Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore the practical ways music transforms everyday life – health, happiness and beyond. We are currently in the last week of August. Next week here in the US is Labor Day and here in the US that means we are in back to school time. Even for those of us who don’t work in education or have young kids in school, this time of year is sort of like a different New Year’s of sorts, with a return to a more structured, focused season of productivity as the fall learning season kicks off. So I thought this time would be the perfect time to bring in today’s guest to give us some practical tips for working music into our productivity toolkit so we can hit the ground running as we launch into the fall season. And if you don’t have kids at home and you aren’t an educator, don’t go anywhere. These insights are for anyone of any age interested in how you can use music intentionally to transform your focus, personal growth, and emotional well-being. My guest today is Sara Sherman. She joins me from New York City. Sara is a classical musician and educator whose work has been featured in media including NBC, The New York Times, and Psychology Today. Sara co-authored this year’s book release, Resonant Minds: The Transformative Power of Music, One Note at a Time. The book explores the profound impact that the purposeful use of music can have on focus and cognitive, emotional, and social experiences. Welcome to Enhanced Life with Music, Sara.
Sara Sherman: [00:01:47] Thank you so much for having me. Mindy, I’m happy to be here.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:51] Sara, we talk a lot on the show about how the power of music can be applied in so many ways beyond simply entertainment value. And your book does a beautiful job empowering the reader to use music intentionally for enhanced learning and personal growth. Your book talks a lot about executive functioning skills, and I feel like we hear a lot more about those today in the parenting and educational space, and just in optimizing our ourselves for flourishing as an adult space. So talk to us a little bit about these executive functioning skills. What are they and why are they so important?
Sara Sherman: [00:02:31] Absolutely. If we think of executive functions like the orchestra of our brain and how everything works together. Executive functions help us plan. They help organize. They help focus attention, regulate emotions, shift between tasks. They are the things that help us essentially get through our everyday lives with some structure, with some clarity and in terms of how we use them all together, it helps with creativity. It helps with learning. It helps with relationships. So whether it’s inside the school, outside the school, at home, even as an adult for ourselves, I know sometimes I feel like I have this chaos in my life, and it’s those executive functions that help kind of put that clarity and that organization together. When I can hone in and we’ll talk more about it, but using music as that tool to help us get there.
Mindy Peterson: [00:03:24] I love that metaphor that you use of the orchestra. And I think in your book you use that to and talk about how we all have our own orchestra that we’re conducting, whether it’s our family life with young kids, a home, whether it’s students, if we’re in an educational space, or whether it’s just our own brain synapses that we’re orchestrating. So love that some of the different executive functioning skills that we might hear about could be cognitive flexibility. I know in your in your book you mentioned sort of like four key components, one being cognitive flexibility, another being working memory inhibitory control and reflection. But then you also talk about four other skills that build on these and that you see as an essential. And there are some others. So I think there’s a lot of different words that a lot of us probably use to refer to similar skills. What would you consider sort of the most important ones to focus on for purposes of our conversation today?
Sara Sherman: [00:04:29] Yeah, I’m going to just start and start going off on all of this because I like this topic. And one in particular that I think is a real core executive function is focus. And it’s one of these that we have every single day. We have moments whether your parent is saying focus or pay attention, how many times does that come out of our mouths or for ourselves if we have a hard time? Whether it’s working, sending emails, even talking to a friend and our brains all of a sudden tune out and I’m like, wait, how did that happen? And I like to think of any of these skills. These F skills, F short for executive function skills, are things that we can practice. And I don’t think there are skills that benefit from practicing individually, but as a part of something. So if we think about focus and we use a piece of music as a tool to help us get there, if we work on active listening and let’s say we play a piece of Bach, I love Bach and Bach cello suites in particular, and we talk about breathing with Bach, and you breathe in for two beats and out for two beats. All of a sudden it’s giving the listener, whether it’s again, you or your child or whoever you’re working with.
Sara Sherman: [00:05:41] If you’re an educator or a friend, you’re creating this awareness in your own body and your own space of your own breathwork, which creates this as grounding presence this awareness. When we practice something like that, it helps us focus in. It also helps lower our cortisol levels. It helps reduce stress. So not only are you working on this skill, all of these physiological things are starting to happen in your body and your brain to help get you grounded. Mhm. One of the other ones I really like to talk about is this reflection. And I think it does go with in this control. Right. This impulse control, it sometimes is um hard, especially for some children or all of us when we feel angry. And you have this, this feeling coming over you, the more in tune we are with our emotions and this emotional awareness, the more likely we are to have the power to shift when we need to be, to be where we are somewhere and say, hey, you know, this isn’t feeling great, or I know that I need to shift where I am because it’s impacting those around me. How can I get there and.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:44] Involve self awareness to begin with?
