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 all the ways that music can make our lives better. Mental health struggles have become part of everyday life for so many of us. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, emotional overwhelm, and disconnection are affecting people of all ages and backgrounds. And many of us are searching for approaches to healing that go beyond medication alone. Today’s conversation explores groundbreaking research at the intersection of neuroscience, mental health, and music. A recent study out of Yale University showed demonstrated success with music, helping to reduce paranoia and hallucinations and ease social isolation in people experiencing psychosis. Even if you’ve never personally encountered psychosis, what we’re talking about today offers profound insight into how music shapes the brain, strengthens human connection, and may hold untapped potential for mental health and healing. Joining me today is the senior author of the study, Doctor Philip Corlett, and the project’s music facilitator, Adam Christoferson. Doctor Corlett is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale and Director of its Belief, Learning and Memory Lab. Adam is a singer songwriter and the Founder and Executive Director of Musical Intervention, a Connecticut based nonprofit and creative studio that uses music making as a tool for mental health recovery, connection and community transformation. Adam is also the winner of ABC’s Claim to Fame season three. Welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Phil and Adam.
Adam Christoferson: [00:01:54] Thanks for having us.
Phil Corlett: [00:01:55] Thanks for having us.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:56] The research that we’re talking about today is on music’s impact on those with psychosis, specifically people with schizophrenia, auditory hallucinations, and paranoia. For those of us who aren’t intimately familiar with this topic, can you just explain how this presents in everyday life? How might we recognize that someone around us, whether it’s a loved one or just someone that we’re passing on the street, may be experiencing these symptoms?
Phil Corlett: [00:02:27] Absolutely. So when we talk about psychosis, I think people sometimes get confused what that word really means, what it means to me, and the way that I use it in my work is sort of two main symptoms, really. And they’re very profound departures from consensus reality delusions. So believing things that other people around you in your culture don’t agree with and don’t believe, and hallucinations, perceiving things that other people around you don’t share. In schizophrenia, that typically manifests most commonly as paranoid delusions or persecutory delusions. These are beliefs that other people out in the world may be friends, family members. Sometimes strangers, uh, intend to harm us. And with regards to hallucinations in schizophrenia, they’re typically auditory verbal hallucinations. So those are voices inside the head commenting on actions and thoughts. Um, and speaking to one in one’s head.
Mindy Peterson: [00:03:28] Okay. And just to clarify for listeners, Phil was the one just talking. He’s the Brit and Adam, uh, since we’re, we’re this is audio only in that video. Adam, were you about ready to say something?
Adam Christoferson: [00:03:41] Yeah, yeah. So, you know, um, my mother has paranoid schizophrenia, and it’s something that I’ve seen my entire life through the eyes. I don’t have it myself. And so the way it’s always kind of presented to me in different settings is, you know, somebody you are trying to talk to seem occupied in their own mind, and then they might even start saying things, um, about their thoughts or they might, you know, try to defend what’s happening inside of their mind. Um, right in front of you while you’re trying to, to, to communicate something. So okay, is a very isolating experience that they have because they’re not truly part of the conversation. They’re very much more occupied, uh, with whatever thought or voice they might be hearing. Um, taking them away from an experience that’s right there in front of them. Um.
Mindy Peterson: [00:04:33] You two have done incredible work together. How did you two connect and how did a researcher, professor of psychiatry become inspired to research music’s impact on psychosis?
Phil Corlett: [00:04:47] Yeah, this is not a path that I thought I was going to be on. I’m a lover of music. Not particularly talented myself. Um, had been working at the Connecticut Mental Health Center here in New Haven for the past sort of ten years or so, and been struck every single day coming in and out of the door, how poor a job we were doing at helping people who suffer from these symptoms. The medications that we have only work for about 50% of people, and they have terrible side effects.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:18] Only 50% of people. I didn’t know that.
Phil Corlett: [00:05:21] The symptoms that I care about, yes, absolutely. So even despite taking really strong doses of these medications, 50% of people will still have residual voices in their heads or, um, paranoid thoughts or delusions. And I got introduced to Adam through a collaborator at the program for Recovery and Community Health. He’d been doing work at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, making songs with our participants in weekly sessions. And I got invited to come along and just observe one of the sessions. And, you know, I’d been coming in and out of that building for ten years and seeing many of the same participants and patients and clients, uh, not really changing and having really quite, um, profound impairments. And just in the context of this brief session with Adam, they would sort of come to life. They’d be singing along, talking, contributing to the direction of the session. And I was just blown away, just sort of profoundly moving. And it just seemed like something that I’d like to be involved with, if I could. And the opportunity arose through this grant that we were introduced to by our colleagues at perch, the program for Recovery and Community Health, um, Adam and I and the broader team spent about six months putting together a really great application that brought together how wonderful his intervention was and the things that he was doing alongside some of the more kind of scientific and objective computational measures that we’d been working on in my lab that could really characterize the mechanisms that underlie hallucinations and delusions. And so it was a really a meeting of two different ways of thinking about and approaching these symptoms. And I think what we ended up with was something that lifted both of our programs, um, to new heights. I’ve been able to attract really fantastic graduate students and postdocs to work with me alongside Adam. We’ve had a really fun time figuring out how to do this work throughout the pandemic, uh, and to keep the ball rolling. And most importantly, I think we’ve really changed our participants lives. And Adam can tell you much more about that. But, um.
Mindy Peterson: [00:07:33] Yeah.
Phil Corlett: [00:07:34] For me, just the most important part has been just having a completely different perspective on what it’s like for people to have these symptoms and to feel better. I used to think that we needed to find the magic bullet medicine that would just wipe all of this stuff out of their brains. I don’t think that exists. I don’t know that it will ever exist. And I think finding ways that can help them cope and deal better with what they’re experiencing without necessarily getting rid of it completely, is a much more fruitful way to approach things. And like I said, being involved in something that’s so transformative for people’s lives has really helped me feel like I’ve had some degree of success in my career.
Mindy Peterson: [00:08:11] That’s quite a testimony for what you’re doing. Adam, anything you want to add to that?
Adam Christoferson: [00:08:16] I wish that we met doing karaoke. That would deepen our story. But maybe in another life for sure. We were a touring band and, and, um, it really does feel like a family. He’s built an incredible lab, um, that I get to collaborate with. And the people that are in the lab are compassionate people. They’re loving people. And it really says a lot about the culture that Phil sets up wherever he goes. He really looks for talented people who have big hearts and great minds, and I’m just lucky that I came in with my my heart. And so the, the, the goal of musical intervention is always to see the beauty in people and see the creativity and let that lead forward. And, you know, back to my mother, some of those times when she would be lost within herself, you know, we could play music together. And then she would start kind of improvising with me, and then she would start to shake off those voices, and then we would be jamming and having a really great time. And it’s something I always knew worked.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:19] And so you experienced the starting at age, what with your mom, with these jam sessions.
Adam Christoferson: [00:09:26] It was probably there earlier when just playing like drums and stuff. But once I took the guitar up around 16 or 17 years old and started kind of making my music that way and writing songs, sitting around the table and, and kind of providing, you know, a chord progression and a concept and letting her just express herself, you know? Yeah. And then she the laughter would ensue. And, and that’s, you know, just a stark transformation from, you know, horrible, um, voices that she would have. I mean, she’s very, very lucky to be alive. And I believe, you know, music has a huge part of that in her life.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:07] And she had musical background as well. Right.
Adam Christoferson: [00:10:11] Kind of, um, I mean, she likes to say that she was a soprano singer before she had a trache, uh, in her throat, but, um, you know, she comes from a stock. So her brother is the famous Michael Bolton.
Mindy Peterson: [00:10:22] Yeah. Another fun family fact for you.
Adam Christoferson: [00:10:26] And, you know, and those concerts were really special and she would be the one. I mean, but she was like, way cool because like in the 60s, she was at Berkeley and she was studying psychology, hanging out with Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, you know, and then she, she got too sick and she had to leave California, eventually went out to Iowa City, got her degree. But, you know, she couldn’t handle, um, the torment. And so she tried every possible way to get out of this world. I mean, really so many attempts at suicide. And thank God none of them were successful. And and she’s still here today. She comes to our open mic at musical intervention. She’s a grandmother. And and, you know, she’s a proud grandmother.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:09] Ah. Well, let’s talk about the research. Explain to listeners what the research showed. How was music used as an intervention for participants and what were the results?
Phil Corlett: [00:11:22] Yeah, absolutely. So Adam can tell you much more about the secret ingredients of what goes on during the sessions. But let me just tell you about the really simple design that we came up with. So we brought people to the lab. We interviewed them about their experiences, their experiences of their symptoms as well as their experiences of music. We recorded those sessions so that we could analyze them computationally and look at the language use that people put forth during the interviews, as well as head movements and body movements and all of these sort of intricate things that happen that perhaps aren’t particularly obvious to the naked eye. And then we gave them a series of just really simple games that had been developed in my lab over the years that were sensitive to the severity of the symptoms that people experience. So when someone’s paranoid and they play one of these games, they tend to sort of switch erratically between the choices that they can make and that we think is related to their expectations, that perhaps the world is a unstable and volatile place. Then, having characterized their symptoms and experiences in as much detail as we could, we handed them over to Adam, and Adam worked with them once a week for four weeks in a session that lasted about three hours where they would write and record songs together as a group with three other people. So one participant and three other people who shared their symptoms and experiences. So groups of four. And then at the end of those sessions, sorry, five at the end of those sessions, Adam would hand them back over to us and we would test them again. We’d do the same sort of interview about their symptoms and their experiences of music. And we do parallel versions of the game. So no practice effects here, just new versions that could track the symptom severity and their behavior in the same way. Adam, do you want to say more about the, um, the intervention itself?
Adam Christoferson: [00:13:20] Sure. Um, it’s based off something that I’ve been doing for 25 years, which is showing up in a room, laying out the beginning of a song and creating a song and recording it with their voices. Original, all original stuff. And for this study we had three band tracks that we used, and for each week we would take a band track, create the lyrics, the melody around it. And every group was different, had a different approach, different lyrics, different concepts. And then the fourth group, we would create something from scratch. So we would have no prerecorded band track. We would just kind of go off the vibe of the room. And by that point, everybody is kind of already established. Um, you know, their roles in the group, their strengths, their willingness to be creative with each other and encourage each other to step out of their comfort zone. And yeah, so after the four weeks, everybody gets a copy of their song. I think what was really special that after each week, the following week, we would play the song that we did the previous week and, you know, we edited it to make sure that everything sounds good, everything’s, um, presentable and that everybody feels really proud of what they’ve created. And so every time they just, they couldn’t believe that they came up with something not only so fast, but so coherent. So just creating hits. I don’t know, we’re just a hit factory.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:53] And so would you have a topic for each song? Or the group would just come up with a topic?
Adam Christoferson: [00:15:00] Yeah, yeah. You know, we, we, you know, I lean into certain things and I’m just able to kind of just pick out where I think we’re going and then release that and allow the group to, to kind of drive together. And, um.
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:18] And you were able to get participation from everybody in the group. It wasn’t just one person monopolizing things.
Adam Christoferson: [00:15:24] Yeah. I mean, that’s the hardest part about facilitating somebody who’s like incredibly extroverted and wants to take over. I mean, could could write 20 songs in an hour, you know, and that’s a part of the process of developing empathy and compassion to allow other people to, um, to take the wheel. And for some of those ideas that you have to kind of swallow them and wait either for another opportunity or let it go and move on to where we are. A lot of intricate things that are happening socially. Um, but you know, the celebration is always there. It’s like it’s a messy thing. And, you know, sometimes it’s like it writes itself and sometimes you really have to dig in and work out the lyrics and really be diplomatic. But at the end, when it’s all said and done and the final hook is done, and you know, we came up with a cool bridge or something, the celebration is is outrageous. I mean, it’s, it is like a drug and, and it feels euphoric. And you’re not alone in the experience. It’s something completely shared. And so it was just an incredible honor to meet all of the participants that came in because, you know, that’s like, I understand that that society is very challenging and capitalism is very challenging and artists are typically a little different, and they don’t typically fit into the role of keeping it together, you know, and so they, you know, with, with drugs or mental health, you know, sometimes they end up in hospitals or jails, you know, and I think of the Van Gogh’s of the world who had people alongside them that could, um, you know, provide the platform, provide canvas for the artists. And, and I just feel lucky enough to be able to work with a lot of these people and continue to work with them after the study.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:15] Well, one thing I read that really caught my attention, either on your website or in an article I don’t remember, but you said something about really wanting to work with these people both to honor them and bring healing. And I can really hear that come out. And what you’re saying too, that you don’t want to just help bring healing to these people, but you really want to honor them and who they are, which is really, really cool. Tell us some more about the findings of the research. What were the results that you found after doing the sort of the pre-interview? And then there was the, the musical group songwriting experience, and then what happened next and what results did that show?
Phil Corlett: [00:18:01] Yeah. I mean, the, the paper that you that brought you in contact with us is the one that just came out in psychosis, which is a peer reviewed journal that’s dedicated to psychotic illness and especially social and psychological perspectives on the illness. What we found, there’s a really interesting measure that you can take from people’s language use developed by a colleague from the University of Texas called James Pennebaker. Basically, he counts the different types of words that people use in their writing or their speech. People who tend to use the word I more are more distressed in their everyday lives. So patterns of sort of personal pronoun use. He found this when he was first analyzing the blogs of people who had been writing online prior to, and then following nine over 11, following nine over 11, the use of this marker increased sort of precipitously. And he’s done lots of studies to validate this as a marker of distress, as have we in our lab. And I suppose the key take home finding is that people use that pronoun pattern a lot less after the intervention, consistent with the idea that they were much less distressed by their experiences. We also.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:17] That is so fascinating. So I just want to make sure listeners are catching this. So you’re comparing first person pronouns I, me, mine. The prevalence of use of those personal pronouns compared to plural pronouns we, us, ours, which, yeah, I, I found that so fascinating. Something I never would have thought of. And yet it, it sort of makes sense when you hear it.
Phil Corlett: [00:19:41] Yeah. And one of the things that’s perhaps not brought forth quite as much because it’s not as much part of the scientific literature, but in the post interviews, after they’d gone through this musical experience with Adam and our team, they started to use the word we much more. So I think maps on to the idea that they feel much more part of a collective. They’re not using the royal we. They’re saying we as a team and what we did and what we achieved. And I think for many of these people, sadly, that’s a very rare experience to feel part of a broader whole and more connected to other people. And I think that’s part of the thing that possibly made make them feel a lot better. Um, a lot differently about themselves and perhaps a lot differently about the world too.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:27] Yeah. One thing that’s kind of cool about that specific result is that something that a layperson can understand and become aware of and just know, you know, if you have family members or loved ones who you think may be struggling with psychosis in some way, just kind of paying attention to how often, how prevalent those first person pronouns are being used compared to plural pronouns would be sort of an interesting thing just to become aware of.
Phil Corlett: [00:20:56] Yeah. I mean, it’s sometimes difficult to catch with the naked ear, but it’s there in all sorts of interesting places. One of my favorite studies that James did that maps perhaps onto what we observed. He analyzed the language use of people during speed dating. And to the extent that they start to use similar patterns of pronouns and start to use the word we. They’re more likely to go on further dates and meet each other later, and even still be in a relationship a few months later. So, you know, these patterns of language use that seem sort of subtle and, um, almost undetectable can have really powerful correlates in our lives.
Mindy Peterson: [00:21:36] Yeah, that is really interesting there. Yeah. There’s something there that you think is so subtle and insignificant, but it really is kind of predictive of how connected these people are feeling.
Phil Corlett: [00:21:48] Absolutely. And I think for me, that message is so clear, right? To be able to be open to connecting with these folks, providing them opportunities for connection, maybe able to achieve things with their symptoms and experiences that drugs and prior therapies have just not been able to touch. Yeah. And I think that’s super inspiring. I think it gives me a lot more hope for the future. Um, not that I’m saying that we should replace anything that we’re doing with regular patterns of approaches to treatment, but maybe to supplement with this and maybe provide some opportunities to do this sort of thing whilst they’re undergoing regular therapies, might help them feel better, but also adhere to those therapies better and show up to appointments more frequently and regularly and that sort of thing.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:40] It’s another tool for the toolkit and could have some kind of a symbiotic complementary type of a result compared to just pharmaceuticals alone. So you notice this we shift was one thing that the results of this study showed. What about the paranoia, the hallucinations, any change in that that you noticed?
Phil Corlett: [00:23:02] So we got them to self rate the severity of their paranoia with just sort of a standard rating scale. And those ratings significantly reduced in the post session compared to the pre, as did their ratings of their sort of odd and unusual perceptual experiences, that some of which might be hallucinations, but just sort of visions and hearing things more broadly. Those both improved with the intervention. It’s not published in that particular publication, but we just pre-printed a new paper that’s now under review, where we showed that the game playing also changed in the appropriate direction. So as paranoia improved, people’s erratic choice making on the task improved, as did their volatility beliefs about how changeable the game was going to be, and presumably how changeable they think the world might be. So everything moved in the right direction, but critically, in concert with one another. Right. It wasn’t just that people were getting better over time, regardless of what we did. We really did change something about these people’s brains and behavior that I just think is really inspiring and exciting and can’t wait to do more of it, to be honest.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:15] Yeah, well, and at risk of stating the obvious, there aren’t side effects from these musical sessions, unlike the antipsychotic drugs, which, as you mentioned, have some negative side effects like I think, lethargy, brain fog, any other common side effects from those drugs?
Adam Christoferson: [00:24:36] Exhaustion?
Phil Corlett: [00:24:37] Yeah, they can tend to make you lose pleasure in the things that you typically enjoy, right? So that would be related to the lethargy somewhat sort of hard to be motivated and out in the world. I would be careful to say there are zero side effects because of course, what we’re asking people to do is sometimes somewhat challenging for some people, right? If you find it hard to be around others or to feel emotionally vulnerable, there is a risk that even in the acute sort of early phases of being in the study, you might feel a bit worse. And as Adam alluded to, groups can be quite dynamic, right? There can sometimes be people who are overbearing and and take more of the limelight than others. And it’s testimony to how good a facilitator Adam is, is that he can find ways to help everybody work together. And on the whole, that was the outcome. But there were a few tears along the way. Um, there were a few arguments and disagreements on the way, but I, I feel like that’s just life in general and dealing with those vicissitudes of life and being around other humans is actually another coping skill that maybe we left people with beyond.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:44] Well, and it probably contributed to a feeling of connection, ironically.
Mindy Peterson: [00:25:49] I mean, if you have some kind of disagreement and you’re able to work through it and come out the other side, that is bonding.
Phil Corlett: [00:25:56] Right? I sort of think about my own experience doing karaoke, right? Like it’s something that I do enjoy, but in the few seconds before I’m standing up there waiting for the track to start and the, uh, the words to light up, it’s kind of horrifying at times, and I feel like many of our participants might have experienced that. I guess I wouldn’t want other people to walk into something like this and think everything was going to be easy and perfect. It’s really quite a journey. But you know, the best journeys are transformational.
Mindy Peterson: [00:26:24] Sure. How long does this effect last? Is it just while they’re going through the the songwriting session, is it a couple hours afterward? Like how how long do these improvements last?
Phil Corlett: [00:26:38] I’m going to let Adam tell you about what happened subsequently, but because we didn’t gather a great deal of long term follow up data, I sort of regret that. But that’s just the way the initial project was structured and the funding was made available. Okay. We followed up with them typically within a week, but usually within a few days of the last session. We’re going to do that differently in future because we think there are longer term changes. And Adam can tell you about those.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:03] Okay.
Adam Christoferson: [00:27:05] Yeah. I mean, I was just thinking to myself, a lot of the population with severe psychosis have a difficult time maintaining medication. Right. And having ideas of like, oh, you know, I’m probably better off without it. And then cycling through an event, a crisis, and then winding up in the hospital again. And so some of the participants that we had in this, in this study decided to come and be part of the musical intervention community at our studio, at our community studio. And this is a studio that’s open to the public. So you have a very diverse gathering of people from Yale students to people on the street, people in recovery of substance abuse. I mean, retirees just looking to jam. And so it’s a really mixed bag. And so when I think about being here for ten years and the people that it’s affected. Yes. Um, a good number, a good percentage of them have serious mental health issues like schizophrenia, and have been hospitalized, but have been coming 3 to 4 days a week for six years. And some of the participants, now that we’ve gotten from the Singh study, have become part of our community here and perform at the open mics every week.
Adam Christoferson: [00:28:23] We have a we actually have a showcase from a participant, from the study coming up, where they’re going to perform their songs for a live audience, highlighting their, their music. And so, you know, people showing up and doing what makes them feel better to me is medicine, right? Going to do yoga for some people is medicine with few side effects. As long as you don’t overstretch. And, you know, we, we do things very non-clinical in the studio. It’s not there’s no sign in. We’re not trying to you don’t need a diagnosis to walk in. We’re looking at people through the eyes of an artist and a producer. We want to be the producer to the artist. We don’t want to be their doctor. We don’t want to be. But we also want to be compassionate, and we want to follow through with their vision for their future. And if their mental health is getting in the way of it, we want to encourage them to seek out the supports that are out there, to continue to be productive at the studio and stay out of the out of the in-patient, ideally.
Mindy Peterson: [00:29:27] Well, it sounds like a huge added benefit of the partnership that you two have on this research project, is that the container for this music facilitation, it, it offers a continued longer term community for the participants. They’re not just participating in the study. And when the study ends, they go on their merry way or maybe not so merry way. But with musical intervention, they have this community that they can continue to be involved with longer term, which is pretty cool and diverse.
Adam Christoferson: [00:30:00] Like I said, you know, It’s typically in mental health treatment. There’s silos. You have the people with addiction in this building, and then you have the people with, you know, schizophrenia or bipolar over in this area. And you miss the idea of, you know, what about mixing it with the regular population? What? I mean, people have something to contribute. It’s not just we don’t need to isolate all these people in their silos.
Mindy Peterson: [00:30:24] Yeah.
Adam Christoferson: [00:30:25] Um, because what do you get from that? And so everybody wins when you put people together because, you know, people who might not have any idea about mental health, uh, come in just to play some guitar and all of a sudden this person that maybe they would have been timid around or scared of, they’re jamming with on stage and now they’re peers jamming, and now they have something to kind of connect over. And that person is no longer the same. They’re no longer going to be looking at people, um, who express themselves differently with maybe fear in their heart or misunderstanding. Now they have some kind of empathy there. So that’s the goal.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:00] That’s really insightful. Yeah, I know we’re running short on time here, but I want to make sure that we talk about something that seems to be a key element in this research, a key element in helping people with psychosis reconnect with reality. It seems to involve the concept of predictive coding, the brain’s ability to anticipate what happens next. Can you explain predictive coding in a way that everyday listeners can understand? What is the brain constantly predicting and why is that so important in this research?
Adam Christoferson: [00:31:36] Let me take over on that one.
Phil Corlett: [00:31:40] You probably could. You’ve heard me say it so many times.
Adam Christoferson: [00:31:43] You just say it so much, so much sweeter.
Phil Corlett: [00:31:47] So in my work, I think we’ve been able to show and argue that the reason that we have brains is to make predictions about what’s going to come next. And that’s because so much information is just incident on us at all times. It’s really overwhelming. We’re not just passively receiving that information. Our eyes and brain and ears don’t work like a video camera. They work much more like a scientist trying to guess about what’s going to happen next. And we use those guesses to kind of constrain how we process the information. When we make the guess correctly, we don’t really need to focus on that feature as much anymore. We only really.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:25] Need to fade into the background a little, free up the the brain for some other things.
Phil Corlett: [00:32:29] For the things that are surprising or difficult to understand. And what we’ve been able to show earlier in my work is that people with schizophrenia, they experience those surprise signals in the brain to things that they really shouldn’t, and that makes them attend to and learn about and focus on things in their world and in their minds that other people would tend to ignore. What can you do with that, and why does music help? Well, music is inherently full of predictive structure. It does have surprising elements at times, but it’s generally something that we can anticipate, right? So if I harm or sing the line, Sweet Caroline in the back of your head, you’ll be going bah bah bah bah. Right. You just.
Mindy Peterson: [00:33:12] Can’t help.
Phil Corlett: [00:33:12] It. And I think because the brain’s system for doing this is not compartmentalized into separate things. It’s just one overarching model, building mechanism that when you make predictions in one domain, it can impact how you make predictions in other domains. This is why when we hear music in our heads, we can’t help but tap along and move along with the music. Now think about what happens when you bring groups of people together. They start to move in synchrony, right? You must have seen concerts, been to concerts where that happens, right?
Mindy Peterson: [00:33:48] Crowds of people. Yeah, we talked about that quite a bit on this podcast.
Phil Corlett: [00:33:52] Right. And so I think that’s what we’ve done, right. We’ve given our participants who singularly might have a real hard time making accurate predictions about the world and what’s coming next. Full of surprises and uncertainty and new meaning that they’ve got to try and figure out. But you give them an environment that’s a little bit more structured, particularly via listening to music and performing together. And then they start to move in synchrony with a few other people, including Adam, and then they start to see themselves differently. They’re someone who can synchronize with others. They’re someone who can contribute to a broader group project, and they can be.
Mindy Peterson: [00:34:38] Affecting their sense of identity in a positive way.
Phil Corlett: [00:34:41] Absolutely. And they can immediately get the feedback that, well, I did that right. Like I wrote those words. And in a very short period of time, I’m singing that song. And over the weeks, they can come back and listen again to this body of work that they’ve now created alongside these people who are now their colleagues and their collaborators, who just a few weeks before were strangers. And that’s all because they’ve changed how they make predictions about the world, how they make predictions about themselves, and how they make predictions about other people. And so, yeah, I think this project and music in general was designed to interact with this way that we think about how the brain works. And I think our data show that to be the case.
Mindy Peterson: [00:35:24] Well, and it’s interesting, I think you said in one of the articles I read that music is a safe way of having our expectations violated. And when we think about music, I mean, it does like you said, it does have that structure to it. We have the prediction, but then there’s also the surprises and there’s emotion involved in that. Music’s been called the sound of emotions. And so providing that safe way to Have these predictions violated in a way and in a way that you’re deeply feeling it too, and experiencing it in sort of like a 3D 4D type of a way, instead of just a very superficial one one sided way. I can imagine would be very effective.
Phil Corlett: [00:36:10] Yeah. Mindy. I like to think about listening to music and making music in a group in the way that we’ve been doing is somewhat like a roller coaster, right? You get on it, you roll along the tracks, maybe you drop down a few turns and loops and loops, and you know that you can’t fall out, but you’re still horrified, horrified, and delighted when you get to the end of it and you can get off and tell people how cool it was. And I think that’s what happened in these groups.
Mindy Peterson: [00:36:36] Yeah. Oh, interesting. Well, I want to respect your time. And I know we’re we’re about out here out of time. One thing I just wanted to ask is, Phil, you’ve suggested that music making may permanently alter brain circuitry. Can you just explain a little bit about what kind of neural changes you think or suspect may be happening here?
Phil Corlett: [00:37:00] Sure. I mean, I think everything changes brain circuitry, right? Listening to a podcast, making a podcast permanently changes our brains somewhat. I think music is really good at that because it sits at this really interesting intersection between rewards, broader non-rewarding predictions, figuring out how the world works, which is in itself somewhat rewarding using your body, right? We use the same circuitry that’s for rewards and for predictions, for making movements. And so I think it has that sort of sweet combination where it modulates all of the important things that dopamine does. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. But in a good way. Yeah.
Adam Christoferson: [00:37:41] Music, right. It occupies so many parts and regions of the brain. And when you add lyrics and memories? I mean, it really brings so many parts of the brain together for this one experience. And that’s why in Alzheimer’s, you see, you see some some miracles happen there. So, so music unifies not only our minds but each other. In my opinion, we wouldn’t have come this far as a civilization if we didn’t have music to begin to share stories and solidify these stories in so many regions of our brain, simply because it had a beat with it and it was syncopated, and it had more than just words attached to it, you know? So yeah, you’re talking to the founder of musical intervention, but music saved my life. And I know that it does a lot for others.
Mindy Peterson: [00:38:30] Mhm. Well, as I knew what happened, there are so many more questions I would love to ask you than what we have time for. Before we wrap things up with the coda, is there anything either one of you want to say if you have time for it?
Phil Corlett: [00:38:43] I still have time. Adam, do you have time?
Adam Christoferson: [00:38:46] I have a few minutes.
Phil Corlett: [00:38:46] Yeah, we can answer some more questions. I’d be happy to.
Mindy Peterson: [00:38:49] Okay. Okay. Let’s see here. Okay. Adam, question for you. Do you have sort of a favorite personal success story of a participant that you observed? Just really be transformed by this experience, whether it was part of the study or something, you know, a similar experience through musical intervention.
Adam Christoferson: [00:39:12] There’s countless, uh, countless stories. I mean, I just opened up my eyes to look at somebody walking in the room. And I know the back story. And, I mean, at any given moment when you come to an open mic and and I look at the people on stage and where they’ve come from, um, to this stage to perform with each other, it’s absolutely astonishing and so sad that other communities don’t have this. It’s shattering to think that here’s a place where these people who have been abused in the mental health world, um, who have been abused at life and just want to express themselves, finally get a chance to do that. And I guess. All right. So I walked myself into it. I think of this one individual who has been in and out of treatment, uh, their entire life. I’ve known them since they were a kid, and music was something that he shared with his mother. And his mother passed away and he found himself in a psychiatric hospital. And I brought him the guitar and told him, basically showed him how to write songs. I left for about a week and came back, and he was writing songs with other kids on the unit.
Adam Christoferson: [00:40:39] And I thought, wow, this this kid is special. Years later, when he was graduating, um, he reached out to me on Facebook and said, hey, would you come to my graduation ceremony? I said, absolutely, I’d love to. And I went there and there he was leading a band and his voice is angelic. When I say he can move an entire room of people. Uh, years later, he’s, uh. He and I are the keynote speakers at the European Conference on Mental Health in Lisbon, and where he’s sharing his story of recovery. And now that he’s a first responder, an entrepreneur, uh, somebody who’s dedicated their lives to helping people, even as an EMS driver, being compassionate and also showing up at open mic and singing his songs that heal and caring the musical intervention torch as just as he was then. And now. He’s a father of a few children. And it’s just like, it’s just a very special. Special thing to be able to do this with people and see the real change.
Mindy Peterson: [00:41:43] Wow. I can’t imagine how rewarding that must be to see that success in a life that could have ended up so much differently, and know that you played a role in that.
Adam Christoferson: [00:41:56] Yeah. Yeah. If I reflect on it, I would crumble like a like a cookie. And so I just keep pushing forward, believing that this thing actually matters. And, and the grace just came along to bring Doctor Colette here. And we, we are, we are we are bound by this thing. And and I just feel so honored, you know, just to be associated with his research. I mean, he is a rock star in the, the, the neuroscience world and the fact that gravity brought us together and that we get to sing karaoke together and change lives together to me is, um, just dreams come true. I mean, it’s a full circle. My mom has auditory hallucinations, and we’re studying how music impacts people with auditory hallucinations. You can’t make that up.
Mindy Peterson: [00:42:44] Yeah, and not just studying it, but making those people’s lives better and the lives of so many people to come in the future. Okay, one last question for you, Phil. From reading your bio, I can tell that you’re a little bit of a disruptor. Uh, you’d like to challenge established ways of doing things. How do you respond to skeptics who might dismiss music therapy as soft science?
Phil Corlett: [00:43:09] Well, I think we’re doing that right. I think that’s what we’re that’s what we’re trying to do. It hasn’t been easy at times. Sometimes we’ve been like multiple groups of people divided by a common language, right? We all care about folks with these symptoms. But I care in my own way that’s associated with my lab. Adam with his approach, other collaborators who think about things in a completely different way, and some people with lived experience who were on the team, who sometimes didn’t really like the ways that we were describing their experiences or approaching the study. It’s made me doing this work a lot more humble, um, and a lot more open hearted. Um, I think maybe I was somewhat skeptical at the beginning that this could work because I’d come through so much of the sort of biological psychiatry, brain based training. But as you said, I pride myself on doing things as differently as possible and shaking things up. And, you know, I think it’s worked somewhat and it continues to work. And as it continues to work, as we keep layering on more and more data, I think we’ll turn a lot of people around who are skeptical. I was certainly somewhat skeptical that we could study these things. Right? It’s almost like anathema, right? Like that’s the special sauce. That’s the stuff that you can’t put numbers to, that you can’t do experiments on that. You You can’t do placebo controlled trials on. But when people tell me I can’t do something that makes me want to do it more. And I think.
Mindy Peterson: [00:44:41] I saw a quote once, it was like a Chinese proverb. Those who say it can’t be done should get out of the way of the people who are getting it done. Or something to that effect. I’m sure I totally butchered it, but that’s kind of.
Phil Corlett: [00:44:57] Something to that effect before, for sure. I mean, this happened to me in graduate school, right? People were like, you can’t study delusions through brain imaging. Like that’s you can’t measure them with numbers. And here we are, you know. Well, I.
Mindy Peterson: [00:45:10] Love that you found a way to do it and to take something that a lot of musicians probably feel is intuitive, whether it’s the specific subject or a different related one. A lot of musicians just kind of inherently intuitively feel that music can be helpful with these things. But as people like you who are able to silence the skeptics and win over the skeptics with the hard cold data and the research to back it up. So on behalf of all musicians, we thank you. Oh well, I so appreciate the extra time that you’ve given me. As you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda, by sharing a musical tool you wish more people knew about. It could be a book or a blog, an app, a therapeutic tool, or anything that enables you to enhance your life with music. I think Adam has a tool that he’s going to tell us about today. Adam.
Adam Christoferson: [00:46:02] Sure. If you ever get stuck in writer’s block, write with someone else. It’s the key component, gets you out of your own way. And, uh, you could lean on somebody else’s experiences and expression to free yourself up.
Mindy Peterson: [00:46:17] So forget the solo writing. Find somebody to write with you.
Adam Christoferson: [00:46:21] Exactly.
Mindy Peterson: [00:46:21] And it probably doesn’t even have to be somebody who considers themselves to be a songwriter. Huh?
Adam Christoferson: [00:46:27] Even better, if they’re not even better.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai