Beat Wala 19: Music & Movement : The Neuroscience of Music with Julia Basso.

This is Beatwalla, serving up the stories behind the beats and taking you straight to the soul of exceptional artists. As we sit down every week to unravel what fuels their artistic expression and creation here on Beatwalla, with me, Jo Yu. Welcome back to Beatwalla at the International Music Summit and I have a very special guest for today's episode thanks to Alpha Theta and their incredible new documentary we become one. We're putting on our nerdy hats to have a chat to Dr Julia Basso today, one of the science stars of the film. She's a pioneering neuroscientist based at Virginia Tech where she leads groundbreaking research on the relationship between movement and brain function. Julia has been exploring how dance and music affect our brains on a deep chemical level. So we're about to dig into the neuroscience behind dancing, the feel good chemicals that flood our systems, and what actually happens inside the brain when we're fully inflow on the dance floor and beyond. Julia, thank you so much for joining me here. It's an absolute pleasure to meet you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to meet you too. Thank you for having me. It's a joy to have you here. I think I'm a little bit different to any other guests that we've had previously on Beatwalla. We've only ever interviewed DJs and musicians and producers and artists and today we have a neuroscientist and a dancer. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you. You're so excited to be here. I loved the documentary powered by Alpha Theta who did of course make one about Ibiza, this very island that we're pushed upon today called the Evolution of Ibiza. Can the white all retain its legendary magic and I think maybe you should be the judge of that because I think that you had your first foray into the wild night at the island last night. How was it? Yes, I did. It was absolutely amazing. So ever since I was in college, I've wanted to go to Ibiza but never had the opportunity. So this is my first time and getting to explore the island last night was just very exciting. So you obviously got on the dance floor. Definitely. I got on the dance floor was right up front with the DJ. Then some beautiful dancers emerged. So I enjoyed every moment. So basically science in in motion. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, this is obviously your first time here though. I mean, what else have you experienced thus far that you could tell us about? Sure, the beautiful beaches and just kind of the this morning I went on a mindful walk through the landscape and getting to see just even the snails along the trails and I'm really appreciating the beauty of this space and along with a soundscape that paired with it. So it was really wonderful. I think one of the lines from the film was that, you know, how music sort of, you know, provides us with an umbilical cord to Mother Nature. So the fact that you kind of got out there and amongst it after last night was probably quite a grounding experience after you kind of left the club. Yeah, it was and we were listening to and we'll get more into kind of neural oscillations later, but we were listening to these beats. And you know, when you're when you're going on a walk and when you walk and you run. What ends up happening is that the brain gets into these theta oscillation states and so paired with the music by the end it felt like the world was was spinning. I was in this really deep meditative state. So it felt wonderful. I mean, how did you actually start your research on the connection between music and movement? What what did that sort of a starting point come from? Well, so I've always been dancing every since I was a little girl. And then in college, I ended up double majoring in dance and neuroscience. So it was really on the dance floor that I'm kind of learning to love to be embodied and really learning the connection between the body and brain on the dance floor. And so starting to deeply pursue the study of neuroscience and college and then eventually went on to get my PhD in neuroscience. And when I started my lab a few years ago, I said, well, I want to study the effects of dance on the brain and the impact that dance and arts in general and music. How it impacts the brain and all these positive ways looking at it from behavior and also from the physiological piece of it. I mean, one in eight of us suffer from sort of mental health issues in this lifetime. I mean, how do you feel, you know, music, I guess, and movement combined give us quite a healing tool, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. So I that's exactly what we do and what we study and the importance of these what we call non-pharmacological interventions, mind body movement practices for healing at the level of the mind, at the level of the brain and at the level of the body. And so they're really powerful. And in some of our most recent studies, well, actually, when you look at things like antidepressants, anti-anxiolytics and things like that, these pharmaceuticals that are prescribed for depression for anxiety, they actually have small to moderate effect sizes. So a smaller moderate effect on decreasing depression, decreasing anxiety. But when you look at dance, when you look at music and movement, we actually see large effect sizes. So in essence, it's more powerful than some of these medications can be. And particularly maybe paired together. And so we're really interested in seeing how these practices can be used as healing tools because we know that sometimes these medications don't work in up to 70% of the population. They are often come with side effects. And in the example of like stimulants for ADHD are often not available. I definitely know which medicine I'd rather take, actually, if I was going to go down that road. I think the medicine of the club and the dance floor, definitely much, much more powerful from what I was hearing in the documentary. I mean, I have no idea that once we become, well, we are the only creatures on planet Earth that are actually managed to kind of fire on neurons in time with the beat of the music, which I couldn't really quite go over, actually, when I heard that it's quite fascinating to hear that. And how obviously our whole kind of social network of the brain sort of starts to light up when that happens. Can you focus three that process? Sure. And I'll be talking about this to my talk tomorrow. But when we start to listen to music, what ends up happening? So when you think about music, the sound waves enter our auditory system and starts to stimulate our cortex or auditory cortex, which is really right under the ear. It's called our temple lobe. And so the music, the oscillations of the music actually start to entrain the oscillations of the brain. They operate kind of in the same fashion. And so what ends up happening because these auditory courtesies are connected to motor courtesies, we can start to train the sounds of the music with the movement of our body. And that's when we hear something with groove with rhythm with beat. We want to physically move, kind of match the tones, the rhythms of that music. I mean, I saw that obviously from the live experiment that was featured in the documentary when you had the dancer with the wet cap on. He was actually, you know, being tracked in terms of these different cables that were coming out of my cap. It all looked a little bit like ET, to be honest. And I was just like, I didn't expect to see like a live experiment and all the kind of waves that were being transferred onto the computer. I mean, is that something that you personally tried yourself? Oh, yeah, I've had it on many, many times and performed with the cap in our recent performance of a piphany machine, which was featured in the New York Times. We were excited about it. And so we've been using these eG caps as artistic performance pieces to actually in live time display our neural oscillations as they emerge from the moving brain. And so, you know, in neuroscience, it's pretty new that we can actually study the moving brain. And I'm one of the, I guess, only neuroscientists studying the moving brain and how we can really look at what's going on in the natural state of things. Because often these studies have been done in stillness or an isolation where someone says in a scanner, you're laying down, maybe pressing buttons of sorts, but that's not really how the human brain operates. It operates in social connection and in movement experiences. So you haven't actually taken that wet cap into the club yet. Yes, yes, it's kind of a fantasy of mine to have everybody kept up and jumping together. I can make that happen, Julia. She'll be good and a beat them, baby, nice as a vision board for the future. I mean, why a wet cap, why can't it be just a normal, that's the right thing. Yeah, so you can do EEG or electron cell biography with as a dry system, but in order to capture the moving mind, the moving brain, we really need to have the gel or the electrode gel, which essentially helps to amplify the neural signal so we can capture a solid signal and it can be as free from movement artifacts as possible. And so we'll often, and we've done this with professional dancers who are doing, you know, triple quadruple pirouettes, really profound jumps and things. So we have to have an additional netting on the head as well to keep everything still and stable as possible. Interesting. Who came up with that concept? Is that something that you created or is it something that you it's seen other scientists or researchers using? Yeah, so we use a German company called brain vision products, their EEG system, and it's a mobile EEG system. So everything's on the, you know, you can wear it in a backpack when we did a piphany machine. I'm just for kind of aesthetic, costuming purposes. We had it. I had it in a little pocket. And yeah, so it's very mobile and kind of a practical thing so you can move about the space we could go on a hike and do it, for example, or, yeah, anything we've been doing with mothers and children as well. And, you know, the children, of course, running around, playing, dancing with moms, moms with depression. We have a whole line of study for that to help using dance for connect. with moms and their children. So we've done it in a lot of different settings. - Incredible. I mean, you say you've never taken it to the club, but you have taken it to the stage for the-- - I've taken it to the stage many times. - Yeah. We have two performances where we've used it, just in a variety of venues across the state of Virginia. And I've taken it out to Memphis. I have a project with a wonderful organization called Grounded in Memphis. And they're a collective of artists who use art for healing, especially in Memphis, Tennessee, where there's a lot of trauma and violence. And so we've taken it out there and Grounded creates these beautiful artistic installations where we've recorded brain activity during those things. And we even have a study on stone carving. So we've brought the EEG caps out into the community where our group of stone carvers, called Backyard Stone Carvers, are carving out in the community. So we've done it in a variety of different locations, but not yet the club. But what are the-- I mean, obviously we saw the graph and the lines on it, which I'm no scientist. So in terms of the actual data that you've collected from music and movement being linked and the kind of effects that they have on the brain, how would you describe that? - Sure. So when we look at this EEG signal, it's a lot of squiggly lines, right? And we're collecting data from all around the brain. We have a 64-electrode cap, so there's 64 different locations on the skull around the brain where we're collecting data from. And when you look at the squiggly signal, what you can do, and essentially it's the same thing you do with music, is you use a process called Fast Fourier transform to decompose the signal. And then we can look at waveforms like delta, like theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. And so the brain operates in these different types of oscillations. You can imagine when we're falling asleep, deep sleep, those are more delta waves. So they're really slow waves, one to four hertz waveform with large amplitudes. And then as we get into more kind of meditative states, we see alpha, which is an eight to 12 hertz. That essentially when you close the eyes and go deep internal into meditation, we see alpha become very prominent. And then more like our focus, concentration states, beta, and even gamma, where these fast oscillations, the brain is really focused. It's concentrating problem solving and things like that. And so depending on, you know, the dance form, you know, if you're doing a buto like dance, and there have just been a new study published from my collaborative Rockefeller University, Constantina Theofanapalu, and they're showing these slow delta waves that emerge during a buto like dance, very slow, meditative. I don't know, have you ever seen buto? It's almost imperceptible kind of movement, right? Very meditative. But you can imagine that if you're going into a club like last night, right? I was, and everybody's jumping and bouncing and the sympathetic nervous system is activated and we're party mode, the brain is going to operate these higher kind of beta or gamma oscillation states. And so we're kind of working now to explore what happens and what happens during the choreographic process when a dancer is learning and remembering movement and then performing, and then also what happens when the brain is, when the human is improvising, right? What's happening during improvisational states? So these are all things we're kind of very curious about and starting to unravel. So which, you know, which waves do you see predominantly rule the mind when you're in an improvised day? Obviously, when you're not performing, when you're in a club. Yeah, so one of the things that we've seen with kind of our mother child studies, what we do, we look at what's called interbrain synchrony, and this is why I'm very interested in kind of club dance, right, because everybody's there, they're synchronizing. In this idea with our mother child dance, especially for moms with depression, who with depression, you know, you get into these very internal states. It's maybe hard to focus on the external environment in the case of having child, hard to focus on the child. So we're using dance as a way to help connect and synchronize the brains between mom and child. And what we're seeing there is that, especially in this alpha wave activity, that during play, you know, after a whole dance intervention, when mom and child are connecting through play, through conversation, through other interactive experiences, we see that the mother and child are in these more, the calm states we see increases in parental child relationships. So mom's saying that she's having more of a positive relationship with her child. So at the behavioral level, we see it and then at the brain, especially in these alpha states, that's kind of one of our first findings from that study. And that these things seem to be related. And interestingly in that, we're also partnering with a neuroimminologist, Dr. Georgia Hodas Evrogenia Tech. And we've seen too that the immune system actually goes from a more pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory state. So this dance is helping to affect the body in the immune system, as well as this neural synchrony and decreased depression levels, again, with this large effect size, and help the mother and child bonding. In the dance club, I would imagine you that we're gonna start to see some of this neural synchrony. Basically, when you get that sense, oh, I'm on the same wavelength as that person, right? Even now, as we're speaking, we're having this conversation, our interbrained synchrony starts to enhance. Our neural oscillations start to sync up because that's how we understand one another. And so, yes, I'm very excited to explore this on the dance floor in the clubs. The clubbing cure's inflammation, you had it at first. I like that. Yeah, I think that could be a thing. Yeah, especially, well, I think often you think, oh, I don't feel like going out tonight. I'm exhausted, I just couldn't possibly stay out late and have a big night. But it's like, actually, sometimes, well, always in fact, not sometimes when I go out, when I'm thinking naked, and I really don't wanna go, I come back, so energized. In fact, so much so that I can often, I can't get to sleep. I've been to maybe like a five rhythms workshop, which I do, you know, not that frequently, but when I do do, I wake up the next day, just feeling absolutely amazing. And that exhaustion, that flatness from a busy day or a busy week of work is completely dissipated. And so, when are we taking it into the club then? When is this happening? Yeah, I don't know, let's plan it, let's do it. I think we're gonna do any other experiments. Yeah, maybe, yeah, back into the season could be a bit of time to prepare how many wet caps have you got? Yeah, well, let's see, I have about 10. We need more, we need a sponsor. Incredible, that sounds like a really exciting experiment. And one I'd love to be part of, in terms of, you know, which of those waves are the most healing ones? I mean, are Delta the main ones that kind of rule the mind or, you know, persuade it to move into a frequency that kind of relaxes it or calms it or resets it? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think each of these brain waves serve a purpose, you know, we need them equally. And, you know, there's always this idea right of, when we think about sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic being our rest and digest, sympathetic being our fight-flight freeze system. You know, when I'm teaching yoga and movement, we really talk about the idea that both of these systems are necessary, and what we're working towards in any of these movement and music practices is to cultivate plasticity between the two, flexibility between the two systems. So, our days can be very, very stressful. We go nine to five or more, and then at the end of the day, we want to be able to come home and rest. But often, right, it's very challenging to do that. We get into sympathetic nervous system the entire day, and then we want to be able to come home and maybe listen to music, meditate, exercise, whatever it might be, and then come into more of a parasympathetic state or rest state. And so, you know, I think the idea that we can kind of flexibly navigate between these neural states is really important. So, sometimes we do want to be in our beta gamma state, so we need to be focused, we need to be concentrated, maybe we're studying, taking the exam, maybe wanting to get up and go out to the club, right? Have some social time. So, that's going to be more of our fast-paced neural oscillations. But then we want to come home, we want to rest, we want to relax, and fall into states of deep sleep very easily. And so, we just, we need to be able to cultivate the flexibility between these systems, which music and movement help us with. Is it possible to actively, you know, bring one of those waves into fruition? Can we actually activate one of those? If you said, "Okay, I really want to be in my more gamma state of play today, is that a possible way to go about doing that?" - Yeah, so the easiest one to get into is alpha. And that's because we can cultivate that brain state by closing our eyes, going deep internal. We could both lead a meditative practice whereby we would really see the alpha waves come on board for really experienced meditators. They can snap into alpha states. It's really amazing. I've worked with some experienced meditators and all of a sudden they just close their eyes and then boom, whereas some individuals, you know, they take some time. Now really experienced meditators and monks who have practiced for years, they can cultivate gamma states. And so gamma is an oscillation that's considered around, say, from 35 hertz and up. And it's considered what's called the glue of consciousness. So it's what neuroscientists think is the neural state that actually creates our conscious experience. So, you know, we experience consciousness. as one continual whole, but of course we're vision and hearing. All of these things are coming to the brain in unique and independent ways. Touch, for example, thought processes, emotional aspects, but yet we experience consciousness as one continuous phenomenon. And so gamma is really a kind of this heightened state of conscious experience. And this is why, you know, it's really experienced meditators who are having the isomadi kind of experiences where there's altered states of consciousness. They can bring this on really quickly as well through meditation. So these these states can be cultivated. But yeah, if we were to do it right now, then alpha, we could bring ourselves into alpha. Okay. Most easily. Let's go. I have the caps right here. So let's do it too, you're seriously doing a demo this afternoon. Okay. I'd actually like to be your guinea pig at some point if I could throw my hat or my cap into the race. Be quiet for it at some point. Let's do that. In terms of the FFT and how we use that to break down complex sound, can you sort of give us a bit of insight into that? Sure. So essentially when you look at this signal, you know, which which looks like a lot of swiggly waves. So all of these waveforms are together and we essentially have to break them apart and we use vest for a transform to do that. And then it helps us to look at each of the unique signals. Again, the delta theta alpha beta gamma and we can look at their power, which is essentially the amplitude of these waveforms. We can look at their phase that is kind of the curvature of these waves. And then when we look at them together, or even between two people, we can see okay now is the power relating, is the phase relating. It's called coherence. Do they have power coherence, phase coherence or power phase coherence? And so we use it to essentially tap into these neural substrates. What's going on? Is there more alpha? Is there more theta? Theta beta ratio and things like that. And so all of these kind of different brain states have been related to different behaviors. And even some of them like midline theta, for example, high midline theta being like a hallmark or a biomarker of depression and things like that. And so we look for some of these kind of states of a neural states of being and then see how they relate to behavior. I guess it's a bit of like a which came first, the chicken or the eggs that you can like actually identify that somebody is feeling depressed due to the different types of waves that are going on in their brain, or before you go okay, this is the kind of modality or the setting, well, the wave that we're going to put you into to make you feel a certain way. Yeah. And that's the idea to have kind of these neural biomarkers that are more predictive of psychological states. Because sometimes it's difficult with self-report. It's challenging. And so to really understand what's happening in the brain. And to see then, if okay, we induce, have a music intervention, have a dance movement intervention, then can we alter these neural states as well? I've heard it called that rapport a dance music intervention. I can't be the name of a new night. I mean, I've heard of interventions on this island for sure, but none of that nature. Maybe that is the future for sure. And this idea, I was quite intrigued that, you know, when a DJ is like teasing a track in their set and they're, you know, playing little snippets of it and then they fade any other track in and then they, you know, slip it back in again. And then you can kind of hear something coming in. And then there's a sense of expectations starts to build, which is obviously a classic thing that good DJs do. But when that actual feeling of expectation isn't satisfied in the mind, I was looking at one of the things that were mentioned in the documentary about, you know, when the expectations starts to happen but is not delivered upon, does something very strange to the head? Is that true? Yeah. So, you know, when we look at the reward prediction, kind of literature, what you see is that dopamine is very prominent. And so when we get an anticipated reward, as I was saying in the documentary, that dopamine becomes available to the brain. And so we find this is a pleasurable rewarding experience. For example, if we're, you know, hungry and we're looking towards this really delicious pizza, you know, we smell it, we maybe see it being made and then it finally gets delivered to our table and we consume it, you know, it's those moments of that we get that reward, right? It's experience is pleasurable. And so dopamine is a huge part of those sensations, those pleasurable sensations. So, but when we don't when we don't have that meant maybe, you know, the pizza falls off the table or we don't get it for whatever reason, then we have kind of a decrease those neurons, those dopamine neurons actually show a decrease in firing. And so then, you know, and then we have, oh, like that, that moment of, oh, we didn't get what we wanted. And so, you know, it doesn't feel very good. But yeah, I mean, in terms of music and being on the dance floor, studies have shown and Dr. Daniel Levison, he did a lot of work in the space of the neurochemistry of music and finding that there's a whole kind of milieu of chemicals that happen in the brain, including increases in dopamine and serotonin, oxytocin and things like that. And so, yeah, it's a really pleasurable state for the brain. I think that has definitely happened to me quite a few times when you when you think something's coming in and it definitely is, but then it just never happens and then as a feeling of like real like, let down. But yeah, where did that go? Yeah, but I didn't realize that I could actually decrease the dopamine that you were experiencing. Yeah, that's right. And what I was noticing even last night, right, is that like, then my, my movements too kind of slow down, like, oh, I didn't get what I was anticipating or, you know, that rewarding nature of sound wasn't met. And so, it plays into the movement experience too. So, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thing to think about is that the DJ is really playing with the neuroplasticity of all of these different humans, you know, and really the DJ has that power to bring the people up, bring them down, alter their mood states through neurochemistry. Quite a quite well. I mean, there was obviously a song "God is a DJ" but oh, slightly sunny over the top, but yeah, you know, consider C. There was a lot of power and that can be had from from understanding, I think, the, you know, the neuroscience, but behind music and the way that, you know, the interplay between people when they're on the dance floor is a very special thing. And that's obviously why we do, you know, get quite addicted, I think, to going out. Mm-hmm. Indeed, yeah. And do you think certain types of music really affect the brain? And if I went out and listened to techno all night and, you know, would I come home feeling a different way to, you know, maybe if I went out and listened to, I don't know, like, handbag, happy house or disco. Yeah, yeah, I, you know, I'm, again, like, this is something that I was thinking about in for my talk tomorrow. And I think it's really like playing with the upstates or downstates, the sympathetic or the parasympathetic. And so if we listen to something like Debussy's, like, Claire DeLune, then it's this, this rhythmic lullaby soft sweet that can bring us down into the more kind of slow neural oscillations, calming effect. But then if we go out to a club and experience, you know, some of our favorite techno house music, then we're going to be more in these upstates, sympathetic activity is going to be heightened. And so, yeah, I think there are differential effects of music based on kind of how they're interacting with their nervous system. What, what is it that you prefer to go out and dance to? What, what makes you feel the best? Yeah, well, I, I love going out to the club. I have, I mean, last night was the first time I went on about over a decade. So yeah, but still got it. So yeah, I mean, you know, I grew up in New Jersey and so we would go down AC and go to the clubs there. And I just, you know, I love kind of that, that 90's 2005. But of course, that's when I was going out. So yeah, what happened, Julia? I had children. Yeah. And you forgot to put your sparkly cat suit on. Which is beautiful, by the way, I love it. And let's talk about haptic feedback. I'm just, just don't know why I picked up on this in the documentary, but I just, I would love you to maybe give us a little bit more background on that. Sure. Yeah, I was, I was interested. I, I realized I had brought that up in the documentary. And yeah, of course, in dance haptic feedback is a huge thing. And so as dancers, we're always like grounding with the floor, rolling around on the floor and really experiencing embodiment through touch, whether that be with the floor itself or with other human beings. And so in the dance club, you know, your sandwich step between other people, not a sweaty ones that you probably don't want to be so much stuff that gets this. Yeah. So, but, but, you know, in any case, you're feeling the other bodies move around you, you're feeling their touch, their sensation, the vibration. Even that, that vibration, I was experiencing it last night, like feeling it in my chest, the vibration from the music. And so, by experiencing touch through kind of the other humans around you and feeling their movements, you know, you become synchronous with them. You might start doing similar movements. I give the example of fist pumping or jumping up and down or synchronizing to kind of a side wave or whatever it might be. So, it's that idea of using touch to provide feedback to your own nervous system. Yeah. Nice. I think, you know, you don't think about the intricacies of what's actually happening on a night. out sometimes but that's why I just loved watching that documentary so much because yeah obviously that's something I do on a fairly frequent basis living on a night and night this but you never really I suppose go home as that analysing the you know the great depths of the vibrational experience and all the frequencies and it is a it is a fascinating thing. Do you know anything about like the four three two hertz kind of music have you ever explored anything to do with that? I was kind of looking into this a little bit about some of these oscillations that you know like binaural beats for example and really using these particular frequency sounds to entrain the brain like the alpha or theta kind of beats. The four three two in particular I'm not positive about but yeah I mean people are very intrigued about this idea of can we use neural oscill or musical oscillations to then entrain the brain which makes a lot of sense you know and especially even in kind of this meditative walk experience when you already through the walking process get the brain into theta states can you know I was thinking about like can you drive it more by adding musical rhythms that are kind of in these theta oscillations as well. So yeah it's kind of a new bit of science that's being explored but you know I understand that in the electronic dance music space that these beats and frequencies are being used very intentionally to kind of cultivate different mood states at least. Why would you want to entrain the brain what is it what's the positive effect of that? So exactly you know we've been talking about this idea that we have alpha we have our beta gamma states where you know once you cultivate those states in the brain they induce particular mood states so even we were doing some breathing practices earlier right and the brain gets into very these like slow oscillatory states. So if you cultivate that you can cultivate that through a musical experience then the mood states will subsequently come on board. So you can kind of enhance or alter the psychological state of the the human by utilizing musical entrainment processes. So do you actually work with clients you know who come to you with you know depression or anxiety or stress and what are your kind of personal stories if you can share them of maybe success or kind of change making in that way. Yeah so you know I definitely work more in the research space than the clinical space though you know by teaching yoga and things like that I've had some of those kind of experiences and it's interesting as a research scientist because you know I'm there setting up the EEG cap and kind of working on the science and of things but I'm also a dancer and so and and hosting a research experience that is at the same time a dance movement experience and so often people do end up having emotional releases through the somatic practices that we're investigating and so in those moments when that happens I need to step into my my dancer somatic practitioner role to hold space for individuals which definitely happens and it was especially prominent in our mother child study because you know sometimes the child be having a tantrum or just wouldn't want to kind of adhere to what we you know what we had asked of mom and kiddo and so the mothers would often have you know emotional responses to this and then in the dance program as well just seeing them interact with their their children and afterwards they may have a kind of an emotional response from that and so it's pretty powerful but challenging to kind of hold both of those spaces in the research design yeah what what's the next kind of you know agenda that you have in terms of what are you working what's the next piece of research that you want to undertake obviously we know about the clubs in Ibiza we're going to do that yeah that's happening for sure but yeah we we were awarded the inaugural Renee Fleming or Arts Investigator award and for a study actually on DJing for young adults with ADHD and so we're using DJing as an intervention wow yeah to to look at how that kind of practice can help young adults with ADHD help to tune their attention and focus improve their mood help with their balance and coordination and just improve kind of overall decreased symptoms of ADHD and so this is happening in the fall and we're partnering with Virginia Tech Digging in the Crates which are hip hop studies program there at Virginia Tech and yeah we're very excited about it and so you know Alpha Theta has been kind of amazing in this whole process of you know with this documentary and starting to get into the DJing space and yeah we're just so grateful do you think that just helps young adults or just people in general yeah I think it could help people in general for sure we're starting with young adults because there is kind of this space when these young people are coming into the the university scene where they're either getting a first diagnosis of ADHD or all of a sudden they're on their own they've been diagnosed from kind of a younger age but now they're meeting additional challenges of the stressful like of academia of university and so you know we're seeing if we can utilize these interventions to help just improve their their lifestyle and and how they're living in their daily life and also because you know when we think about ADHD medications stimulants like Ritalin for example they work kind of in eight to 12 hour time space so it's an acute kind of effect and often a lot of individuals with ADHD report that you know they they they take the the pills in the morning and the effects are kind of wearing off by the end of the day they might come into a lull and often some of these medications I had mentioned before they're in they're they they're not available they they're in low supply actually in America right now and so it can be hard to get them or that the those individuals actually have to say okay well take it on on these days only because you know they don't have enough and so it's just necessary to have these other healthy approaches to to helping people to live and succeed what are your thoughts on you know the use of music as an alternative perhaps to the Ritalin I mean how do you feel about the drugs that are being offered to people with ADHD in terms of tackling that particular situation yeah I mean I'm all for pharmacology and so you know I think that probably the best bet is to partner the pharmacology with some of these non pharmacological interventions such that you know kind of the idea of we know from the clinical research that partnering the pharmacology with therapy is the best approach and we see the best outcomes from that and why right like taking the medication allows the brain to kind of open up these neuroplastic processes but then when you've got the therapy or music or any of these things that are enhancing the neuroplastic process which is essentially what we're doing through music and movement is enhancing neuroplasticity then you're gonna see added benefits so yeah I think it's a great kind of alternative approach and one that needs to be studied amazing well I'm intrigued to hear the data from your findings when we hopefully next meet yeah and they're not too distant future but yeah that's really utterly fascinating and really the work that you're doing and it's an absolutely pleasure to have you here on our Magic White Island for this episode yes thank you for having me thank you yeah