Sara Sherman: [00:06:47] Absolutely. And utilizing a piece of music to do that. It goes back to the lowering cortisol levels or lowering your blood pressure. Music has the power to impact our neurons within 100 to 300 milliseconds. So that’s when we blink an eye. If you blink your eye and you think about how quickly that happens, your neurons are firing before you can consciously understand what piece of music you’re even listening to, and create a thought about that piece of music so your body is working for you. If you do it with a piece of music. And so it’s that awareness within yourself to say, okay, I’m having this feeling, or I’m here and I need to go there and then having that mindful action and I’ll get more into that. But this awareness to say I can select a piece of music to help me get there so that I’m not just trying to crawl through it, so to speak, whatever feelings that we’re having. And that goes then with this resilience. I think these are all the executive functions are all intertwined with this reflection and this impulse control and shifting between tasks and learning to regulate our emotions.
Mindy Peterson: [00:07:56] Well, I like going back to focus. Your book mentioned this really caught my attention that 76% of public schools reported a negative impact on student learning and behaviors due to a lack of focus, and I was like, wow, that’s incredible. And when you talk about having a conversation with somebody and suddenly you realize that you’re physically present, but mentally you’re not. I am so guilty of that when it comes to my kids, not so much anymore. They’re I, as we discussed at the offline as we started our conversation, I’m now an empty nester, but when my kids were living at home, there were so many times I would catch myself doing that. And then later I would ask them a question that say, you asked me that before and I answered it, and you don’t remember what I said, and I thought. Oh, man. Busted. Like, I know I asked that, and I know that when they were answering me, that’s when I was tuning out. So I’m totally guilty of that. So focus. Yes. So important. And then you talked about resilience. That’s something that you cover quite a bit in your book. And again, so important we hear so much about loneliness in today’s world. We hear so much about mental health in today’s world. And resilience can be so impactful on both of those things. I love also how you mentioned the physiological effects of music, whether it’s cortisol and its impact on that. I know you talk in the book about oxytocin and the impact that music can have on on that and some other hormones and neurotransmitters. So I love how you address that in your book. Um, you talk quite a bit about a lot in your book about mindfulness. Um, I think all of us have an idea of what mindfulness is, but some of us picture meditation and some of us picture other things for purposes of our conversation. How do you define mindfulness?
Sara Sherman: [00:09:56] I love this question because I do think mindfulness can have a very negative impact if it’s something that doesn’t resonate with you. And I like using the phrase mindful action, because mindfulness sometimes is seen as, you know, sitting in a lotus pose and practicing yoga or maybe meditating, but it is so much more than that. And if we think about mindfulness as this idea of creating presence and awareness within ourselves, which then when we have that cognitive flexibility and presence within ourselves, we can work on circles back to the executive function skills and using those. And so I think of mindfulness being this presence without judgment on ourselves also. Like you said, you have those moments with your children sometimes where your brain wanders and you recognize it. But then part of that mindful awareness is recognizing your thought pattern, even if it’s not exactly where you want it to be, but acknowledging it without any judgment on ourselves, because it happens to all of us. And the more awareness we have in ourselves and in our thought processes, the more we have the ability then to adapt and to change and become aware of where we want to be. And it’s not just about clearing your head, but it’s more about tuning in to those own thoughts and your own awareness.
Sara Sherman: [00:11:16] And so from mindfulness, I like to use the phrase mindful action, because mindfulness to me is something that’s almost passive. It’s happening through you and to you. But this mindful action is the idea that we can take this awareness and this and presence and purposefully use that awareness to impact ourselves. So whether it’s playing a piece of bark for our focus, um, whether it’s singing along with a song because it releases oxytocin, and if you’re in a group, then you’re feeling bonded and connected to somebody else. Or maybe this song reminds you of somebody. So then it’s releasing some endorphins and it makes you feel happy. Or whether you are having that 4:00 pm slump in the afternoon and you want to take a nap or whatever it is, and you pick a song with 80 to 120 beats per minute, because that’s about a walking tempo. And that impact for ourselves is just as effective as going for a walk in the middle of the afternoon when we play a beat with that certain beats per minute. And so it’s this ability to take that mindful awareness to ourselves and to make it into an action to help support ourselves in our everyday lives.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:28] I love that definition because I do think about meditation when I hear about mindfulness, and meditation is something I’ve tried. And for me, I’ve come to decide that meditation works in different ways for me than what I typically typically think of. Like you said, being in the lotus pose and just concentrating on your breath, concentrating on your breath and just sitting there. Drives me absolutely crazy. But there’s other ways I’ve been able to apply the concept of meditation in my life personally. But when I hear that word, that’s what I think of. And I just kind of have this negative reaction to it. So I like how you’re defining as more awareness and intentionality, because I love the idea of being intentional, of being purposeful. And so that definition is definitely something that really resonates with me. To kind of play off the title of your book there with, uh, resonate there. So with all of that that we’ve discussed so far. Why music? How is music uniquely equipped to help us develop executive functioning skills? Mindfulness. Focus. Resilience?
Sara Sherman: [00:13:43] Yes, I want to answer that, but I want to go back to the stat that you said about 76% of students with a lack of focus and a lot of research is coming out in schools post-Covid. Whatever world you want to say we’re in right now, it’s hard to find the research. We don’t really even fully understand the grasp of how much Covid impacted ourselves and our children or our students, and I think that STAT is lumped into some of that, and the way in which we used different ways to communicate. And we, I think at least based in the States, we did all we could in a really hard time. And part of that, though, was this lack of connection among kids. You know, people were connecting through screens. And in the book, you remember there there’s a story we talk about with this kid named George, and I like to use music as this idea and why we use music, because it’s this connector for everyone. It says universal language, whether you like somebody’s song or you don’t. Part of that also is showing this resilience and this respect for one another. How we said non-judgmental for ourselves. But it’s also about showing respect and trying to understand and empathize with our friends, with our neighbors, with our colleagues. And so if you select a piece of music and you play it in a room together and in this story about this kid George, who was having a really hard day at school, you know, especially adolescent kids, whether they’re thinking, oh, I’m shorter than my classmate or look at this pimple here, or did I say something stupid? Teenagers and adolescents in particular are so in their heads, which makes sense with everything going on in their bodies. But we can utilize a piece of music and give them the options to whether it’s right to draw, to think, to breathe along with the music. And when you’re giving the the autonomy to make a decision that really helps people take ownership for themselves.
Sara Sherman: [00:15:40] But when we have that music on, it’s also connecting them, whether they’re talking together or they’re doing their own self decided task based on a certain list, because the brain waves in a room of people listening to music start to synchronize. So you’re creating that community. And I mentioned oxytocin earlier. All of a sudden you’re having that bonding hormone be released. And then if it’s something you do regularly for yourselves, for students, it starts to have this dopamine impact. And what I like to call of this, um, this positive musical habit where it goes from our explicit memory to our implicit memory, and then this music can become this cyclical thing that we go back to time and time again to get in touch with that emotion. And the more in which we utilize it as a tool and it being music. The more it helps with that focus for those students. And not just that focus, but it helps with that community building, that less feeling of alone. And because music is the only thing that we know of that activates the whole brain. It works with our amygdala and our emotions, with memory, with language, with movement, and everything’s going at once. And that’s why when you hear a song, maybe you’re brought back to a smell of cookies that you made once when you listen to that song or another type of memory. And so this whole brain activation is so unique to music that I, as you can hear, I get so passionate about it. I just think it’s one of the most underutilized tools that we use in our everyday lives.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:13] And as you mentioned, the effect is immediate. You don’t have to wait for instant gratification, instant effect. Love that. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I just want to point out too, I was thinking as you were just talking about the examples from the classroom that you give in your book about a New York City public school teacher who has brought music into her classroom to enhance focus and engagement, even though she herself is not a trained musician. And I loved that because it really shows how even when you have limited resources and limited musical training and expertise, you can still use these concepts in these principles. You can still put music to work for you and your students to reduce stress in the classroom, to create an environment that’s more conducive to learning, that’s calm or energetic, depending on what your goals are for that moment, and for creating a more productive environment for yourself and for your students. Or of course, you can apply that in your home or for yourself. So love that. Well, in the time that we have left here, I’m wondering if you can give listeners three. Well, there’s there’s so many more. And people can definitely get your book and read more about some of these practical strategies and tips that you have in the book, but just to whet your appetite and give us something to hit the ground running for our fall here. Can you give us three practical ways that we can integrate music into our daily life this fall to enhance focus, productivity, and emotional well-being, whether it is in a classroom or at work or at home.
Sara Sherman: [00:18:56] Well, because you just said focus, productivity and emotional well-being. My first would be to create an intentional playlist for each of those three different categories a playlist for focus, a playlist for productivity, and a playlist for emotional awareness. And it’s something then that you can come back to time and time again, that idea when you need something to focus. We tend to focus better with instrumental music, with music that doesn’t have a lot of high melodies or more lyrical. Nothing that kind of sticks out and low beats per minute. So knowing that, that helps us with focus for a productivity, that’s really an individual preference. I know sometimes when I like to run, I listen to jock jams or whatever it might be, and there are certain beats that I know get me going in different ways. And also emotional awareness is something that can shift. So having a playlist for each three of those categories that you can come back to time and time again.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:51] I’ll just point out to you that you have some really great prompts in your book and some great ideas, including utilizing AI to create playlists for various purposes. So some really good ideas in there. If listeners are hearing this and thinking, I love the idea about how do I start?
Sara Sherman: [00:20:09] Absolutely. And on our website we have ideas to start. And even in the book or in this conversation I mentioned Buck. I always want to be cognizant that my musical selections are not everyone’s musical selections, but there are a starting point, and it’s taking that same actionable skill, whether it’s breathing with music, maybe it’s tapping the beat, maybe it’s drawing what you hear. It can be applied to limitless different selections out there. And so it’s just a starting point. And with AI that you just mentioned, sometimes I gives us this feedback loop of the familiar, you know, if you’re on Spotify and then it says because you like this, you’re like this. And I always like to say, we don’t know what we don’t know. And so I really believe in part of this mindful action and awareness of giving everything a chance. And if you don’t like it, that’s knowledge, right? We understand that a little bit more about ourselves, but especially if it’s a song, maybe someone’s like, I really like this and you’re like, oh, hey, country music or whatever it might be, give it a chance, you don’t know. And same with the algorithms that feed back to us.
Mindy Peterson: [00:21:14] Great idea. So create a playlist, number one. What’s the second practical way?
Sara Sherman: [00:21:18] To pair with transitions. I mentioned before these positive habits. So if you have a same song, maybe it’s a morning song, maybe it’s a get ready for the day song. And even if it seems silly to repeat that same song over and over again, when we go back to that 100 to 300 milliseconds, our neurons start going. It starts to have that automatic response without needing to think, all right, maybe it’s your kid and they have a tie their shoe song. And the second that song starts to go, when you have that behavior attached to that song, enough times that behavior starts to become automatic. And so with transitions, it is magical when it starts to work into sync up, whether at home for yourselves in the classroom, for your students, you know, for your children. I’ve seen it happen. I use it with my children. I do it for myself and it’s so helpful.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:08] I love that, and I wish I would have known about that when my kids were young, because I think it could just be magic to start playing a certain song every evening when it’s trying to sort of clean up, wind down, brush teeth, you know, all of that. And then also in the morning, a certain song that you play when you’re like getting ready for school, having breakfast, you know, it’s just, I know I have a song that my alarm is set to, and whenever I hear that, sometimes it’ll start, start playing in, uh, out of context, you know, just in a playlist or something like that. And my kids will recognize it. They’ll be like, mom, it’s your alarm, you know? And it does have a certain like, I have this have low end response when I hear it. Um, so I yeah, I love being able to use that idea of a song for transitions. And there’s so many great examples in your book about teachers and parents both using this for transitions, like in the classroom. Okay, time to get in line because we’re gonna head to lunch or, you know, various transitions. Call music a students are coming in in the morning, maybe a different song when they need to be energized and things like that. So I love that. Awesome. Anything else you want to say about that one before we hear number three?
Sara Sherman: [00:23:27] No, I think that one is just something to be patient with where it’s not. Um, the reaction is automatic to a certain point, but that long lived attachment takes like anything, practice in time. It’s, you know, that reaction. Okay. Whether it’s shoes, whether it’s the door, it’s going to take multiple listens to start to have that association really like brushing your teeth. You know, when you learn how to brush your teeth or teach somebody how to ride a bike. It doesn’t happen instantly.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:54] Sure. Well, and the thing about using songs for these things too, is it not only creates a mood and taps into habit over time, but it also gives young students or young kids an idea of what to expect in terms of what comes next, but also the timing. So, for example, I heard one person talk about how they created a song Brushing Your Teeth song for their kids. And part of the benefit of that was the kids know how long the song lasts and they know, okay, once the song is over, the brushing of the teeth is over. Or a parent would say, okay, we’re going to clean up for one song in length. So you pick a song when the song is over, we’re done. So it’s kind of that expectation of timing too. That can be really helpful for young kiddos.
Sara Sherman: [00:24:51] Absolutely. That was going to be the that was actually going to be my third one. I have a fourth one. So this is fine. But yeah, that if you tell a child in particular, hey, we have five minutes and you set a timer, that means nothing, you know, especially for young kids or even a lot of elementary school kids. Five minutes is something, but it’s.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:12] A very abstract concept.
