“How can engaging with music change the brain in lasting ways that go beyond the effects that we feel in the moment?” This is the question that Ani Patel hopes to answer in his lecture at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, closing out the theme week of “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music with Renée Fleming” with a discussion about his work with music cognition.
Patel is a professor of psychology at Tufts University where he studies the cognitive, neural and evolutionary foundations of musicality. He has authored a book, Music, Language and the Brain, and contributed a chapter on evolution and animal responses to music to Fleming’s Music and Mind: Harnessing The Arts for Health and Wellness.
Patel said he’ll divide his talk into two sections, the first being about “the research on how music can transform our brains in positive ways for maintaining health or helping us recover from different kinds of neurological challenges.” The second part dives into human evolution: “How did evolution transform us into a musical species?”
With a background in biology — he earned his master’s and Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University — Patel became fascinated by the “idea that you could use the tools of biology to study how complicated behaviors work in the brain.” Plus, he had a personal love of music from playing clarinet and guitar.
A good amount of the research that Patel has done is focused on music and language processing in the brain. One of the studies that has intrigued him is the cocktail party problem — the ability to focus on a sound of interest in a complex auditory setting with many competing sounds.
“There’s some evidence that people with some musical training do better at that task,” Patel said. “The question is, why would learning music help you process speech better?”
A few of Patel’s colleagues looked at the effect of music training on language recovery after a stroke; just adding in melodic components can help individuals regain their speech. Although, he said, “sometimes after strokes, people who can’t speak fluently can still sing, so how do you leverage that for bringing back some of their speech abilities?”
In 1973, neurologists created Melodic Intonation Therapy, which “uses the preserved singing physics to add more melody and rhythm to ordinary speech and help start practicing that kind of musicalized speech,” Patel said. Researchers found that this changes aspects of brain structure and function in ways that support speech recovery. This type of therapy has become one of the most widely used for nonfluent aphasia.
Patel believes these kinds of rhythmic therapies can improve brain function because they “tap into very deep aspects of our brain function and connect motor centers to emotional processing.” The science behind exactly why this works isn’t completely understood yet, but it is clear the impact is profound.
With Parkinson’s, the basal ganglia — connected to many different areas in the brain and heavily involved in beat processing — is the part of the brain that begins to have difficulties.
“One idea is that music with a beat is helping normalize function in this brain area that is starting to have difficulty in its processing mechanisms,” Patel said.
However, the bigger picture “is that music can get into these brain areas and change their activity patterns in ways that can actually benefit neurological function when that function is starting to degrade from its normal patterns.”
There are several theories on the functional value of music and the existence of musical behaviors; one is social bonding, in that “when you sing with others or move in synchrony with them, there seem to be these effects where you start to feel much closer psychologically (to each other) than you would otherwise,” Patel said.
There are those who believe that musicality isn’t part of human evolution — it is simply a “wonderful invention that we came up with.”
“The evidence seems to actually point to us being inherently musical by nature,” Patel said.
Patel has served as president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and is a member of the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Outside of his research, music is deeply important to his family. His wife Jennifer Burton, also a Tufts professor, is a casual jazz singer, and on Thursday taught a masterclass on “Embodying History through Music and Movement.” His daughter sings, and his son is a drummer. They are a family that openly trades music, from Led Zeppelin to bluegrass to Beethoven.
“It’s a really eclectic mix of things in the house,” Patel said. “That’s what makes it fun.”
Even with all of the groundbreaking, proven neurological benefits that musicality provides in terms of brain function, the average person also finds themselves undeniably shaped by music on a day-to-day basis.
“Music can be a kind of form of time travel that people really value and can help remind them about what they care about in life, who they care about, and how they feel,” Patel said. “Music has a lot of power in that regard.”
