54 | Indre Viskontas on Music and the Brain

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2019

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It doesn't mean much to say music affects your brain — everything that happens to you affects your brain. But music affects your brain in certain specific ways, from changing our mood to helping us learn. As both a neuroscientist and an opera singer, Indre Viskontas is the ideal person to talk about the relationship between music and the brain. Her new book, How Music Can Make You Better, digs into why we love music, how it can unite and divide us, and how music has a special impact on the very young and the very old. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Indre Viskontas received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCLA. She is currently a Professor of Sciences and Humanities at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of San Francisco. She is also Creative Director of the Pasadena Opera, Director of Vocallective, and host of the Inquiring Minds and Cadence podcasts. She served as the co-host for the documentary series Miracle Detectives, and has produced lecture series for The Great Courses. Her opera performances include roles in Mozart, Puccini, and others. Web site UCSF web page Wikipedia How Music Can Make You Better Great Courses professor page TEDx talk Twitter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast.
0:02.8	I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and today we have a fun interdisciplinary episode looking
0:06.9	at the area where music meets neuroscience.
0:10.9	We've had a little bit of music, we've had Winton Marsalis after all, quite a bit of neuroscience,
0:15.1	but we've never looked at this particular issue, teaming them up, how we learn about music
0:19.1	and how music helps us learn, how it changes us as people.
0:23.0	Today's guest, Indraivis Contis, is a PhD neuroscientist, and she still does neuroscientific
0:28.3	research, but her main focus has become music.
0:31.4	She's an opera singer, someone who gets up there and belts out the arias on stage, and
0:35.8	also someone who creates new musical projects.
0:38.9	She's the creative director of the Pasadena Opera, for example.
0:42.4	So it's very natural that she would address this question of how musical influence changes
0:46.3	what's going on in our brain, and also how what's going on in our brain creates different
0:51.2	kinds of music, how it inspires us to do different things.
0:54.8	Our most recent book is called How Music Can Make You Better.
0:58.3	The idea being that in various ways, not only do we learn music, but music helps us learn
1:03.0	other things, helps us train our minds, helps us be sociable, and even can have therapeutic
1:08.0	uses.
1:09.0	So it's been a lot of fun to learn about this while reading the book and talking with Indraiv
1:12.4	on the podcast, because neuroscience is one of those things where we learn a lot.
1:17.2	There's been enormous progress in recent years and months.
1:20.3	There's constantly new neuroscientific discoveries coming down the pike, but there's so much
	...

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