You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas. This is a podcast that explores the space

where science and society collide. We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it matters.

I got into podcasting about 10 years ago, and it was a time in my life when I really wanted to

be a musician professionally,

an opera singer, specifically, but I decided that any way in which I could use my voice to make

money would be okay. And that's essentially how I discovered podcasting, and then I just fell

in love with the medium. Before that, though, I had gotten a PhD in neuroscience, and so I had a

very strong science background, and a lot of my singer friends wondered why I never really talked

about the science of the voice or the anatomy of the larynx. To be honest, that kind of

approach to singing just didn't work for me. I kept my artistic and scientific lives

very separate. And I just got bored of looking at pictures of a larynx and trying to think about

how all the parts work together when it didn't seem to make me a better singer. So I kind of avoided

the entire field until more recently as I've started to spend more

of my time thinking about music and the brain and how science can actually make musicians better

and make us all better. And all of a sudden, some of my singer friends started talking about this

one book that they really thought was different, that they found really compelling. And I thought, well,

maybe I should give it another chance. Now, this book was not written by a voice scientist.

It wasn't written by any kind of scientist, really. It was written by a staff writer for the

New Yorker, John Colapinto. And he was a long-time journalist at The Rolling Stone.

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