The event itself represented a novel attempt to cope with the challenges of coronavirus. For the first time in its 16-year history, Zócalo, which has produced more than 600 events to date, presented its first last night without a live audience. Instead, the evening discussion, entitled “How Does Music Change Your Brain?,” was conducted live on Zócalo’s YouTube channel, with the panelists speaking over internet video links while remaining at home, as California authorities have mandated.

The format produced a fast-paced discussion between panelists—as well as freewheeling exchanges among the hundreds of audience members on YouTube’s live chat. At one point, after actor and songwriter Mary Steenburgen, one of the evening’s panelists, explained how she had been drawn to the accordion, the Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who also plays accordion (and is a Zócalo board member), appeared on the chat and offered to jam with her once the discussion was over.

NPR host-at-large Elise Hu, the event’s moderator, began the night by asking why the effects of music on the brain are so powerful and meaningful. That touched off a conversation that mixed the musical and the medical, with panelists discussing both detailed neurological research as well as their personal experiences with music.

Steenburgen, an Academy Award winner, recalled how she woke up from a 2007 surgery on her arm, which required a general anesthetic, and “felt very different … I felt as if the sound of my brain had changed. I was obsessed with anything musical.”

At first, this was distressing. “I wanted my old, much quieter mind back,” she said. But when she realized her new reality wasn’t going away, she decided to “take what [she] was hearing and then express it in songs.” After considerable work with other songwriters and a music lawyer, she became an award-winning songwriter herself. “Glasgow (No Place Like Home),” a song she co-wrote for the 2019 film Wild Rose, won critics’ and audience awards, and was short-listed for an Oscar.

Steenburgen, now star of the NBC TV drama “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” about a young coder who develops the power to hear people’s innermost feelings through song, still isn’t sure what happened. “But to this day, my brain is different from what it was,” she said. “Logic would tell me that I got access to something that was there already … I had a grandmother who was extremely musical. Sometimes I’ve wondered, ‘Could I have done this all along?’”

UCLA neuroscientist and ethnomusicologist Mark Jude Tramo, who directs the Institute for Music & Brain Science, said that Steenburgen’s experience reminded him of Dr. Oliver Sacks’ account of Tony, a patient who got hit with lightning and became preoccupied with piano music. Tramo added that surgeons often listen to music as they work, and it may have an effect on them and their patients. “I recommend that you ask your surgeon what he was playing,” he said.

Tramo laid out both evidence and anecdotal experience of how music can affect brains, and noted that these insights are not new: “Remember, Apollo was the god of both medicine and music,” he said. But Tramo stressed that we need more research—including clinical trials—so that medicine can make better use of music in actual treatment.

Music treatment, as he pointed out, “is effective, but it is not available to everyone because of Medicare and third-party payers.” Tramo, who also serves as co-director of the University of California Multi-Campus Music Research Initiative, later quipped that we “want to make the hospital a little bit more like Disneyland, and a little bit less like Salem”—during the witch trials, that is.

USC Brain and Creativity Institute research psychologist Assal Habibi, who is also a classically trained pianist, described her research with children, starting at age 6. She noted that children who study music improve their emotional development, are better at being empathetic, and show improved cognitive skills and executive function. When asked why, she noted that music training changes the function and structure of the brain. She added: “We know that children, when they’re moving to a rhythm, … they tend to be more social.”

Habibi also cited evidence that music can help with depression and anxiety—and not just in children. In one intervention in her research, older adults were put into a choir, and the experience helped with their hearing skills, which allowed them to enjoy socializing more, and that in turn improved their overall well-being.

The current pandemic came up repeatedly throughout the evening, including during a question-and-answer session that featured questions drawn from suggestions made by audience members on the live chat.

Habibi suggested that people make use of this time to “have an artistic experience at home as a family.” Have children play on pots and pans, and experiment with music. “I would emphasize that they play whatever they want to play,” she said.

Steenburgen took note of the powerful scenes of people in Italy singing from their balconies. “It not only put smiles on their faces and lifted them up,” she said. “But it lifted all of us up who saw that” online.

Perhaps that could be an inspiration, Steenburgen said, just as the difficult moments after her surgery convinced her to embrace songwriting for the first time. “Maybe during this time when we’re all stuck in our houses,” she said, “people will say yes to some things they’ve never said yes to.”

Several audience members asked what books the panelists recommend on the subject. Here are a few:

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Emotion and Meaning in Music by Leonard Meyer
The Unanswered Question by Leonard Bernstein
Music of the Hemispheres by Mark Jude Tramo (forthcoming)
The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

A few of our favorite independent bookstores:
Powell’s Books, Diesel Bookstore, The Last Bookstore, Skylight Books, {pages}, Kramerbooks, Politics and Prose Bookstore, and Stories Books.

The post How Music Heals—and How It Can Help Us Find Solace in the Time of Coronavirus appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Some say the gap—between nerve cells and life, the brain and the mind, objective reality and the subjective—will never be understood, because such understanding is beyond our human capacity. But I think it is possible to answer the question of how the brain becomes the mind. We just need to change our thinking.

Right now, we are stuck—at a place and time in human history—where scientists and other serious people accept that the physical brain, following all the laws of mother nature, gins up this wonderful thing called consciousness and its particular brand of sweetness in humans. Scientists also realize the brain has evolved over eons to have a gazillion parts, intricately organized to manage certain capacities of life, from seeking food, drink, and shelter, to eating, drinking, and reproducing, which we share with other animals. In addition, humanity has more elaborate thinking and talking capacities. Each process by itself—seeking, eating, reproducing—has been dubbed instinct, because it is in some ways unlearned. And as the great American philosopher and psychologist William James famously observed, humans have more instincts than any other animal.

But none of this actually answers the question of brain-to-mind. In our era, we have the work of the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who famously showed in the 1990s that language was not the mere product of our brain or our human societies. Language was an instinct, literally a piece of our brains, and thus part of the very human machine itself.

It is time to think of consciousness as another instinct. We know that, literally, consciousness comes from physical places in our brain. Think about it: Consciousness comes with each capacity we have as humans and it is the state we feel about the capacities we possess. When we lose a capacity, we also lose its felt state. Consciousness is not an added-on capacity that enlivens another one of our capacities.

To my way of thinking, each of our sub-systems, modules, or capacities is real and alive because of the particular way that life works. And here I appeal and defer to the lifelong work of an extraordinary scientist little known to neuroscientists and psychologists, Howard Pattee. While Pattee was trained as a physicist at Stanford, he has spent his academic life at State University of New York, Binghamton as a theoretical biologist. Pattee proposes a different way to think about that pesky gap between neurons and mind. And to do it, he takes us all the way back to a prior question: How does life arise from non-life? Hold your hat. The next bit requires more thinking.

Pattee’s original insight began when thinking about the gap between non-living stuff and living stuff. How did one become the other? Living stuff replicates and evolves over time. To replicate, this living stuff has to build a copy of itself. That requires instructions on how to build a copy and construction of the copy. It also requires the newly minted stuff to have its own copy of instructions, so those, too, have to be copied.

But life has gone a step beyond simple replication; it is evolvable. And the mathematician and physicist John von Newmann understood that to evolve, the process has to introduce variation so that natural selection can begin its work, and variation had to come from a code, an abstract, reliable representation of the instructions.

Right there is where Pattee stumbles upon a brilliant truth. While the substrate of the code is a physical structure, the code itself is made up of abstract symbols that have been selected for their reliability (and can change if a more reliable one pops up). Symbols are subjective, and as such, follow no physical laws; they follow rules. Thus, the gap between non-life and life is bridged by an abstract but physical code, a substance. There is no spook or magic in the system; it is simply that every code requires a complementarity between its two aspects: the physical and the symbolic.

While the original substance that seeded life is unknown, we now think of it as DNA. And DNA is a perfect example of the phenomenon that Pattee describes: DNA follows the laws of physics and generates proteins by following the coded recipe—and DNA exists physically. Yet the code for the recipe, though conserved and stable, is abstract and not subject to physical laws.

Likewise, the gap between neurons and mind is bridged by a symbolic neural code and that code also requires a complementarity between its two aspects: the physical and the symbolic. Subjective consciousness is not a “thing,” though physical neurons produce it. It is the result of a process embedded in an architecture, just as a democracy is not a thing but the result of a process.

What we call consciousness arises through the moment-to-moment expression of brain modules with hyper-specific functions that are scattered through the brain. As those modules each come forward through time, they create the “flow” of consciousness, which is both a process and a sensation.

It is a rich story and the details are absorbing and mind-bending. It’s a thrilling journey to look back on the history of the human struggle with the question of consciousness and see the modern battle lines about the brain-versus-mind. But the act of observing that consciousness is an instinct—that it comes with life—is easy. Appreciating that consciousness is just that is the hard part.

The post Consciousness Isn’t About the Mind, It’s About the Body appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

He was right, especially about the brain’s divinity. As some of the brain’s secrets have been revealed, we’ve been able to see surprising connections between the evolution of the brain and the very human practice of seeing gods in charge of our universe.

I am a psychiatrist and researcher on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Twenty years ago I started collecting postmortem brains to facilitate this research, and became interested in how our brains evolved. A century ago the German researcher Korbinian Brodmann published data showing which parts of the brain developed early in human evolution and which parts developed more recently. At that time, relatively little was known about how specific brain areas functioned, so it was not possible to interpret the evolution of the brain’s inner workings.

But over the past two decades, brain-imaging techniques—including functional MRI’s and diffusion tensor imaging—have allowed us to say with relative certainty which brain areas are responsible for specific cognitive abilities—and thus the order in which we acquired them.

Korbinian Brodmann (1868-1918), the German researcher who published data showing which parts of the brain developed early in human evolution and which parts developed more recently. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Take for example the fact, demonstrated by archaeological evidence from caves in South Africa, that approximately 100,000 years ago early humans began to adorn themselves with necklaces. They also began wearing more tailored clothing, as shown by studies of the evolution of body lice that attach to clothing. Early humans had become aware, for the first time, of what other people were thinking about them. Does my new bearskin look good on me? Will people like my necklace of seashells? The consumer economy had been born. And since we now know the specific brain areas that are involved in thinking about ourselves—introspective thinking, as it is called—we also know when those brain areas and introspective thinking developed in the course of human evolution. As a result, we now have an evolutionary timeline for the development of specific human cognitive traits.

I found this intriguing, particularly because I majored in religion as a university student. And because, over the years, I visited many of the world’s religious shrines, including Europe’s Gothic cathedrals, Peru’s platform mounds, Egypt’s pyramids, England’s stone circles and monumental earthworks, and Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe, discovered in 1995 and apparently built about 11,500 years ago as the world’s first known holy place. Now, with a timeline of human cognitive traits, another thought occurred: We might be able to track the development of human religious thought and specifically our beliefs about gods.

So I began to merge the new neuroscience of brain evolution with what is known archeologically regarding hominin behavior at different stages of development to get a sense of how our thinking about religion evolved. I also reviewed the anthropological literature regarding thinking about gods among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. And finally, I consulted some theories on child development. As child development specialist Jean Piaget noted, “the development of thought in children closely parallels the evolution of consciousness in our species.”

Ultimately I concluded that human thinking about gods probably had its origin in brain developments that occurred about 35,000 years ago. At that time humans acquired the ability to project themselves backwards and forwards in time in a way not previously possible. Psychologists refer to it as having acquired an autobiographical memory. This period was marked by extraordinary advances in human behavior, including new tools and weapons, the first musical instruments, sculpted ivory figures, and thousands of drawings and paintings in the caves of Spain and France.

This period also saw the first unequivocal examples of human burials with valuable grave goods, indicating a belief in an afterlife. This was an important development because the acquisition of an autobiographical memory enabled modern humans to understand fully and for the first time that they were ultimately destined to die. Faced with such knowledge, we created an afterlife for ourselves so that death would not be our final end. The afterlife was peopled by those who had died in the past—our ancestors. Proof of their existence in an afterlife came from dreams in which our ancestors sometimes visited us. Even today in hunter-gatherer societies it is common for people to interpret their dreams in this manner.

Thus began the practice of ancestor worship, which posited that your deceased ancestors could help you. This was probably the main form of religion from about 35,000 years ago until the beginning of the agricultural revolution. As long as you had ancestors looking after you there was no need for gods.

All this changed about 10,000 years ago when people began to plant crops, domesticate animals, and settle on the land. Previously deceased members of the group had been buried wherever they had died, as demanded by a migratory lifestyle. However, the new settled lifestyle allowed relatives to be buried beneath the family’s house. In some cases, the skulls of deceased relatives were displayed in the house.

By 8,000 years ago some skulls were being painted and modeled with plaster so as to resemble a human face, suggesting that ancestor worship was becoming more elaborate and important. Human masks and human figurines, some three feet tall, also appeared.

As the agricultural revolution progressed, people began living together in villages, then towns, and finally cities. Each hunter-gatherer group had brought its ancestors to be worshipped, and as the towns increased in size a hierarchy developed among the ancestors, with some considered to be more important than others.

Ultimately a few very important ancestors broke through the celestial barrier and came to be regarded as gods. This probably happened between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago since by 6,500 years ago, when the Mesopotamians were using a written language for the first time, they recorded the existence of several gods. This was the origin of modern gods and religions.

Given our new technology for studying the brain, we are on the threshold for better understanding how and why it works as it does. Just as our genome includes DNA inserted thousands and millions of years ago, so too our brains include ancient functions. By better understanding the evolutionary origins of such functions perhaps we can improve our species.

The post How the Evolution of the Human Brain Led Us to God appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Millions of novice investors in China, mesmerized by the promise of astonishing profits, had been lured to buy grossly overvalued stocks. Lack of investing experience, easy finance, hyped promotion, the mushrooming of day traders, “margin accounts” fostering stock purchase on borrowed money⎯it’s all chillingly reminiscent of America’s dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, or the sub-prime mortgage madness that preceded the worldwide financial crash of 2008.

Market booms and busts are not new, as history tells us. Holland’s tulip mania in the 1630s; the South Sea Bubble a century later; the financial turmoil that gripped the nascent United States in the 1790s (ensuring Alexander Hamilton’s place on the $10 bill); plus the speculative frenzies of the late 1800s and the Gilded Age, are topped in their drama only by the freewheeling flapper years of the 1920s that ended in the disastrous crash of ’29 and the Great Depression. Bubbles, it seems, are a feature of financial markets and increasingly so in contemporary times, despite today’s technical wizardry. As Mark Twain observed, while history may not repeat itself, it surely does rhyme.

So why do we find learning from history so difficult?

As a neuroscientist interested in the behavior of capital markets, I believe insights into the persistent cycles of boom and bust are to be found in how the brain balances risk against reward and how our current financial preoccupation with short-term profit has “retuned” that process, distorting the choices we make.

In the brain, as in the marketplace, the evaluation of risk is the foundation of prudent choice. Evolved over millions of years, the human brain is a hybrid. There is an ancient, pre-conscious core—developed in the interest of survival when life was nasty, brutish, and short—that makes us instinctively selfish creatures, emotionally focused on near-term reward, and driven by habit. The more recently developed frontal cortex, which sits above the eye sockets and is sometimes called the “executive” brain, blends this emotional striving with kaleidoscopic streams of stimuli that monitor immediate experience. In complement, a conscious, deliberative “thinking” cycle, drawing heavily on memory and predominantly concerned with behavioral control and avoidance of harm, runs through the lateral, outer region of the frontal cortex. It is in the crosstalk of these parallel cycles of perception and action—seeking balance between the fear of pain or loss and the expectation of pleasure or profit—that choices are made.

Over the last three decades the enticements of affluence, hand-in-glove with reduced financial regulation, have distorted this crosstalk and lured the ancient emotional self into the bullish pursuit of profit, overriding objective control and disrupting the brain’s “internal market.”

Risk assessment in the brain is a process not dissimilar to the barter that sets prices in real-world markets, balancing future reward against potential hazard. However, in the consumer society, which now represents some 70 percent of America’s economic activity and which in the interest of continued growth promotes the joys and benefits of easy credit, the temptations of immediate gratification can rapidly overshadow the brain’s reasoned assessment of downside risk.

Credit makes it possible to have in hand today what otherwise we would have to postpone. Of course, the debt that is incurred mortgages future earnings, but the ancient emotional brain has a hard time evaluating long-term costs, especially when easily available financing offers a false sense of security. In neurobehavioral terms, easy credit builds dangerous intuitive habits that can hijack the brain’s perception-action cycle: The more we enjoy a painless, immediate reward, the more we want to repeat it. In consequence, reason—to paraphrase David Hume—becomes enslaved to passion. We learn to be thoughtless.

The run-up to America’s 2008 financial crisis offers illustration. Faced with a global savings glut and low interest rates in the closing decade of the 20th century, pension funds and other endowments were demanding safe, higher-yield investments. Similarly the big international banks were exploring innovative ways of increasing profit and managing risk by bundling loans into credit-financed portfolios, thus reducing the cash reserves required to cover potential defaults. By the late 1990s, as the excitement of the dot.com boom declined and with the ongoing liberalization of banking laws, the concept of creating such “credit derivatives” was accepted by federal regulators.

At first, reason prevailed among the bankers and the portfolios were constructed largely from the assets of companies with proven track records. As the opportunities for short-term profit were recognized, however, greed took hold. Soon home mortgages of dubious asset quality were being added to the mix. The securities so derived were complex and difficult to understand, with risk virtually impossible to accurately assess even by those financiers promoting them. Because the income of the hustlers selling the mortgages was tied to the units sold, however, this was a detail largely ignored. In consequence, the home mortgage bubble rapidly inflated, creating unknown trillions of imaginary wealth. Once again, in a frenzied search for rapid return, the passions of the ancient brain had outstripped executive reasoning. Then, inevitably, as the bubble collapsed, true risk stared us in the face. Panic ensued as the markets froze, precipitating the Great Recession.

In rational moments, most of us agree that mortgaging the future to excessive debt is not prudent behavior. In the run up to the 2008 fiscal crisis, however, homeowners, investors, the banks, and the government were essentially complicit in doing just that. Aided and abetted by the enticements of short-term profit, we had shifted in our thinking from credit as the healthy driver of economic growth to the steady accumulation of debt as basic to the economics of everyday life. Collectively, as individuals and as a nation, from the neuroscience perspective we had been hard at work retuning the brain’s internal market. Economists give such retuning the quaint name of “moral hazard.”

That, in this electronic age, money as a tangible asset is fast becoming invisible hasn’t helped our reasoned decision-making. Friedrich Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit, warned against such abstraction: “The moment that barter is replaced by indirect exchange mediated by money, ready intelligibility ceases.” Reduced now to a string of numbers that provide a record of the pay we receive, the money we borrow and the stocks we buy, tangible assets have become divorced from economic reality. And yet the abstract concept of “money” is ever more central to everyday life. While it is possible to have too much to eat or too much to drink, in the abstract one can never have enough money.

In this world of short-term self-interest where risk is a secondary concern, it is perhaps not surprising that China allowed its debt to quadruple prior to the recent meltdown. But for all the wagging of tongues about the Chinese debacle, and our wringing of hands about the U.S. stock market’s gyrations in its wake, the evidence is that we have become addicted to debt as a way of life. A 2015 McKinsey report estimates that global debt has grown by $57 trillion since 2008. That’s a 17 percent rise and a yearly increase of 5.3 percent, not far from the annual growth rate of 7.3 percent that marked the “boom” years before the Great Recession.

For many, this ongoing saga calls into question the integrity of our financial and government institutions and those who lead them. And indeed they do bear responsibility, but it is a fool’s chase to expect governments to set boundaries that we increasingly avoid setting for ourselves. To learn from our mistakes we must accept ourselves for who we are. In truth, the ancient brain that serves us each day – evolved in scarcity, focused on the short term and habit driven—is poorly matched to the frenzied affluence of contemporary material culture.

If we are to change the future of our cultural institutions, we must first each take the responsibility for changing ourselves. We must become mindful of the longer-term consequences of our actions, for the sake of personal health, the stability of our economy, and the quality of the environment that sustains us. Particularly we must ask: Is the debt- driven short-term market model, with its power to foster greed and erode the social contract, an adaptive strategy for the 21st century?

The post Low Interest Rates Are Bad for Your Brain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.