Research Reels: Music and Cognition

Welcome to BBS Mindful Minutes, a podcast where we sit down with BBS students and faculty to discuss all things research, student life, career tips, and mental health. Today we are joined with Dr. Yuni Lee, an assistant professor and director for the Speech, Language, and Music SLAM Lab. Along with their fascinating research on music and neuroscience, Dr. Lee and his SLAM Lab team have developed clinical treatments such as rhythm therapy for patients with motor and speech disorders. It all started with Dr. Lee's passion and love for music. Enjoy this research reel and let's get started. So just to kind of start off, what's the main theme and goal of your research? Tell us a little bit about that. You know, both language and music are the two most unique traits of humans that may be completely lacking in other animal species. Even if we we know that some of them actually have some vocal repertoires and you know will sound like a you know they're singing, but they don't really have a level of sophistication in both music and language system like we do. Okay, now the fundamental question in terms of their relationship is whether music serves as an evolutionary and sister for language, in other words whether music comes first, right? Or conversely whether music is a mere byproduct of language with no survival significance whatsoever. So there's famous quote by a Harvard professor named Steve Pinker. He said music is just a you know cheese keg of language, right? That's his view, right? But whether you believe or not. Now, so these questions kind of resonate with some ongoing debates in the cognitive neuroscience field. So for example, there's a really dominant theory, very influential theory, you know, first proposed by MIT linguist named Noam Chomsky. He still, you know, is still very actively doing active, you know, all kind of things. Anyway, so he proposed that there's very highly specialized neuroanatomical systems dedicated to language faculty. Now, there's another competing theory. There's a kind of different theory that argues for a co-opted neural systems that are shared between music and language. So some elements of a music and language can be mediated by that shared neural resources. Now, my research has been testing the latter, the competing theory, by demonstrating both behavioral and neural connections between music and language. So for example, in one of my studies, you know, we can predict whether kids actually doing a good job on some language comprehension tasks that involves complex, you know, grammar processing by simply measuring their rhythm skills. Even after you consider their other demographic factors or, you know, their working memory event. So yeah, so for this, I take an interdisciplinary approach that involves neuroimaging such as fMRI or EEG. So those are my main arsenals. But also we use neural stimulation and the genotyping and the behavioral psychophysics. So yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'll try to understand neural and behavioral connections between music and language with the goal of developing some music-based intervention protocol for some language disorders or some neurological disorders such as stroke, pregnancy disease, Alzheimer's disease, so forth. Wow, so you're basically trying to kind of move towards how this can be applied to a treatment setting in terms of kind of a recovery from a neuronal injury? Yeah, exactly. So my research kind of has both aspects. So the goal is to translate the basic auditory neuroscience into clinical practice for, you know, individuals with language disorders. That's what we do in the lab. Wow, that's really fascinating. And that leads me to another question. So kind of based on the research that you do in your lab and kind of the general ideas within the field, what happens to our brain when we listen and play music? So, okay, so let me give you a simple, easy example. So you've probably been to some concert, right? So, you know, when you go to concert, a bunch of people actually bobbing their head or, right, tapping their toes, all in synchrony with the rhythms, right? What that means is music activates your motor system. Now, it is even true, even if you don't move your body or, you know, your motor cortex still is reacting to the external sound of music. Your brain just cannot help activating the sensory motor system. Okay, so with that, people use music as a therapeutic tool for practice in spaces, right? So they have trouble moving. You know, they show a lot of tremor, but if we play some music or even simple metronome beat, they can walk better. They stop their tremor here. So music has that powerful influence on sensory motor system. Now, there are a lot of other things that music also does. So another very powerful effect is called the nostalgia effect. Now, you probably have this moment when you, you know, turn on the radio station and the very familiar tunes coming out of radio station that you use to listen to growing up, right? And then that brings back all your memory, that time, right? Your high school period and all that, you know, associated with that music. So it's got very powerful nostalgia effect. So people use this music that is nostalgia effect to help out patients with Alzheimer's disease. And people actually compile, you know, individualized favorite music for different Alzheimer patients. So when they listen to the all-time favorite music, the familiar tunes, those Alzheimer patients, their memory comes back and they begin to recognize their family members and they, they can actually respond to yes/no questions rather quickly and accurately. Okay. So we still are trying to figure out how all the, those things are happening, right? Oh, that big phenomenon. We're still on the way, right? A lot to say about it, but there's another very powerful effect. And in general, when you listen to music, right, when you play music, I mean, it makes you feel better. Why? Because music, for some reason, it turns on the system called the reward system that is located the deeper layer of the brain, which is called the basal ganglia. And it all coincided with the sensory motor system, by the way. And there's this key neurotransmitter called the dopamine. I'm sure you heard about dopamine, right? When you listen to your favorite songs or you play your favorite tunes, you have this a shot of dopamine coming out of the reward system. So, you know, dopamine works for all different kind of things. But one of the things that dopamine does is like an addictive, like, you know, addiction, right? So it works exactly the same way, for any type of addiction, right? Whether it is, you know, a drug or, you know, food or some kind of, you know, video games, gambling. But for some reason, music also, you know, turns on the addiction system. That's why, you know, you always like to listen to music. I mean, having said this, there's some small population who don't like to listen to music, you know, who really are not interested in listening to music. It's called the music and hitonia, you know, we don't have to go deeper into it. But in general, you know, we always listen to music because music makes you happy, especially the music you like. Doesn't matter different genre, whatever genre, whatever music you like, that music actually works well for you. Well, that's really fascinating. I guess I never considered how many ways that music could affect our brain from motor output to emotional to memory to reward systems. And all of those, I bet, are such good targets to develop therapeutics. So I know that one of the therapeutics that you've been researching and trying to implicate is rhythm therapy. So tell me a little bit about what rhythm therapy is, what type of patients that could help and what are those, what does it look like in a clinical setting? Okay, so I mentioned that the music activates the sensory motor network, right? Now, and the sensory motor network also serves for connection between music and language. Now, there's this medical term called aphasia, which refers to the impaired speech and language abilities. It's typically due to stroke, right? You have a stroke, your blood vessel ruptures and where you got clocked in there, and you have this stroke. If that happens in your left of frontal temporal system, and then you have a permanent damage to your language system, sometimes people acquire this aphasia through like gunshot wound, or any like a TBI traumatic brain injury too. So, you know, so you can get acquired through different ideologies. Anyhow, when you have that aphasia, you have trouble speaking, you sometimes also have understanding. Now, there is this fascinating phenomenon that was actually first documented 200 years ago by a German neurologist. So, people who have aphasia, they have trouble speaking, but if we ask them to sing, they can sing lyrics. I, you know, heard about it, I read about it in the textbook, until actually I first started working with those patients during my post-op period, and, you know, during my, you know, faculty career period. So, we used to believe that it could be a melody that actually enables this speech recovery. So, that's why in the 70s, there is this speech therapy protocol called melodic intonation therapy, or people commonly call it MIT. By the way, don't get confused between like school in Boston, right? This is a different thing, MIT. So, you know, when we do this MIT, we usually have patients also tap along, okay? They're seeing it, they tap along with their intact kind of undamaged left side of the arm. Usually, their right side is paralyzed because of damage to the left side of the brain, and they're all always controllarily connected. And we used to believe that this rhythm tapping is kind of secondary to melody singing, but these days, you know, recent studies actually suggesting, and they're providing compelling evidence that rhythm alone is sufficient. You can actually improve someone's speech fluency by rhythm alone, rhythm therapy, and their study actually comparing rhythm therapy to melodic intonation therapy or singing, right? So, I was very inspired by that because I haven't known thinking about suspecting. It may not be melody, it could be rhythm. So, I devised this new rhythm therapy protocol where you gradually induce this groove, right? The rhythm, the entrainment in your head, we typically call it groove. And with that groove, patients can actually get the word out without involving like melodic, you know, ups and downs. And then we've been trying this with non-fluorinophage patients through some NIH fundings. So, the way this rhythm therapy works is by driving some brain plasticity in the shared part of the sensory motor system between music and language. And then that would actually, in turn, give rise to language improvement after they practice on this. So, you know, that's how it works for rhythm therapy. And this, by the way, this involves actual tapping and the tapping and speaking, and we develop an ad for this. And we're actually giving this, issuing this tablet PC installed with app to patients so they can actually do it at home. They don't have to come to the clinic every single day. They can do it at home. So, it was actually developed before the pandemic. Ironically, these days, everything is on base pretty much, right? You can do anything at home. So, it kind of works out. But, you know, because of the pandemic, we had difficulty recruiting some patients. So, now we're in a full swing to carry out this project. Well, that is really, really fascinating that music can drive that neuroplasticity in the shared sensory motor areas, that rhythm and language share. How are the clinical outcomes coming for the people in this project? Are they noticing vast improvements in language skills based on the rhythm therapy? Yeah, exactly. So, that's something that I wanted to show you if I can actually show you some video clip. I'd be happy to show you that later on outside of this meeting. Now, we tested this one patient, you know, whose nickname was actually Time Woman. And I didn't know why she's calling. She goes by Time Woman. But, turns out, she can only say one word Time. So, every time we meet, I mean, I still remember the first day I met with her, she was trying to introduce herself by using only one single word Time. So, instead of saying my name is Debbie, her name is Debbie, she said Time, Time, Time, Time. And I was able to guess, okay, she's really attempting to introduce herself because the process of everything resembles my name is Debbie. So, that was the first day. And then, I suggested, why don't we sing together? So, I asked her and her daughter, what is your mom's favorite song? She was a 61 years old back then, but she was very into this 70s disco, early 80s, like, you know, Abba, Bee Gees, I don't know if you know them. Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, so, you know, she's like, she loves dancing queen kind of stuff. But then they chose this baller called You Are My Sunshine. I don't know if you know that tune. It goes like You Are My Sunshine. You probably know this song, right? Yeah, of course, of course. So, yeah, we were singing this together and sure enough, she was singing beautifully. Wow. And then she actually towards the end, she cried because she didn't know her hidden potential. And then, you know, her family and her, she was very engaged and she was eager to receive the therapy. So, she was our very first patient. And towards the end, I mean, her improvement was, I mean, the difference was day and night. It was just significant improvement. We taught her, you know, several difference, a set of different phrases and sentences. She mastered them all. She got the hang of them all. And we also saw the brain plasticity in the right side of the frontal temporal loom. That is actually the counterpart, the homo part of the left side. So, the tendency of a brain is to develop some kind of compensatory system by utilizing some unused part of the brain. So, language is actually predominantly utilized by left side, left frontal temporal, but it's a very natural behavior that as we get older, the right side of the brain, the frontal temporal system, actually they come in to help out, right? Because as we get older, we go through all kind of cognitive sensory declines. So, left side alone, you know, they have a hard time actually dealing with very complex language information. The right side comes in. But the more dramatic case is when they actually have damage to the original site, so that it's no longer available, the brain has a tendency to utilize the other part of the brain. So, it's true for people with deaf and blind, right? When they go deaf, then their hearing gets better, their tactile gets better, and the vice versa, right? So, we saw the brain plasticity on the right side of her brain. But again, that was from one participant, one patient. So, now we've been, you know, scaling up and then we've been trying to recruit more patients. And then we want to establish whether that was really the case, right? Yeah. Wow, that's an, that was an incredibly heartwarming story. And it's so good to know that this research is actually impacting the lives of patients and helping them recover from their pain. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's just very touching. I mean, I remember, like, at one more, you know, thing, the last day was really touching. I mean, her family members, daughter came to me and my research team saying, Dr. Lee, we thank you so much. I actually, we dropped the ball for my mom. We never expect that she was going to speak something except for time, right? But then they were so encouraged. And then they decide to enroll her mom, Debbie, in some, you know, clinics, right, speech clinics. So, you know, so we, you know, I still remember what they told me is like, Dr. Lee, you gave me the foundation of hope. I never, I mean, you know, we did this for research. And you know, that was the kind of, you know, superficial goal, if you will. But then actually, when you heard that from patient and their, their family members, it meant a lot to me. Yeah. Yeah, that story is like that, that make research so meaningful. And I'm sure that given the kind of, from what I'm hearing, multifaceted and multi, multi-targeted ways that music can provide therapeutic treatment for patients, are there other projects in your lab that you guys are currently working on to target music therapy in other ways that are outside therapy? So tell us a little bit more about some of the projects that you're working on in your lab. I mentioned that we developed this app, rhythm tapping app for rhythm therapy app for Alphasia. But more recently, we developed another app that combines music with specific frequency called the binaural beats. I don't know if you heard about it. No, tell me a little bit about it. Yeah, it's kind of trendy among youngsters. I mean, if you go to YouTube and, you know, type in keyword binaural beats, you'll see a bunch of video clips there, like thousands of tens of thousands of video clips. I'm sure you heard about ASMR. Definitely ASMR. Yeah, right. So, you know, low in ASMR, binaural beats are kind of popular amongst them, you know, your generation, right, the youngsters and teenagers and college students. Now, the way binaural beat works is a very simple principle, actually. You have this single sinusoidal frequency. Now, you play those, so one of them to the left side of the ear, the other right side of the ear. Now, they're slightly mismatched in terms of their frequency. So, for example, you play 400 frequency to the right side of the ear and full 40 hertz to the left side of the ear. Now, what happens is your brain gets confused. Wait a second. Why am I receiving slightly mismatched tones? And the way the brain compromise that is by generating a third frequency, that corresponds to the difference. The brain takes the difference and then generate a new, kind of denover sound inside of your head, right? So, there's just a third frequency. And it turns out that frequency, new frequency, like a 40 hertz. So, you can actually, an engineer, you can manipulate however different frequency, right? So, 40 hertz is in the gamma range. Now, 40 hertz these days is really popular because one MIT group a couple of years ago showed that when mouse was exposed to this 40 hertz flickling light, they started with light. For one hour for seven days, then they showed improved like memory performance, but also when they sacrifice a mouse, you know, there's a reduction of amyloid and, you know, all kind of, you know, marker. And also when mouse has Alzheimer, it's Alzheimer model mouse, right, kind of genetic, you know, manipulation. Their gamma was very funky, like it's a very, you know, idiosyncratic gamma profile. But after they exposed to this 40 hertz beat for seven days, it completely restored. Wow. And after that, they replicated findings with the sound and/or these days the audio visual and a bunch of people actually come in, jump in. And I, you know, I know that there's some clinical trial ongoing with the human participants. Now, so that's beta gamma frequency. Now, we are more interested in beta frequency. Why? Because beta has been implicated in a lot of sensory motor studies, sensory motor processing. And as I told you, right, sensory motor network is really playing a key role in connecting between music and language. So we've been using this beta frequency vinyl beat. And that is actually combined with music, unbeknown to participants. So actually last year, we recruited hundreds of UTD undergrads, and then they were enrolled to either vinyl arm or like control arm, right? And then they performed language task. And then participants who were enrolled in vinyl beat arm, they actually showed better performance in language comprehension than other control group. And then we also did the EEG recording. And EEG recordings show the reduction of the burden when they process grammatically very complicated sentences, you know, compared to control group. And there's increased functional connectivity between frontal and the temporal and left and right side. So we are actually currently writing up a manuscript and we're about to submit, you know, a couple of papers actually. Now, leveraging that data, we're actually right now is ongoing. We're trying to provide this to our several patients. And potentially also other type of dementia called the primary progressive aphasia, whose, who shows actually language impairment, especially grammar. So we developed this app called, this is called a therapy. And then the way it works is actually they can actually pull any kind of music that they like from a third party software, like a Spotify, if they have a Spotify account, within the app, and then they choose those music clips. And then those songs will be actually seamlessly integrated with the vinyl beat. Within the app. And then they listen to it. So it's really, I mean, they do the therapy while they enjoy their favorite listening to favorite music. So we are actually according to in this right now, you know, with Alzheimer patients. Wow. What an enjoyable and fascinating therapeutic method, being able to listen to your favorite music and getting some improvement in some of the cognitive deficits that are kind of hindering your life. That sounds like the best of both worlds. I agree with you. You know, people who are trying to develop this therapeutic regimen, they all recognize the importance of this fun factor. It's not fun. If it's very enduring, if it's boring, then people, so they cannot continue, right? They cease to do this. And then, you know, they forget it and walk away. So everybody who is really into this, this, like digital therapy, where these days it's called digital medicine, their goal is how to make it fun, enjoyable and engaging, right? And I mean, music listening, come on, right? It's something that everybody loves to do. So, but then there is, it's not just the typical music, it's engineered music, because it's combined with a binary beat. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Awesome. That is absolutely incredible. Just kind of as a closing out, what inspired you to study music in the first place? Do you play any instruments? Are there any favorite instruments that you have, any favorite genres that you like? Yeah, it's kind of a long story. So I was a biology major majoring undergrad, but then, I mean, I was always into music. I used to play guitar in a band for many, many years. We had a regular show in some clubs here and there. And so I thought that was going to live as a musician. And then after I graduated, I spent some years in the music industry. I was working as a music director in the commercial TV commercial field, mostly. My daily job was to compose like 30-second background music to like a three-second jingle, right? Like something like da-da-da-da, right? And then ironically, at that time, that experience actually got me into this neuroscience of the music. Because, you know, my daily job was to find out some music that fit well with, you know, the films, right, the visuals, right? Sometimes it's a very laborious, painful job to come up with music that would be perfectly harmonized with those visual scenes, right? You have to either find out existing songs, then you have to deal with all kind of license issues, or you can make it from scratch. So you have to watch this silent film, movies like Thousand Times, and try to come up with the music. Now, at the end of the day, the last day, final presentation day, you have a client sitting on the couch. And then in the studio, we have this gigantic speaker side by side, the TV in the middle, and you play our work, our final work. And it feels almost as if you watched this for the first time. And it gives you goosebumps, right? When there's some music, there's a sound effect, there's, you know, voice actors, script, you know, all kind of integrated with the visuals. And then that gives you a lot of great impressions. And I was like, wow, what is this? And I began to search some, you know, scientific documentations, because I knew how to find out some papers as, you know, biology major undergrad, you know, student before. So whenever I had downtime, you know, I typed in some keywords, and then I found out papers, and I found out groups out there in the world, who actually studied this topic. I thought that was just my daydreaming thing, you know, never exist, but it does. And there are ways of actually studying this. So I thought, wow, man, this is something that I've been daydreaming. But I feel like I found it. So I decided to, you know, go to grad school. It was not an easy decision, by the way. So I, you know, I took a GRE and so forth. And then luckily, I got admitted to Dartmouth College, you know, which is very, you know, prestigious institution. I mean, Dartmouth is known as birthplace of cognitive neuroscience back in the 50s. So I was lucky to actually get hands on mentorship, learn all the valuable skills from eminent scholars in the field, including like a neuroimaging techniques and whatnot. So, so yeah, so that's how I ended up, you know, life is always interesting that you don't know how, how it, where it takes you to and, you know, all those exact journey, you know, that as well. Wow. Well, I think that the world and the patients that you've treated thus far and the patients that you will treat in the future are so glad that you followed that daydream and you followed that hunch because it sounds like you're making a real change and providing a therapeutic that is engaging, fun and clinically relevant. So that's awesome. It was really great speaking with you and hearing about what you guys are doing in the lab. Is there any final thoughts that you have before we kind of wrap it up? Thank you for inviting me and it's been fun to have conversation with you. Awesome. It's been really entertaining to speak with you as well. Thanks for listening to BBS Mindful Minutes. We hope that you enjoyed and feel inspired by Dr. Lee's story and thank you Dr. Lee for sharing your story and the powerful insights of music and cognition. This episode is brought to you by the UTD School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. To listen to more episodes, follow BBS Mindful Minutes wherever you listen to podcasts and stay tuned. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.