for what other people had created the composers. So all of that together, it took about eight months for me to begin to feel comfortable on stage again. But I did get through it. I'm careful. I'm always very prepared. Prepared well in advance. So I know kind of the markers of what could trigger fear. It's a whole process.

Meryl Comer (03:13):

I recall in your book the Inner Voice, the making of a singer, that coming from a musical family really inspired your career. But my question is, what does the research suggest about the importance of a lifetime connection to music? And can most of us claim it?

Renée Fleming (03:29):

They're tremendous health benefits. I mean, even Deepak Chopper, when I met him said, you're lucky. You're a singer. You're stimulating the vagus nerve every time you sing. People are really interested in the vagus nerve and how it promotes health and connects our bodies from the neck also to the gut. There's no question that artistic pursuits are helpful. In fact, this past January 1st, I made a promise to myself this year that I would not get sucked into the anxiety and worry about literally you could spend all day long on your newsfeed and never leave your apartment or your home. And I said, no, I'm going to give myself the gift every day of doing something I love that's creative or artistic and I can't tell you how much happier I am, whether it's going to an art museum, reading novels, going to theater, which I absolutely love going to, of course, operas and concerts, but also walking in nature every day, getting outside and smelling that air, especially where we live. It's so beautiful. So I am so happy that I made this promise to myself. It's made a huge difference in my state of mind. Much less anxiety, you know, not falling into depression. As individuals, we can only do what we can do. It doesn't help any of the problems in the world for us to be miserable.

Meryl Comer (04:41):

Renee, thank you for sharing something so personal. In your opinion, what do the arts and science share in common?

Renée Fleming (04:48):

Oh my gosh. I think we are so aligned with creativity. I think of science as extremely creative because a scientist is imagining what might be, what could be much as we are. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would want to perform, how I would want to connect with an audience. Aligning those two pursuits together has made a lot of sense to me. Once I met Dr. Francis Collins, who was the head of the National Institutes of Health for 12 years and is still incredibly active. He also discovered the genome and mapped it. He's an amazing man and I met him at a dinner party, an amazing dinner party. I have to say, his sword in my book is about it. And I said to him, why are scientists studying music? And his answer was to understand the brain. We embarked on this path to provide a platform for science to the audience of the Kennedy Center because I'm an advisor there and it's been a wonderful initiative. We just announced the first winners of the Renee Fleming Investigator Awards, in which a young scientist pairs with an artist in a piece of yearlong research that's of collaborative.

Meryl Comer (05:57):

Interesting subjects that they've been awarded to study.

Renée Fleming (06:00):

There's one on hip hop and A DHD for instance. And so exciting. Yeah, the caregivers is for dementia patients and rhythm, EEG and dance, for instance. Now, a lot of what's enabled us to have high level research is technology is F-M-R-I-I was in an FMRI study, and the fourth winner is, it's a a heart rate variability and live music research project. But we need a pipeline with really powerful rigorous and evidence-based results so that we can eventually embed artistic interventions and therapists in healthcare.

Meryl Comer (06:35):

Now, the brain reportedly lights up like a Christmas tree with music. Have they figured out what gene turns someone on or does it matter?

Renée Fleming (06:44):

So it's interesting that music actually is embedded in all the known mapped areas of the brain and has more impact on the brain than any other activity. This is what I learned from Dr. Collins, and I think it's because it's so complicated engaging with music, especially playing music, utilizes all of our hearing, but also anticipation. It's incredibly complex activity using your motor skills to play something and translate it from, from, say, reading music from site. And it's also been with us since before speech. We've been artistic creatures forever. And so I think those things really make a huge difference. And genre is not part of the equation. It's what you like, it's what appeals to you, it's what you need in a given moment. A lot of us use music for exercise, for instance, to maintain tempo, to increase tempo, et cetera. We also use it to calm down. We use it while we're cooking. We use it for events, family events. We also use it for war. Sometimes it can be inspirational for people who have to do something that requires a huge amount of courage. And in fact, I have to laugh because if I go into a store and I hear some irritating high voice with a generic pop song. I think somebody must have done market research that I'm going to buy more if I'm hearing this in the background.

Meryl Comer (08:03):

Your early collaboration with the NIH included being part of the emerging research, which as you mentioned was really made possible by the advances in brain imaging as an artist. What did you learn about your brain on music and the creative process?

Renée Fleming (08:20):

Well, it was really interesting because in noting also that memory is incredibly important for music. All of our major events are remembered that way. And I picked a song that is powerful to me. I've always loved folk music. I find it has a direct connection to my heart. So I picked the water is wide and repeated that in the FMRI machine. So this particular experiment at the NIH had me singing, speaking and imagining singing and the scientists who were looking at the results, because this was a two hour long experiment in the FMRI and I just told myself, being in this machine is not so different from flying economy on a small plane <laugh>. So it really didn't bother me. But I basically said that imagining singing was harder and more active, it impacted more parts of my brain than the other two activities. And they surmised that because I sing all the time as a professional that the singing wasn't difficult for me. And imagining singing took more focus and more concentration, the next experiment should have been do the same thing with a non-singer and see what happens.

Meryl Comer (09:23):

As co-chair of the Neuro Arts Blueprint Advisory Council, why is it important to explore the science and neurology behind what most of us think is a subjective experience? I mean, for many it feels like a no brainer’

Renée Fleming (09:37):

Right? People think of it as entertainment, which is why this work was often referred to as soft science. But the evidence-based and rigor of, of the research itself is incredibly important in our system. It takes the double blind studies and all of that for it to be deemed really effective. So that's really important. And the Neuro Arts blueprint, what I love about it is it's extremely ambitious. And I would say the umbrella that they are talking about is includes every aesthetic experience. So it's a much larger umbrella, which is why nature, visual arts, architecture are all under this dance, of course, are all under this umbrella of activity, doodling even. I love Susan Meg Salmon and Ivy Ross's book Your Brain on Art. That was a bestseller last year. So I'm now an advisor and co-chair of their project. And if I did my book again now, it probably would be broader, but at least we have everything represented in the book. Anna Smith's chapter on theater, Liz Diller on Architecture, and of course Mark Morris and David Leventhal on Dance. I would say that the neuro arts blueprint seeks to create a field and a proper field like one that brings together all the siloed parts into something that's infinitely more effective. Climate change was not a field 20 years ago, and now it, of course it is. That's the overarching plan.

Meryl Comer (10:55):

Renee, your book is ambitious 550 pages of fascinating and focused essays. The wind combined really validate the therapeutic benefits of art and music therapy. Did you have an intuitive sense about the need for documenting this body of research at a time when we have a wide range of chronic and disabling medical and social issues?

Renée Fleming (11:17):

Oh, what I thought is that it's unique in the sense that it is so broad and it brings everything together. So I thought it would be a document, almost a textbook for the snapshot of where we are now with the field. Never having done this, obviously I didn't know how hard it would be. I didn't know how much time it would take, and I didn't know how ambitious the book was. It's really intended to be rather, this breadth of various players in this field, including performing arts venues and artists and researchers and institutions, gives the audience for the book a chance to kind of pick and choose because the pillars are childhood development and aging disorders of aging, mental health and pain research, I would say is also so important right now. And you can go in and kind of look at the table of contents and say, I'm interested in education, so I want to learn about what, what is really happening with music education. So all of these opportunities are there, or what does Yoyo Ma think about creativity and indigenous culture or the climate And every, all of the artists get to write whatever they want to talk about. It was such a labor of love. It was a wonderful, wonderful process and pursuit.

Meryl Comer (12:26):

Our guest, Renee Fleming, world renowned Soprano and WHO, global Arts and Health ambassador, her new anthology, music and Mind Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. In part two of our conversation, we explore the universal healing elements of music and art therapies for relief from pain, anxiety, depression, as well as its capacity to reawaken those lost deep in dementia. You won't want to miss what she's learned.

Renée Fleming (12:57):

Anybody who has witnessed this, you don't need to tell them about the benefits of the arts and elder care. And also for caregivers, they say, we know. We know we've seen it because people come back to themselves, they reengage with their own identities, even if they don't know who the people are around them. They can remember all the lyrics to songs that they sang when they were young, and it is quite extraordinary. And there are researchers who are trying to sustain the benefits from this engagement.

Meryl Comer (13:31):

That's it for this edition. I'm Meryl Comer. Thank you for brainstorming with us on brainstorm. We interview top experts in dementia research and brain health, but we know you are the experts on the Alzheimer's journey, which is why we invite your participation in our a-list. By joining and taking periodic surveys, you're helping inform healthcare providers, policy makers, and other leaders in the field about your experience and what matters most to you. It only takes a few minutes of your time. Join the A-list and see how it feels to be heard.

Speaker 2 (14:10):

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