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. What if a playlist could do more than change your mood? What if it could change how the brain behaves? Today we’re exploring a developing frontier in music and health music as a therapeutic tool for epilepsy. Epilepsy affects millions of people worldwide, and music and epilepsy have a fascinating relationship. Certain kinds of music have been shown to impact seizure activity, for better or for worse, in some individuals. To help us unpack what the science actually says, what we know so far anyway, and what this looks like in real life. I am joined by Doctor Philip Pearl, Director of Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He is also a professional jazz musician and part of the Music and Health Institute at Berklee College of Music. Welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Phillip.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:01:13] Well thank you, Mindy. This is, uh, quite a unique experience for me. As I was telling you before we started, I’ve done podcasts for medical organizations, but nothing quite like this. So.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:25] Well, yeah, we’re thrilled to have you here. And this is a topic that I have not yet covered on this podcast. So when I came across another podcast that you had done for, I believe it was The Epilepsy. Not the Foundation. It was like the International Association.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:01:40] International League Against Epilepsy. Yes.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:42] Okay, okay. So when I ran across that, I thought, oh wow, I need to connect with this guy and find out what is happening in this area because it looks so fascinating. Starting out though, can you and I’ll just jump in to and say, you present all over the world. It was. We had to kind of bump out our conversation a little bit because of all of your travel schedule. And when we were off the record, when we first got on our call, you were talking about all the places that you’re going to be Taiwan and all over the US, Puerto Rico, lots of other countries, and also not just presenting but playing, performing and performing. Your medical practice, um, operating and in treating patients all over the world. So we’re thrilled to have you with us here today. Starting off, can you just explain for listeners who aren’t intimately familiar with epilepsy, give us just a brief description or explanation of what it is, and also let us know how common it is. How likely is it that someone we know has epilepsy?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:02:44] Epilepsy is the same as seizure disorder. Of course you can have seizures from acute situations, and that’s not necessarily epilepsy. But if you have epilepsy, it means you have an underlying A predisposition to having seizures, meaning electrical storms from the brain. Now, the word epilepsy comes from a Greek word which means recurrent events or repeated events because a single seizure doesn’t make epilepsy. But if a person has recurrent repeated seizures, they have epilepsy. Now, epilepsy is kind of a confusing term loaded with all kinds of not just denotations, but connotations and stigma. And in fact, there’s a current argument that we should get rid of the term or change the term because of all the historical stigma laden with it. But what it really means is that everyone has a certain threshold to having a seizure. There’s a 10% chance any individual will have a seizure in their life, whether it’s from a high fever as a young infant or child, to a head injury or something else later in life, to having a low blood sugar to taking too much of certain drugs such as cocaine. But the single seizure is not the same as epilepsy. On the other hand, something like 1 to 2% of the population worldwide has epilepsy. Around 3 million people in the United States, the Epilepsy Foundation of America estimates. I think 1 in 8 people will have epilepsy. It’s actually more common than you might think. The incidence is around 1%, and it’s most common at the extremes of life, meaning young children in the first years and in the elderly or the the older population.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:04:34] And as our population is aging because we’re all living longer, which is wonderful, um, the rate of epilepsy is going up, up, up because cases of dementia and other disorders that affect folks as they get into the older years, uh, are often neurological and can result in epilepsy. So epilepsy is a predisposition to seizures that are electrical events. You can’t see them. There’s not really a great test to say you have it or you don’t. In most cases, we do have a wonderful biomarker. That’s the EEG, that’s the electroencephalogram, which measures the electrical activity of the brain. And that kind of dovetails with the topic that we’re going to talk about today, because there are more and more studies trying to look at how not just medications and surgeries and implant devices we’re using these days to a big extent, but how even music can affect the EEG. And the jury’s still out. I mean, we’re not there yet. As you said, it’s kind of in its infancy in terms of the research in this area, but it’s pretty exciting that music has made major forays into medicine. It’s made major impacts in pain. There are certain anesthesiology units that have found that music can reduce the amount of anesthesia a person needs to get through surgery. So it clearly has a role in pain, has a role in stress. It makes sense that it would help with stress and anxiety disorders, probably helps with mood disorders.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:06:03] There’s a lot of literature that helps people sleep, but there’s also literature saying it interferes with sleep, you know? So that gets to the individualized aspect of it, because it turns out when it comes to epilepsy and EEG, the little bit of data there is to support a role of music in how it affects the EEG and how it affects seizures, turns out to be very individualized. It doesn’t seem like it’s the same for everybody. Now, with all this fancy imaging that was developed in the latter part of the last century, 1980s, 90s and so forth, now we have tests like functional MRI, where you can put someone in an MRI machine and have them perform a function like talk or listen to speech or listen to music or even play music, because there have been MRI compatible keyboards, and I’ve been involved with the person who’s investigated that. He’s written a chapter on that in my upcoming book on this topic, to be published by Cambridge University Press on music, medicine, and the Neurobiology of Creativity. So you could put piano players in the MRI and have a machine that’s not magnetic, so it’s compatible, and you can see what part of the brain is activated when you’re listening or even playing music. And it’s actually very different than the areas when you’re speaking or or when you’re doing other forms of art. And music involves multiple areas of both sides of the brain.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:07:19] There’s not a music spot. The old notion of the left hemisphere is sort of the analytical one for right handed people, and the right hemisphere is the emotional one that’s way simplified and not true. But the point is that music is an incredible art form. It involves both sides of the brain dramatically, not just the cerebrum, but even the cerebellum in the back of the brain, in the hindbrain. But there are areas more specialized for it. And the functional MRIs have shown back to that, that different people have different tastes in music and the brain kind of picks it up. Because if you do an fMRI of someone like me who loves jazz, and then you do an fMRI, if someone completely different than me who loves country music, say, but it turns out the favorite music still activates the same area for both people, even though it’s different forms of music. In that case, it turns out to be the hippocampus and amygdala. And there are other networks in the brain that are very active in music. There’s a frontal executive network, there’s a default mode network, there’s a salience network. We can get into all these networks. But what the point I’m trying to make is neurology has gone from this lesional field to a functional field where we can now map things and see what’s happening from music, and we’re learning a tremendous amount, but we still don’t have all the answers.
Mindy Peterson: [00:08:36] Well, it is so wonderful that those functional MRIs were developed, because I feel like that has really fueled an explosion of research on the effects of music on the brain, whether it’s applied to pain management or epilepsy or Parkinson’s. Uh, miss, you know, there’s so many applications of it. And so that’s been really fascinating. And I know a recent guest mentioned, too, that all the wearables that have have exploded in popularity have also helped with with being able to understand a little bit more about the effect that music is having on us in various ways. So that’s really exciting. You had mentioned the Musicogenic seizure, a seizure that’s triggered by music. I that’s I kind of alluded a little bit in my introduction to this fascinating relationship that music and epilepsy have had. I didn’t realize until I was preparing for this conversation that this existed, this musicogenic seizure. And, you know, you mentioned that this is an unusual podcast for you to be on. You’re speaking to laypeople here, and you’re used to speaking to medical professionals and other doctors and scientists. But that musicogenic seizure just really intrigued me, that it’s a seizure that’s triggered by music. It from what I could tell, it could be a song from childhood. It could be always the same song. It could be a specific rhythm that triggers the seizure. Or for some people, it could be any music or just a certain genre. So that was really interesting. Um, I saw that there’s also speaking of this relationship between music and epilepsy. There’s audiogenic seizures, which correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like any sound is creating a seizure. Is that right?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:10:17] You got it. You summarized it beautifully.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:19] And then also these auditory seizures where people hear sounds that don’t exist, like an auditory hallucination during a seizure. Is that right?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:10:29] That’s exactly right. So the sounds music can trigger a seizure, or they can be the presenting symptom of the seizure.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:37] Yeah. So that was just fascinating to me. But just for time’s sake, let’s kind of narrow this down and talk a little bit more about when should music be considered as a therapeutic tool or an intervention positively for epilepsy, not triggering seizures, but helping to hopefully reduce seizures.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:10:56] Well, this is the challenge is you know, we don’t know. Now music appears very powerful in certain neurological diseases. It doesn’t take much to see its power in dementia. In fact, I’ve played piano at enough nursing homes to see myself and my own family members. Actually, that what music can do to a person whose memory is slipping away is unbelievable. It will bring back long term memories, which are the last to go in Alzheimer’s disease. First, you lose your short term memory, of course, and it will bring back lyrics and singing and enjoyment and dancing and movement in a person who really hasn’t indicated much memory in in a long time.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:34] Yeah. Have you seen the documentary Alive inside?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:11:37] I have not.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:38] Okay. That’s fascinating. It’s, uh, boy, ten years old. Now. At this point, I’m not sure exactly how old it is. Maybe even more, but it’s. Yeah, it’s literally gives you goosebumps to see these people come alive when they’ve been virtually unresponsive, when they hear music that was often important to them in their youth.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:11:57] And it’s going to it has applications in Parkinson’s disease. It can be entrained in some way to help gait and movement disorders. In that sense, in stroke, music therapy has been shown to be able to bring back a person’s ability to speak by first using singing, which involves a different part of the brain, although close by or proximate to speech, but different, and by learning to sing again and then adapt that singing and evolve it into speaking again, it can bring back speech. So music is very powerful in the stroke patient.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:27] And TBI like Gabby Giffords relearning how to speak.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:12:31] That’s exactly.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:31] Right. Therapy after her shooting.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:12:34] And then music has shown incredible has shown the brain’s ability for plasticity at both extremes of life, at all ages of life, for example, there have been studies in premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, where those exposed to music as opposed to not had more calming their autonomic nervous system. That calms things down, especially the parasympathetic that slows down the heart rate, lowers the blood pressure, was working better. And in follow up tests, at 24 months or two years of age, those children did better in emotional behavioral testing the way they reacted to stressful situations. So it seems like music was helping the premature before they were even due to be born. Then, in school age children, there’s strong evidence that playing music is associated with higher academic achievement. Now, that might be very confounded or complicated by who those children are and who their families are, and who those parents are, and the kind of resources they had and the kind of pushing they had. But still, it shouldn’t really take away from the idea that learning music in a youngster is associated with more academic achievement, because I think that’s still got to help youngsters from every demographic. And then there was a study published not too long ago in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, where they took older adults from ages 65 and up, and they put half of them in piano lessons who were musically naive. They were not musicians, and they put half of them in a music appreciation course where they just kind of sat there and listened to music and talked about it. And after six months, the older adults who started piano lessons for the first time had increased size of their brain, of the temporal lobe cortex, where music goes compared to those who didn’t.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:22] So it’s never too late.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:14:23] Never too late to start taking piano lessons. Even my own wife, who’s another physician, has. She took him as a child, but it started taking him again. And so have a lot of my colleagues who’ve heard me well.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:32] And I think I saw somewhere that she did that. As a result of some of your research and what it showed about music.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:14:37] Well, not only she.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:38] But several.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:14:39] Of my colleagues have contacted me and said, hey, I’m taking piano lessons again, or I’m back in music and they’re past retirement.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:45] Because of what they’re seeing in your research specifically?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:14:49] Well, either my work or what I’ve reported or what I’ve talked about. So the plasticity is incredible. Now, how is it going to help epilepsy? This is this is a harder nut to crack. The Mozart effect has been very popular in the lay public. You might say, you know, the Mozart effect was described years ago. I think it might have been in the 60s or 70s a long time ago. And what they found is a group of young adults took some IQ tests after listening to Mozart’s Kershaw. Uh, I want to say 448. It’s the it’s the two part piano in D major.
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:25] Yes. Sonata for two pianos in D major, I think.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:15:28] Yeah. And and they found that after listening to it they had higher performance IQ, which is not the verbal but the performance like motor stuff or motor perceptual kind of testing. And that got translated or transmuted, you might say, into the Mozart effect where people started thinking, well, hey, if my if I’m listening to Mozart while I’m pregnant, my baby will be smarter. I mean, it led to all this commercialization of baby Mozart. So it was very well.
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:53] And I think that may have sort of been peaking around the time that my kids were born, because I remember these baby Mozart CDs. Dvds were really popular at the time, and I got them and and I know since then that that’s been a that research has been a little bit debunked. They found some flaws in how the research was conducted. But I will say as a parent, I swear by those, those DVDs. I mean, my kids. I remember my oldest right around the time in the afternoon that I was starting to prepare. Dinner was like the witching hour for her and she would get so fussy. And that was the one time I would put her in front of a screen and I would put that Baby Mozart DVD on, or Baby Beethoven, Baby Bach. We had several of them and she would just calm right down. It was magic. So I understand some of the research may have been debunked, but I. I swear by those videos.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:16:49] Well, I hear you because every time I hear Mozart, I feel like I’m getting a little smarter. So anyway.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:54] Uh, but back to yes, epilepsy.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:16:57] A bunch of a bunch of investigators have now explored the effects of Mozart’s 448, as well as other pieces of music on people with epilepsy, people with epilepsy, on their seizures, and on their EEGs. Even Invasively implanted electrodes into the brain, where you can really record inside the brain in the seizure producing areas. And some of the studies have found that that piece in particular reduces spike discharges and is associated with reduced seizures. But not all studies have. Other studies have found that it’s certain it’s not so much that piece, but a certain aspects of that piece. Like if you have to play it at a certain speed where it’s supposed to be, which is kind of quick, but if you play it faster or slower, it doesn’t work. And there’s a group from Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, that just presented a couple posters. I noticed at the recent meeting I attended in Lisbon of the International League Against Epilepsy. Speaking of the Ilae, where I did a podcast about music and epilepsy that you mentioned, and that group found that they didn’t really study that piece of Mozart, but another Mozart piece, and they compared it to a Philip Glass piece, like a keyboard piece, and they compared it to some movie theme and some calming music and some more upbeat, lively music that it was just different for different people. But for some people, whatever piece of music it was was consistent in how it decreased their spikes and they tried to base it on various acoustic features, like the volume or the speed or the harmonics or the pitch, and it wasn’t clear that they really came up with anything, except just like when I said a person’s favorite piece of music activates the same part of the brain, even though your favorite is going to be different than my favorite, it seems like for some people, it’s a unique aspect of the music that can reduce their spikes.
Mindy Peterson: [00:18:48] Okay, so it’s not even a certain number or structure like classical music, you know? Or yeah, it can be vastly different from person to person, like country music.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:19:00] Or it might be it might be a timbre. But for that person and not for everybody.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:06] Okay. So is there a way to measure, like with an EEG, like what healthy electrical activity looks like in a person’s brain, and then find music that sort of matches that, or what’s what’s the process to try to either identify the music that’s going to help a particular person or what does that look like?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:19:32] Well, I mean, I don’t think we’re there, but that’s where epilepsy researchers are trying to go in terms of implanted recordings, where you get more accurate kind of picture of that seizure onset zone. Now there are there’s a whole nother group of research that I’m not involved with using music to entrain rhythms of the brain. Not so much spikes or seizure activity, but just entrain the natural rhythms of the brain. And there is data to support that. You can entrain rhythms of the brain using music.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:00] Okay, so that’s just encouraging, um, consistent rhythms to avoid those spiking electrical activity.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:20:08] Well, I don’t know if they would avoid spike electrical activity, but it might promote, you know, it’s sort of like in biofeedback. There’s been some data, although I think I think it’s not confirmed that you can treat things like post-traumatic stress disorder with biofeedback. I do think that’s real, uh, in various ways. But one way might be to use music to get the EEG to have more relaxed rhythm than the more tense rhythms. For example, we have alpha rhythm, which is kind of a dominant rhythm when you’re awake, eyes closed, just relaxing Versus a beta rhythm when you’re kind of eyes open and stressed out. So the idea would be to try to increase your alpha rhythm and relaxation can do that. And that’s how biofeedback works. Well. Music may be able to provide that kind of biofeedback as well.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:55] Maybe what we should do is talk about what research has already been done on the application of music to epilepsy, what research is ongoing in this space?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:21:05] So there have been about a dozen investigations, I’d say, of the effects of either the Mozart piece, the cursor 448, or the D major two part piano piece, uh, or other forms of music, but mainly that and this. Most of the studies have shown that there is a beneficial effect, but a meta analysis raised a concern that most of the studies were biased and not properly controlled with confounders, and that there’s sort of biases in terms of publishing positive effects versus not publishing negative effects. So so it’s I would say there is some evidence, but it’s very preliminary for Mozart or any piece of music to really improve seizures. But you will find articles that will say it. And the consensus right now is it’s not going to replace regular therapy like medication or when appropriate, surgery or implants or even diets like we do have epilepsy diets, the ketogenic diet being the main one. It’s not going to replace any of those, but it could supplement them.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:10] So back to that question about who should be considering music as an intervention for epilepsy. Would it be people who are resistant to drugs, or just people who want to supplement what they’re already doing that may be helping and maybe working kind of supplement that?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:22:26] Oh, I would think it’d be anybody.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:28] So anybody with epilepsy could consider this, whether it’s a supplement or if they’re drug resistant.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:22:33] Well, there’s really nothing to do. I mean, right now, right now we don’t know enough to know what to do.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:38] So with music, specifically.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:22:40] With music forever. Okay.