Sara Sherman: [00:25:13] And like what is actually five minutes? You know, I lose track of time. But if you know your songs, especially if they’re songs that you know and you use music as a timer for that, it really helps create this flexibility and this awareness to be like, okay, this is the second song, this is done or whatever might be. So to use it as a timer as opposed to an actual timer, which we often do. I do that for my own children, sometimes say five more minutes, but that means nothing and I have I need to work on that skill.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:39] Love it.
Sara Sherman: [00:25:40] But then the third one that I’d say is something that I think is out of people’s comfort zones. If you think back, I’m not sure what generation you’re from, but the mix tapes, you know, we used to give each other burn each other CDs or a mix tape, whatever it was, the songs that we liked, and it was a way of showing someone that you cared about them, that you were thinking about them. I remember if you were going on a long car ride and going somewhere with friends like, hey, I made this CD for us to get there. And when you do that for somebody else, it’s saying like, here I am. And these songs mean something to me and it creates this bond. And I think with music as this universal language, especially if somebody is not comfortable always using language to express how they feel. Music does that for us. And so this idea of selecting a few songs today, maybe it’s a playlist or maybe, hey, I was listening to this song this morning and it made me think of you. I think you’d like it as this connector to help us bond more with our friends, with our family, with our children, because we’re in this world that is so technology focused, which is okay, it’s the world that we’re in right now. But it’s important to get outside of that sometimes and learn to connect with each other in new ways, because I think connecting with one another is so important for our overall well-being and our health. And it’s not always easy to do in today’s world, but a song can help us get there.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:05] Mhm. One thing I love about that is our focus today is on focus and productivity. But I like this last recommendation because it keeps the focus on what is truly important in the long run. And that is a relationships. Relationships are the biggest indicator of happiness in the long run. And so I love not getting too caught up in how much I’m accomplishing and how many things I’m checking off my list and how productive I’m being. But keeping in focus and keeping in mind the bigger perspective of relationships really are what matters the most in the long run. So love that final suggestion. Well, I hope listeners, this really what’s their appetite for utilizing music and really intentional way this fall for hitting the ground running as you launch your new year that the the other new year of the fall season and that new season of learning. I want to just leave listeners with a couple of quotes that I really loved from your book. The first one is related to the title A resonance, and the the quote is resonance is not just a musical term. It’s a way of life. How we treat ourselves, how we interact with others, and how music vibrates through every part of our lives. That’s resonance musical, personal and interpersonal. Resonance. Pulse. Timbre. Vibrations. Synchronized life. Love that quote. And then one other that I want to leave listeners with is this today will be legato, a day where each action will flow purposefully and smoothly into the next. Much like a symphony, life has its own sections, some fast and intense, others slow and reflective. With practice, we can learn to transition smoothly using our executive function skills to connect the dots. Beautiful quotes. Well, Sara, thank you so much for reading this book for for joining us today. As you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. Do you have a song or a story that you can share with us today? In closing?
Sara Sherman: [00:29:31] Yes, I think I’m a pianist first, and I shared a view, and I always knew that music and performing were a huge part of me and my being. But that’s great to a certain extent. But then. Then what? Right. This idea of now, it’s so what? And playing music for children has changed my life. And all music, whether it’s classical, jazz, bluegrass and there were experiences in the last few years, particularly with my work with Mozart for munchkins, where we’ve gone into schools or concerts, and it’s this moment I like to call Shining Eyes. You know, when you have a child or that you are making an impact and that whatever you’re doing is reaching them and reaching them in a way where they don’t necessarily have to say anything, you could see it in their eyes. This idea of shining eyes that comes from a Ted talks. Actually, Ben Zander did a few a few a decade ago, I think. But this idea of shining eyes and, you know, when you have those shining eyes in someone and so it it’s this moment I had with children making music for them, with them and seeing their shining eyes. That really filled my heart with love, with joy and knowing this is it. This is exactly where I am, what I’m supposed to be doing. And I just want to continue to spread more shining eyes and love and importance of music.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:02] Love that. And there’s a video that you shared with me that I’ll put in the show notes that relates to what you were just talking about. Can you tell just a little bit of the link between the two?
Sara Sherman: [00:31:12] Yeah. So I’ve had the privilege of going to schools and working with neurotypical and neurodivergent communities. And in this video clip, you can see all students and the moving to the music, dancing along with us, singing and clapping. And it’s one of my favorite videos because it shows this work in action. It lists the important executive functions, actually, that we talked today about focus and how music has this impact. It kind of goes through and bullets them and really shows this way of community building. And it kind of goes back to those moments and working with these children that just make my heart so full. And I feel very lucky to be able to do this, this type of work.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai