Ep 74: Music and Mind Series - Part 4 with Assal Habibi, Ph.D.

The latest research shows that not only does music play an important role in the development of cognitive, emotional, and social abilities in children, but it also benefits cognitive functioning in older adults, including those suffering from dementia.

In this episode of BrainStorm host Meryl Comer sits down with Dr. Assal Habibi, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute and Director of the Center for Music Brain and Society at the University of Southern California. Dr. Habibi’s essay in the anthology Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health highlights the benefit of musical engagement across the lifespan.

You won’t want to miss this episode of BrainStorm’s six-part series that showcases researchers & clinicians featured in Renee Fleming’s anthology Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health.

Sponsored by Eisai

Produced by Susan Quirk and Amber Roniger

Transcript

Assal Habibi (00:00):

We have done a couple of choirs with older adults who have had no music training and we wanted them to come and then participate in a community choir program for us to understand whether participating in choir can help with their wellness and social isolation, connecting with their community better. Not only are quantitative results showed that singing has helped with management of anxiety and connecting with community better, but also it helps with their auditory perception, their perception of necessary and important signal in a conversation, what we call speech and noise perception.

Introduction (00:33):

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 (00:50):

This is Brainstorm and I’m Meryl Comer. We continue our special series inspired by Renee Fleming's, new anthology, Music and Mind Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. Our guest today is Assal Habibi, assistant professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute and director of the Center for Music Brain and Society at the University of Southern California. Her essay as lead researcher was the benefit of musical engagement across the lifespan, education, health and wellbeing. Welcome Dr. Habibi. It's great to have you with us.

Assal Habibi (01:29):

Thank you. A pleasure to be here.

Meryl Comer (01:32):

Assal, the idea that music promotes health and wellbeing is not new. It dates back to Greek culture. Fast forward to today, what is driving the resurgence of interest in the link between music, mind and wellbeing?

Assal Habibi (01:45):

Part of my motivation, for example, as a researcher to look into this work and music science and music, neuroscience really has grown the last two or three decades I'd say, when I seek budget cuts coming through the education and one of the first things that get to be eliminated or removed from the programming being music education, that was one of my motivation to really understand better what does music education does for child development and how shortsighted we are to remove it from programming thinking that is not as important as math or science and reading. So the work that I have done really from a longitudinal perspective and from a developmental perspective, has focused on finding the answers of like why music education is important in child development and not only showing that it's obviously joyful, but it actually does provide opportunities for children to learn skills and abilities that we want them to learn, both from a social emotional learning perspective such as skills like empathy and compassion and also cognitive development.

Meryl Comer (02:47):

Now you're a classically trained pianist. Correct. And did you ever envision as a little girl practicing at the piano that you would become a scientist studying music? <Laugh>?

Assal Habibi (02:59):

Yes and no. My mother was a geologist, a scientist, my father was an engineer, so science had a pretty strong presence in my household. I never imagined studying science of music and I was sitting in an undergraduate brain and language class and understanding how language is mapped in the brain and coming from musical background kind of dawned on me that, well, music is language to me and I'm just really curious of how music is processed in the brain. So it didn't really come to that intersection until undergraduate, but I'm sure that at some point there was always in the background. What

Meryl Comer (03:31):

Are your findings on how music training shapes the development of cognitive, emotional and social abilities?

Assal Habibi (03:38):

That's a really good point. I always say that part of my research is me search because I always really valued the role of music in my own emotional development and my connection with community and friends at longitudinal work that we've done that is covered in the essay, in the book, concerns with Children from underserved communities of Los Angeles who received music training as part of the youth orchestra program of Los Angeles called Yola, which is kind of the education arm of the Los Angeles for Harmonic. We followed these children over the span of seven years as they learn music in a community setting. This was in youth orchestra, so everybody received a violin and learned string programming and then they moved on. Not all of them became musicians, but I think they all became individuals who have had the gift of music in their life and they can always use that as a way to connect to the world.

Assal Habibi (04:28):

We saw benefits in the areas of the brain and development that we expected to see such as auditory regions of the brain because these are the regions that are stimulated by music and by kind of a near transfer effect development in language and speech perception and auditory skills, which were all expected and was really nice to see. But when we compare these children with their counterparts who did not receive music, but they were matching every other aspect from a socioeconomic perspective, age, gender distribution, we also saw development and advantages in executive control and executive function skills. Skills such as impulse control planning, better attention allocation to things that are relevant and important. So from a cognitive perspective, these children really arrive to these milestones of cognitive development faster in their life. Now, if you have better inhibition control when you are age 10, that may translate into better decision making when you are in middle school. And that inhibition control really becomes handy when you have to make a decision about peer groups that you want to get associated with or even more kind of risky, like we know that inhibition, for example, is very relevant to addiction. So if one has better inhibition, control has better protection mechanisms against addiction. So these were really unexpected results in terms of our findings, but really was nice to see that we can really show these benefits using a task like music that is so joyful and fun at the same time

Meryl Comer (05:54):

When it comes to musical engagement and child development. You talked about your findings on impulse control and decision making. Were there developmental sex-based differences?

Assal Habibi (06:06):

When we looked at outcomes of executive function and impulse control, we did not see differences between gender distribution. So our female participants did not perform better than male participants. The one area that we saw changes that were specific to female participants was that when we looked at singing and improvisation in the space of singing, we saw that, and this has been shown developmentally before, that girls tend to develop faster their singing skills and their voice skills and they're also a little bit easier in terms of learning how to improvise with their voice and be creative maybe voice at that age between ages to six to 10 that we looked at them. There's some kind of like social inhibition, they're not as comfortable as participating in singing. So that was really the only findings that we had that we saw differences between genders. But in overall that basic change was true for both genders in terms of changes as a result of music training.

Meryl Comer (06:59):

As a researcher, were you surprised by the recent findings on singing and choir?

Assal Habibi (07:05):

We have done a couple choirs with older adults. These are choirs that we have created for older adults who have had no music training and we wanted them to come and then participate in a community choir program for us to understand whether participating in choir can help with their wellness and social isolation, connecting with their community better. When these older adults came to us, they have signed up for a choir study, they're very shy, nobody wants to sing if they've never had any experience of singing seven years in their life. Not only our quantitative results showed that singing has helped with management of anxiety and connecting with community better, but also it helps with their auditory perception, their perception of necessary and important signal in a conversation, what we call speech and noise perception.

Meryl Comer (07:49):

If your research validates the early musical training, what is known about the opposite end of the spectrum in maintaining cognitive abilities and connections as people age?

Assal Habibi (08:01):

So I think from a lifespan perspective, one of the things we have been working on in addition to the choir for older adults is looking at how listening to music that is meaningful to you, music that is maybe nostalgic music that brings memories that are meaningful and personal to you can really engage the brain in a way that very specific. So we've looked at older adults listening to music that is nostalgic and we've observed changes and function of activity of not only the auditory areas of the brain, but both memory regions and reward system of the brain that listening to this music is so meaningful that even for adults who have maybe early stages of dementia or Alzheimer's can facilitate accessing memories that in kind of typical time it doesn't happen. So from that perspective, I think just listening to music and providing music, listening opportunities for older adults in a way that is meaningful to them is not a way to slow down Alzheimer's, but is a way to provide a tool for them to have a better quality of life.

Assal Habibi (09:00):

And I think in that way, having this social prescription idea of like providing music as a way of enhancing life during the older stages is meaningful from a cognitive perspective. What I said about choir, one of the things that is deteriorated during aging for all of us is auditory perception, specifically detecting sensory information that is important in a conversation. If you cannot hear a conversation meaningfully, you avoid going to like social activities to restaurants, to cafes. And what we've seen is that with participating in these choirs, not only we see better attention to auditory environment as a result of participating, but also really better speech and noise perception. After 12 weeks of participating in choirs, our older adults who were in the choir program compared to the ones that were in the control programs were better at detecting speech and noisy environment much more significantly than the control groups.

Meryl Comer (09:54):

If I'm listening to you correctly, engagement with music during childhood benefits, those cognitive domains that typically decline with older adults in terms of cognitive functioning, is that right? That

Assal Habibi (10:07):

Is correct. So brain is very neuroplastic and once we start a skill and activity, I think we should continue. So it would be hard to say that if you do 10 years of music training during childhood, then you're protected for the rest of your life. I think it's important and when you start that skill, we continue and even if you're not professional musicians, we just continue to play music and as a hobby or as a way of like connecting with friends and family. But even if one has stopped as a, again, brain has like amazing capacity for neuroplasticity. So if at an older age an individual picks up music, again, those pathways of the brain have already been stimulated and these areas get connected with each other and co function much more efficiently if you already have that background.

Meryl Comer (10:49):

Your research has focused on investigating the effects of long-term music training on pitch and rhythm processing by looking at brain activities in adult musicians, non-musicians and patients with auditory impairments. Is there any correlation with balance when it comes to seniors or issues of falling, which are a health hazard?

Assal Habibi (11:12):

Pitch and rhythm perception are basic ingredients of music training and we know that with individuals who learn music, those are the first skills that we see change that are pitch production, which perception and same with rhythm. Rhythm production takes a bit longer because it relies on the motor system of the brain and developmentally the motor system has like a more prolonged way of maturation and we've seen that in children and interestingly even with like rhythm perception and rhythm production, we see a correlation of that ability with social behavior. So the more rhythmic synchronize these children were in their drumming, for example, experiments, the more prosocial they were towards their peers, which was really one of the nicer findings of this study. In terms of older adults, music rhythm is now one of the really key ingredients that have been used with older adults with Parkinson's disease because one thing we know about Parkinson's and gait is that it's kind of like a loss of internal rhythm and for initiation of movements.

Assal Habibi (12:07):

And one of the things that music does is provide an external rhythm, really good work in the field that has been shown that using external rhythm of music for older adults who have Parkinson's really helps them with initiating movement. So an individual who cannot walk can use the rhythm of music to rely on walking to taking steps, but typically individuals who have better rhythmic perception and rhythmic production have better control of their body and balance in general. So if I were just going to assume that they would have a correlation, I'd imagine there would be a positive relationship

Meryl Comer (12:39):

In reading the essay and I quote at least 10 years of musical participation across the lifespan has been shown to have a strong predictive effect on preserved cognitive function across verbal visios spatial domains and for executive processing. Now does that mean that I need to call all my friends who have given up their instruments in old age and said get back to them? Well

Assal Habibi (13:06):

Definitely do. Call your friends and ask them to get back to their instrument. The 10 years mark is something that neuroscience field has used as a way of distinguishing professional musicians versus non-musicians. And that's a way for us to really understand who's a long-term musician and has had the biggest change in terms of some of these abilities that you name like cognitive abilities, social emotional abilities, executive function control process lab at Northwestern and other colleagues have shown that we typically take about a year or two to see changes, not these like near transfer effects. So pitch and rhythm perception tend to change very rapidly as a result of music training because those are the skills that are being practiced. As I said, if one drops their instrument when they're like in their twenties or thirties and then picks them up again, the brain has already had the neuroplastic effect and can get connected back to where it was much easier as if you've never played that instrument before or we have practiced that music before.

Meryl Comer (14:01):

Unfortunately we've lost many arts teachers and music teachers in the schools. Do you think this work will help educators reconsider the importance of this training

Assal Habibi (14:14):

Now? It's kind of one of the motivation for this work to bring attention to that music learning is not just fun, but if you want to teach a child impulse control, music learning is a way to do that. It's a lot more inclusive and engaging attention or rhythmic perception or some of the other language development and speech perception that we've seen results of. I think as a society our job is to provide high quality music and art education for children and then let them decide how they want to use that. Yes, not everybody is going to become a conductor or a participant in an orchestra, but then we'll have individuals who have arts and music as part of their life and a way of connecting with their other humans.

Meryl Comer (14:52):

So can you describe the interface of artificial intelligence with music research?

Assal Habibi (14:58):

I very much value the importance of technology and what it allows us to learn about human brain and advancing our science and knowledge in terms of replacing artificial intelligence with actual music educators or actual music therapists. I think that's something as a society we should think about. I'll give you an example. We did a study with older adults listening to music, musical playlists and wanting to see if listening to music that is meaningful to them helps with reduction of anxiety and agitation at the early stages of dementia. And it's very difficult if we don't have a good understanding of that human being or what kind of a music we would prescribe for them. You may not have any association with country music or classical music and it doesn't matter how much of that I play for you, we would not really affect your mood. So just having an application decide what music one should listen to is not enough. We can combine and integrate. So having a music therapist work with a patient to understand their preferences and musical history and then use AI as a way of suggesting music and creating musical lists that aligns with the preferences of the patient. That would be a way to take advantage of artificial intelligence and ai, but at the same time keep the role of human both in the education system and to me in the therapeutic system as well. Thank

Meryl Comer (16:19):

You so much. Our conversation, the benefits of engagement across the lifespan. Our guest today is Sal Habibi, assistant research professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. That's it for this edition. I'm Meryl Comer. Thank you for brainstorming with us.

Closing (16:43):

Support for BrainStorm by UsAgainstAlzheimer's comes from Eisai, early Alzheimer's disease, sometimes called mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia. Due to Alzheimer's disease is a progressive type of brain disease that causes problems with memory, language and thinking. You cannot stop Alzheimer's disease from getting worse, but you can take steps to slow how fast it progresses. If you or someone you love is experiencing memory loss or problems with thinking, it's important to speak with a doctor about your concerns and available treatment options that may help. To learn more about a treatment option for mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia due to Alzheimer's disease, visit treatalzearly.com. That's treatalzearly.com. Subscribe to BrainStorm on your favorite podcast platform and join us on the first and third Tuesday of every month.