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:42] So what research is ongoing because I know the Mozart research that we’ve been talking about, that was, like we said decades ago, what’s going on now?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:22:50] No, no, that’s very active now. The decades. Oh, really? Decades ago was sort of discovering the Mozart effect, for better or worse, because we don’t even know if it’s real. The current research is to see if it really does help, and we don’t know, but there’s some evidence that it might. It just has to be studied on a larger scale. Now, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that they should run out and do music therapy as a treatment for epilepsy, because that would be basically super alternative thinking.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:15] So right now there is no established tool.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:23:18] It’s not an established tool, but it’s just very, very interesting.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:23] And would you say showing promise?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:23:25] Uh, yeah. Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:27] It’s something that wasn’t very convincing.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:23:30] Right, right. No, but I’m, you know, I’m coming from a position where I’m not going to recommend something that’s not well Established.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:38] What is the research that’s ongoing now? Look like, in light of the fact that we do have these functional MRIs now, things like that. I mean, do people are they. Does the research look like somebody having a functional MRI done? Do they have electrodes being attached to their head and then they’re or are they doing and measuring brain activity while they’re listening to certain music? What does that research look like?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:24:00] The research is in basically two forms. One is having patients being who are undergoing epilepsy surgery with implanted electrodes implanted stereotactically, which means from different directions like a stereo sound. And while they are being recorded and while the seizures being recorded to investigators are using music to determine whether it changes those recordings, decreases the amount of spikes or changes to spikes, or decreases the amount of actual seizures. Because a spike is just kind of like a biomarker, it’s like a lightning strike. But the actual seizure is when the lightning strikes go into an electrical storm. That’s the seizure itself is the electrical storm. Form. The spike is basically a biomarker that one is predisposed to seizures and may not cause any effect at all, positive or negative. And if music reduces spikes, that doesn’t mean it will help somebody, but it sort of seems like it would. So that’s the main area of research in terms of music and epilepsy right now.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:56] Do you think that being a musician yourself has changed how you research this topic, how you ask clinical questions about epilepsy?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:25:04] Well, sure.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:05] I mean, you’re a neurologist who lives at the intersection of music and medicine. How has that impacted how you practice or research?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:25:12] Well, sure, because I’m going to ask questions and think about this both as a neurologist and as a musician, because I hang out in both camps. I’m in three jam sessions a week right now with people.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:24] Oh, good for you.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:25:25] Really into it. Or they went to Berklee or they’re currently at Berklee, which is here in Boston, of course, where I am. And I played with the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, which is an orchestra of musicians in the Longwood Medical Area at Harvard Medical School. That’s a very, very fine orchestra. I was in the percussion section. Oh, interesting. Major. Back when I was a kid at Johns Hopkins and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, where I grew up. So it does affect. But it’s true of everything. No matter what you do in life, your your lived experience affects it, right? So like in your case, you’re you’re a musician, you’re a piano teacher, but you’re also a podcaster. And you know, you’re working in the higher echelon of piano world with steinways and things like that. So that affect your ability as a musician affects your conversation right now because you’re thinking about it as a pianist and as a piano teacher, as you are. And so it’s the same with me. And also I’ve been able to integrate music and medicine in a in a unique way, in a sense. And others have done it too, but it’s still kind of special where, for example, we love in medicine, the CPC, the clinical pathologic correlation, where you talk about a person’s illness and then show the pathology.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:26:32] But I’ve done these things of clinical pathologic correlations of the great musicians. So I’ve covered Beethoven’s deafness and Schumann’s madness, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann, her own rheumatism and strokes, and, uh, Ravel’s dementia and Shostakovich’s neuropathy. And Cole Porter had phantom leg pain when his leg was amputated, one of the first examples of that. And George Gershwin had the olfactory seizures that eventually was his brain tumor that he died of because he herniated from the undiagnosed tumor. And I’ve had the ability to explain their medical histories and then their musical histories and play their music at the same time to bring it all together, because I find that the heart of creativity is combinatorial, is combining things. It’s very hard to have an original thought, but if you start combining music and medicine and neurology and EEG and epilepsy, then you can do really creative things, because creativity comes out of bringing all these disparate or seemingly disparate areas together.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:35] Well, if you were to imagine what a future treatment could look like, where music is being used as a therapeutic tool for those with epilepsy, what do you think that would look like? Would that be like an individualized playlist that somebody could listen to on a regular basis to just help normalize their brain’s electrical activity and kind of use that entrainment concept to that benefit? Or what what would you anticipate this treatment looking like?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:28:02] Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. Uh, in fact, I’m working I’m mentoring a high school student right now who’s a musician who’s trying to do that. Exactly. Okay. And she has epilepsy. She’s trying to take other high school kids with epilepsy and find out what music they like and what music helps their seizures by exposing them to music. So this this picks up on what we’ve been talking about, is people have their favorite and a certain musical aspects that seem to help, uh, some form of epilepsy. It’s thought that via a parasympathetic mechanism, which is the part of our autonomic nervous system that calms us down. So to put that in layman’s terms, if one can determine the genre of music or the types of pieces that leads to relaxation responses and to kind of perform a biofeedback, then implementing that for a person’s stress disorder or anxiety disorder or epilepsy may be the ticket.
Mindy Peterson: [00:28:57] So I’m just thinking as a parent, we were talking about the Mozart effect and those baby Mozart DVDs that regardless of the research, I stand behind those just for my daughter and what I saw they did for her. So let’s say you’re a parent and you have a child with epilepsy, or you’re an adult and you have epilepsy. What would you say to them? Maybe doing an experiment and saying, hey, I noticed that when I listen to this song or this artist or this genre or this, maybe it’s classical music or whatever it is, I just notice that my brain feels more relaxed or some other. I don’t even know what they would look for. But if they notice that in themselves or they notice that in their child. What do you think about them doing an experiment? Just playing that music more regularly, or playing it before they go to bed, or playing it before they’re going into a stressful situation or, you know, any recommendations for people to just sort of be their own. You kind of hear that term n of one, like, I’m my own person, that I’m just seeing how this works for me.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:30:06] I think that’s a great idea. As long as you don’t forget to combine it with exercise and taking your medication.
Mindy Peterson: [00:30:11] Sure. Well, as you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda. In the past, I’ve asked a different question. With this being our first episode of 2026, I’m switching up the question for this year and for this year’s musical ending, I’m asking guests to share a musical Tool that you wish more people knew about. And this could be a book or a blog, an app, a therapeutic tool, or anything that enables you to enhance your life with music. So do you have a tool that you can tell us about today?
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:30:45] I have a the mom of a patient who’s who’s absolutely wonderful. And, you know, I worked with her daughter with epilepsy, but she sent well, first of all, she has how did I get interested in medicine? And I told her, well, I read this book when I was 11 years of age called Stories of Great Physicians. And it was like about Hippocrates and Salk and Sabin and Madame Curie and Louis Pasteur and those kind of people. And I just thought, this is the greatest thing to be. So she bought she found the book Stories of Great Physicians, and she sent it to me. And I couldn’t believe how juvenile it was when it actually came to me that I actually quoted and cited it. On the other hand, she also sent me a book that I had never heard of, and it’s called Year of Wonder Classical music to enjoy day by day by an author named Clemency Burton-hill, who I have never met. But this woman is remarkable because it’s a book that takes you from the beginning of the year and it’s January January to the very end, December 31st and every day of the year. She has a different page and recommends a piece of classical music, and has a couple paragraphs describing the composer and the music and its applicability to modern life. And it is remarkable. And you could just like me, you go on YouTube and you can listen to the piece, which usually only takes a few minutes. It’s my inspiration of the day.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:08] Wow.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:32:09] And then about a year later, the mother sent me a volume two called Another Year of Wonder. It turns out this author had a massive brain hemorrhage, lost her ability to speak, had to go through rehabilitation, regained her faculties, and wrote a volume two as a comeback, which is just as wonderful. So now every morning when I come to work, the first thing I do if I, if I remember and have time, is I look at the pages for that day, like today will be January 7th, and I’ll open it up and it’ll tell me what to listen to, and I’ll read it. And it’s just the most inspirational, relaxing moment. So that and going to the pool in the morning, which is another thing I do, is, uh, is what I recommend for one’s health.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:54] Oh that’s wonderful. I look forward to checking that book out. Year of wonder.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:32:57] Year of wonder.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:58] I’ll put a link in the show notes for listeners so they can easily get their hands on it. And what a what a story of resilience too, for that author coming back from the injury. Yeah.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:33:08] I know, and I tell you, I deal with families every day whose resilience is incredible, unbelievable. And, um, that’s really the story of life. That’s the human struggle.
Mindy Peterson: [00:33:21] Mhm.
Dr. Phillip Pearl: [00:33:22] Well, so if we can make an impact with something as beautiful as music, then we did something good today. Thank you Mindy.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai