The Value of Connection Over a Lifespan, featuring Jennie Gubner, PhD and Yumi Shirai, PhD

Welcome to the Innovations in Aging podcast where we explore the latest in how the next generation of change makers can prepare to meet the needs of our aging world. We are your hosts, John Kevan and Lauren Erdely. Today we are speaking with Dr. Jenny Gupner and Dr. Yumi Chirai. Jenny is a professor at the University of Arizona School of Music, an ethnomusicologist and violinist. Yumi is a professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Department of Family and Community Medicine, a social behavioral scientist and a trained modern dancer. Together they are leading the development of a graduate interdisciplinary program and applied intercultural arts research. In our conversation today we share a lot of great stories and research projects and discussion around the connection between music and touch. We talk a lot about caregivers and their experience working with older adults and the importance of agency of these older adults and a lot of community projects and in their life. Hello Jenny and Yumi, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we get deep into the conversation, tell us a bit about your areas of research and what got you interested in aging and older adults. Hi, I'm Yumi, thank you very much for having us. So my area of research, you know, I have two lines of research related to aging. So I study about caregiver well-being and the factors that impact the caregiver resiliency and how they handle the stress. So that is my area of, you know, research but based on the survey based. But more applying arts, expressible arts, I work with the people with intellectual disabilities and supporting their aging process. And also we do host more applied activities with multiple group, community groups for instance, students and people with intellectual disabilities, you know, residents with artists with disabilities. That's awesome. What gets you into that line? So, you know, my expression is the movement that's my background. And when I came here from Japan to adapt it in the US culture, the movement is one of the ways that I can connect with the community and adapt it into building my community. And it helped a lot to just using that as my, you know, building my identity and also learning others. So that is my passion, why I came into this world. And I think aging and people with disability, particularly who does not have full capacity to communicate verbally, those are the populations that I'm very interested in working with. You know, in a prior podcast, we had talked a little bit about social cultural differences when it looks at the look of aging. So I know we're still doing our intro here, but I would like to swing back around to Japan, US, different perspectives and maybe just hear from you a little bit about how you think aging is perceived differently between the two. Maybe we'll swing back around to that, give Jenny a chance to jump in here. Thanks so much for having us here today. It's exciting to be able to talk about our research and the intersections of our work at arts and aging. I'm an ethnomusicologist, so I study music and culture. And my research background actually is in studying intergenerational music scenes. I spent a lot of my doctoral research years in Buenos Aires studying intergenerational music scenes in bars in Buenos Aires, tango bars. And that work put me in contact with a lot of older musicians who would gather with younger musicians and audience members night after night, playing music together. And I wrote my dissertation looking at why those spaces were so important for community engagement in big cities. And although that work wasn't explicitly about aging, I realized in retrospect that it really was so much about aging and about intergenerational connections and why those are valuable and meaningful. And so when I moved to the States and started teaching, I got interested in thinking about how the arts could be a lens for teaching students about aging and building and fostering intergenerational communities with the support systems that universities can offer. So I built a course about music in dementia, first in Maine and then Indiana, that looked at building personalized music playlists for older adults living with dementia, where I would pair students with older adults in memory care facilities and adult day care centers. And they would work together over the course of the semester to build playlists of the favorite musics of older adults. And then each student would make a film about that experience of engaging with that person. And so I'm a visual ethnographer, which means I like telling stories through film. And I think that those films that we created were very powerful because they both gave students a lens through which to understand how to engage with adults with dementia. But also then there was a product that could be shared out not only with family members and other students, but then for families that gave us permission. Those films became public and they helped sort of ignite and pass on conversations and dialogues about creative aging specifically with adults living with dementia. After that, I spent two years in San Francisco working on a research team in the Geriatrics Division about music and dementia caregiving relationships, where I went into people's homes, probably 20 families. I went through about three visits to 20 different families across the San Francisco area, trying to understand what is the role of music in everyday life, because if we're thinking about how clinical programs can bring more arts into their care packages, first we sort of need to understand what's already there. And so that year was really fascinating being part of a research team with Dr. Trace Allison, who's a physician, and learning how to do both ethnographic work alongside standardized assessment work, so the interdisciplinary research space. And following that, I joined a fellowship program called the Global Brain Health Institute that looks at equity in brain health around the world. And I was a fellow there for six months before coming here to the university. And thanks to that program, I'm now developing a new research project that will have visual ethnographic components, hopefully an interactive website, but looking at creative aging within Latinx Tucson. So we're really trying to think about how can we diversify conversations about creative aging, because a lot of the programs that I have seen in the maybe six, seven years that I've been doing this work tend to culturally sometimes focus on one group of folks. And I think that there's work that can be done that perhaps my background as an ethnomusicologist can be helpful with in diversifying how we can both still tell stories about creative aging and work with older communities to promote dialogue about creative aging. So I think we can have like five podcasts, you know, with each of them covering all these topics. So thank you both for being here and for sharing some of your research. There's a lot of threads to pull in just what the two of you have said. But I feel like maybe an area of overlap that you both mentioned was in particular the area of caregivers and everyday life arts. And so maybe we can just expand on that a little bit as a common thread for us to talk about. And, you know, where do you see arts and creative aging with caregivers merging right now? What's the future of that path? So I particularly support the aging caregivers, as well as the, you know, folks with intellectual disabilities that, you know, Jenny may talk about this, but the life story of the individual and importance of their background when they start caring for the individual as they age. So the arts are the, you know, key parts that how we can capture and deliver and pass that information on when you are no longer able to talk about your background. And so, and also it is exciting, it's personable. And I think the arts has a lot to offer that we haven't done in supporting individual who are aging as well as the caregivers and give them comfort, having that as, you know, sometimes caregiver who has been in a caregiving role for a long time, they believe that no one else can provide the good care for them, their loved ones, right? But if you have that visualized or digitalized life story, or what are the meaningful for them, you know, what are their families? So those personal story can be captured only captured by arts, I think that would be the strength of it. No one would read an individual themselves cannot read at some point. But then if you have a music, if you have a picture of their favorite gathering for the holidays, so those are really important part when you think of aging and supporting caregivers. I think for me, there's a few different ways to think about supporting caregivers that in support of what you may sing, I'm used to telling stories with film. So it's funny to be on a radio show where I don't have films to show you, but I'm going to tell a story of a film to make a point. So one of the films that my students made was working with an older adult who had been nonverbal and really mostly nonresponsive for about a year. And I met his wife, who said that she hoped that we didn't work with her husband because it would be very boring. And I said, you know, don't worry, we're not here to be entertained, we're just here to try to see if there's some way that we could reconnect your husband to music that he loves. And is there any music that he liked? And then she said, well, you can try, but you know, don't expect anything. He used to be a clog dancer. This was in Maine, and so he loved country music and that they used to go clog dancing all the time. And so when I put turkey in the straw in headphones and put it on this older man, he immediately opened his eyes, this enormous smile came across his face and he started dancing with his feet wildly. He was in a wheelchair. And I don't know if his face or his wife's face was more amazing in that moment because she looked at me, I thought she was going to pass out. And we ended up making him a playlist of clog music and old fiddle music and fiddle tunes that he listened to for the remainder of his life, which was about a year. And she told us that thanks to that music, she was able to go back and start spending time with him every day. That prior to that, she just didn't know how to connect and so she couldn't go because it made her too sad. So this way, they would go sit together and listen to fiddle tunes and she would watch him dance and smile and he actually looked her in the eye for the first time. And so that on the one hand is extraordinarily powerful. If we can tap into someone, older adults living with dementia that are at that stage where they're having trouble interacting and engaging, you can give such a gift to a caregiver to give them a way of reconnecting with their own selfhood and with the selfhood of the person that they love. And then another story on the other side is that in San Francisco, I thought about a woman that we met who was caring for her husband who had fairly late stage Alzheimer's. And in talking to them about music, at first we spent a lot of time talking about him and she thought we were there for him to learn about his musical stories. And then it turned out she was a dancer who until very recently had been going out and dancing on the town in these very intergenerational sounding swing dance scenes. And it turned out she had this huge record collection, but her house was so messy because she was a primary caregiver and she didn't have any help that she couldn't get to her records. And so on the last day that I was there, I just decided to clean her house for her. And I cleaned her living room and we got access to her records and put them on. And again, it was like you just watch someone melt and she just lit up and she started talking about all of her favorite songs. And something that we noticed a lot when my research colleague was a physician and we would go to these houses and if the physician showed up first, the conversations quickly turned to medicines and this is going wrong and I'm stressed and I'm this and I'm that. And when I would show up first and say, "Hi, I'm a music researcher and I'm here to talk to you about music," the mood shift was really amazingly notable. And so we realized that you can tap into. It's not that all those other things aren't there. We know they are. But if you can tap into that space where someone connects with something that they love and it's meaningful to them, that can be so powerful. And seeing if you can give that kind of a break to someone who is spending 24 hours a day caring for someone, even if it's five minutes a day of listening to a song that makes you dance, I learned a tremendous amount from that and recognizing that sometimes the barriers are something as simple as getting your living room cleaned or getting your speaker fixed or making sure that you have some ability to access that music, that the music is there, you kind of just need to tap into it. And sometimes that's a question of can we just take a minute to shift the topic of conversation and sometimes it's really thinking what tiny technological barriers can I help you with that would give you that access. So in that way, I think I've really gained a lot of appreciation in the last few years about the arts as a powerful tool for older adults, both in a caregiving capacity and someone who's maybe being cared for. Yeah, I think it's really interesting to hear the stories of the power in that because I think often, particularly in Western culture, and we'll talk about this and we have talked about it on the podcast before, but there's such a different view of aging where we address it in some ways where we're trying to maybe solve a problem when in reality there is this holistic view of the experiences. I think we can all think back to times when there was a song playing. If you're married, maybe that's something, you choose a wedding song. So clearly music and arts are a very big part of who we are and the stages in our life and so taking a moment to take a step back, register that, and then be able to present that in a way that maybe hasn't been engaged before and it's probably very transformative to see that power. If anybody is listening that is in this capacity of working with older adults or maybe in a caregiving situation, I think what's exciting is that these are very accessible tools. It is not that hard to say, "Hey, close your eyes and think of what was a concert that was really fun or think of a song that's connected to a memory that brings up something nice or do that exercise yourself." I mean it's such a simple conversation topic that that's one of the things that I most makes me excited about this work is that it isn't something that requires fancy technology to tap into. Can I add to that because I can talk about from the provider perspective, right? So if you care for the individual at home, the music is a very easy access and it's not just bring the joy, but then also you can give a break for some of the resistive or difficult behavioral challenge that we may face today, right? I have a gentleman, you know, as soon as the Bonanza music, we put that on, then he will come down and he start marching. So we can take him to the bathroom really easily rather than, you know, fighting with him to stand up, then let's walk over, right? So some things that if we know the history of that person and culture, we can tap into those, you know, into the practice kind of application, not just for the enjoyment. And we haven't used that in the medical practice much yet, right? Sometimes, you know, folks may get disoriented or confused in the urgent care or emergency room or post-surgery, and many of folks may have those because they know they are in the situation that it's not safe and unfamiliar. As soon as you hear the voice of the wife or music that they are familiar with, a smell or something that reminds him or harb something, it can be a very strong strategy to, you know, manage those challenging situations. So I think we haven't used that much yet and a study and a practice needs to come in this area in the future. I'll just say that absolutely I agree with that. I had another gentleman I worked with who had moderate dementia and we built him a playlist that he loved and he loved music. He loved old barbershop quartets and about four months after working with him, he had a major back surgery and then had to be in rehab for months and I ran into him and he told me that he decided to bring his playlist to rehab and that he loved it and that he would listen to it before going into these therapy sessions and that it made such a difference that then his therapist said, "Please bring that playlist every time you come in." And so he would take about 15 minutes to listen before going in and that the therapy and his wife told me was much more effective when he had that space. And so one of the things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about in recent years is this how, for those of us that come from the arts and have knowledge of how powerful art can be in keeping us well, how do we enter into more clinical spaces and have conversations with clinicians so that we can do that translational work of really teaching each other and finding out how to support the same people through our different mixes. And so I'm not trained as a music therapist but I think that the work that I've done taps into a lot of tools that can be used therapeutically and that can be used to promote well-being. In lots of different ways, but if we don't have access to the physicians and clinicians and nurses and therapists that are working with adults, then we're really missing an opportunity. And so I think that was what I most learned in the fellowship that I was in working with people from all different backgrounds, both arts and medical and policy, is that the sort of doing the labor of figuring out where to talk to each other, how to talk to each other, and how to collaborate together, that's for me the next really big step because that we know that it works, we know it works, but how do we effectively bring that into the systems that we already have so that we can add extra support. And the work that I have done that has been collaborative has been so well received. I think there was maybe an assumption, an erroneous assumption when I started this that clinicians wouldn't be excited about tapping into the arts, but in fact, the physicians that I have worked with and other kinds of clinicians are usually so excited to find anything that's useful and helpful, you know, that I found that there really is a spirit of let's talk about how we can do this and work together. Yeah, one of my colleagues that he's a magician to start with, and he had a major injury and he kind of tapped into the OT world, occupational therapy. And he's teaching a clinician a little trick with, you know, whatever they have on their body to show little magic tricks to engage and open the conversation with the patients. I think we would love to see many of those, yeah. And I think that's another thing is that, of course, in a perfect world, we can imagine what health systems would look like with endless resources and how we might reimagine the way that we give care. That's a bigger thing. But I do think that, you know, if your first reaction is, "Well, that sounds nice, but we couldn't possibly hire someone to do this work," well, I think Yumi's absolutely right. We can teach little things, you know. If you're sitting down to do a neurological exam with someone, how hard is it to start the conversation with, "Is there a song that you love that we could put on for three minutes while we get to know each other before we start this conversation?" And how much could that potentially sort of shift the space or if someone's getting anxious to say, "Let's take a break and let me put on some music for a minute or show you a magic trick or we can do a small movement exercise." I mean, there's so much that I think can be trained, which maybe takes me back into something else that I care very deeply about, which is educating people from when they're very young to understand arts and aging so that when you already are a physician or a nurse or some sort of clinician, you aren't hearing about the arts for the first time. You're in fact saying, "Oh, I remember when I was in college and I took that class or I did that project where we did dance and, you know, then you have those resources in your head that you can tap back into as opposed to coming at them for the first time." So I believe very much in interdisciplinary education and arts and aging for that reason. So many great threads to pull on there. I do want to get back to interdisciplinary. I just want to throw a thought out there that came to me right at the beginning of this sort of section of the conversation, which was that concept of connection. I think you both talked about it in different ways and how powerful it is. It certainly as a caregiver, it can be a very stressful and energy-consuming process, whether you do it as a career or you do it for another reason or a family member. And it seems to me like those kind of connections where you share a musical experience or a magical experience or whatever it is, makes the experience so much easier and so much more meaningful where you maybe have a little more energy to do the things that you don't want to do when you have a break, like clean the house or something like that, because I can totally imagine how you would be exhausted at the end of the day and just leave that there, worry about it another day and that becomes another day and another day. And building those connections with just understanding arts and aging and being able to leverage that for just some moments of sunshine that make everything so much better, can I imagine just change the world for some caregivers? I think it's hard because when you talk to an exhausted caregiver and suggest that they do something else in their day, the immediate reaction can be, "Don't tell me to do more. I already am doing so much." And so when you're thinking about how you can gently suggest to a caregiver to bring more art into their day, I would recommend thinking about very routine things. Like could you possibly turn on the radio at breakfast? Would that be something you could do? Or could you, before you go to bed, or if you take your dog out for a walk, maybe put on some music while you're walking your dog, and think about something that becomes automated and that can be very accessible and easy so that it doesn't feel like a chore. But I think that what's sad in the research that we did in San Francisco is we saw that the more stressed out people got, the less connected they were to arts because we think about our survival as food, medicine, making sure you're paying your bills. And so how do you really teach yourself that those bringing in some very, very small creative activities can make those other things easier, as you say. And I think you kind of don't believe it until you try it. But anyway, that you can start very, very small, I think that would be my recommendation. I just want to add that, so the chronically stressed caregivers, it's really hard to find the time, and it's completely true. And also those caregivers are not resilient in handling even flows of incident. So I have some research on, on average, the caregivers who have lower stress level are able to manage sudden stress or incidental stress better. But the caregivers who have an average higher stress level, they do not manage the incidental stress well, so it's impacting their physical health. So having the arts as a part of the intervention for those higher stressed caregivers, and we can really promote our targeted caregivers because we are limited funding, and how we can identify those caregivers, right? So those are the ones who need, you know, art-based intervention, and how we can bring that time to them, how we can put the federal and state effort into those specific populations. And we can really identify those. And I totally agree with that, because if you are at that level that you're so stressed that if you think that you can send someone an email or a pamphlet that says, "This is how you're going to get art into your life," forget about it. But if you think that you might be able to send a person, you know, or bring a person to a space where they can connect and have a conversation and feel seen and feel heard and feel validated and then give them those tools, I think then you really have an opportunity to for change. And I was also thinking that we're talking a lot about caregivers, I think we're talking mostly about family caregivers in my mind. But one of the things that we saw in our research was that of course a lot of people have paid caregivers, and paid caregivers in the population that we worked with in San Francisco actually did use a lot more music in everyday life, although paid caregivers often don't know the musical preferences of the people that they're working with. And so one of our recommendations for people that are hiring caregivers for a family member loved one is take a few minutes to make a list of, you know, favorite movies, favorite artists' favorite songs, or, you know, get some CDs out or records out. Because sometimes that work, again, in explaining to the caregiver everything that your loved one needs, you forget these pieces that are so essential to our self-hood and personhood, which can be really powerful. And so I found that paid caregivers were really excited to learn ways that they could tap into that, but they kind of hadn't thought about it before because they tended to put on, or many of them put on the music that they liked, which is fine. But then also, and important, too, because, you know, it isn't just the person, you know, music is good for all of us, but that when there was the opportunity to give people tools to say, "Would you like to connect with this person, and here's some ways that you could have the conversation," I found that many paid caregivers were really excited to have that conversation. I think that's so important to think of the person-centered or clients or patient-centered care-for-life perspective rather than clinical perspective, right? If you think of the clinical, what they would like to be for treatment, it's easier to implement that. But then if you think of the person-hood, the music should come from the patient rather than the care provider, so it's very interesting, yeah, totally agree. Not to mention that almost all of the paid caregivers I met were women of color immigrants from other countries. So there was a lot of cultural divide between their cultural background and their music and the music and cultural background and life story of the person they were working from. So it isn't that often our caregivers are from our own neighborhood and we grew up together. There is often that real big jump between two very different cultures coming together and learning how to harmoniously support one another. May I add one thing because mover perspective, that the music is fantastic, but when you're caring for the older person, the sense of touch, you know, it's really don't have that if you're living in a nursing home or group homes and if you don't have the family member in your state or town, right? But if you use the movement or dance or any physical part that promote the sense of touch and it's really addressed the sense of loneliness, which is really severe issue for the older population. So promoting music, but with the movement is really meaningful because you can have the sense of touch without asking, may I have a hug, you would not ask that, right? But then I think many of us cannot live without touch and many of the clinicians only touch you because you are providing a clinical care versus they really care for, you know, and enjoying time with you, right? So having music and dance or movement is really regardless of their level of functional level, right? Whether they can move from the chair or not. Still it's an important part of our life and those senses stays through your life through the end of life and you can dance even on the bed. One of the greatest programs that I had the privilege of working with in Indiana was a place called Jill's House and they opened an intergenerational preschool in their dementia centers. It was a memory care center and they would have little kids come up for a few hours every morning so the basement had the preschool and the memory care was above and then they would do intergenerational projects once a day and sometimes those would coincide with our music projects and so there was, you know, hugging and dancing and crawling all over each other and it was amazing to see that, you know, I mean, I talk a lot about music and aging and music and dementia but I always like to remind people that puppies and babies are really helpful too, you know, and it does really tap into this idea of touch because puppies and babies not only are they cute but they're also, they're not afraid of touching you, of contact, of, you know, that physicality. I would imagine as somebody ages to, especially as other senses might decline, something like touch may become more and more important because they're more attuned to that also and I, I mean, I, we all have personal instances where we've been with a loved one perhaps at the end of life and it can be scary sometimes as a caregiver to, to touch because you don't want to hurt them or you yourself are afraid because you're experiencing something for the first time but once that barrier of touch is broken, I think it's, it's immensely powerful both for the person but also for the caregiver because it allows you to have that connection in a way that maybe you can't have anymore because there's no verbal communication. And I think one of the, maybe misunderstandings about work with music and aging is this idea that, oh, I'm going to tap in and figure out all your favorite songs and then I'm going to put them on a speaker and I'm going to turn it on and I'm going to leave and you're going to have a great time. You know, really I think of music as a catalyst for human connection, whether that connection means playing a song that reminds you of someone that you love that can't physically be there but really often it's who is it that's bringing you that music, how can music facilitate engagement that is meaningful with somebody else that's in the room. So listening to music together with someone while you hold hands, I mean, it can be so simple but I think it makes a powerful difference. Yeah, that seems like a critical point. I think you could easily have listened to this conversation before and just taken away something as simple as I'll just turn music on, right? But that's, it is more than that, it's opening the door for more connection, more engagement. Yeah, and also, you know, Jenny is so right about the music and arts as a kind of the bridge between, you know, developing the connection and not just among the clinician and a care recipient but among the peers, right? Because clinician or caregiver can do so much just by one person to watching for 20 people but themselves still capacity to build the community support among themselves and the arts can do that and we just need to facilitate that space. I'll make this short but I worked with another woman in Bloomington who I had my students divided so they had a student, two students with one older adult in different rooms and there's two ladies, they kept coming into each other's rooms during the interviews like breaking in 'cause they wanted to hear it and after about, I don't know, half an hour I thought to myself, first it was like, we're busy, we're doing it and I was like, what are we doing? These women want to be together and so they ended up making a film together, sitting together, putting on headphones, talking about old songs and it was such an important moment of recognizing yeah, that which, where are these channels flowing? It isn't just between student and older adult, it isn't just about teaching the nurses, it's also about providing tools for community building that can be so powerful so I love that. Yeah, oftentimes we forget in the nursing homes when the clinical demands are high and then we forget about the power of the peers, right, how they can support each other. We have one story that when I was in the nursing home working as a movement therapist, so one gentleman I was in the music and movement therapy session together and we were facilitating the conversation and one gentleman is in the middle and we supposed to give him space or time to reflect on his life with the cello music and we are holding the space for him and he started talking about his, you know, past life that was not nice to his wife and he just keeps talking about his story but one of the member who is holding the circle for him, she's also the client who is on the wheelchair, she doesn't really move but she started talking to him as if she is his wife and they carried the conversation, it didn't make any sense to from outsiders but they had a fantastic conversation for five ten minutes and they concluded they laughed about it and something they may need it to close, you know, for their unsolved issues or challenges and they supported each other, it was a beautiful moment that I really loved it. Amazing conversation about caregivers, I know one of the things that we talked about maybe a little bit earlier in that block was the importance of an interdisciplinary perspective about having an understanding of arts and aging either before or maybe as you're gaining new skills and a new discipline so that you can use that, so I like to expand on that, I know we have the innovations in aging and interdisciplinary program, you both have your own interdisciplinary program as well, why don't we just take a moment to hear about your program and we can inform our listeners about that. So here at the University of Arizona there are many graduate interdisciplinary programs which is an exciting model for promoting interdisciplinary graduate work and then one of the newest of those programs is the Applied Intercultural Arts Research Program so you mean I are both involved in that and I was brought here in part to help develop and be the chair of that program which is exciting because it's bringing in grad students from all different perspectives in the arts who are interested in addressing social issues through the lens of the arts in collaboration with other disciplines so it's how do we address social issues and do that translational work between if it's music and psychology or dance and public health or journalism and sculpture or what have you so that's a program that we're involved in which I think will very much support the work in the innovations and aging program that is now growing here at the University and we're building a course together now called Arts and Community Health which is going to be housed between family and community medicine, the Applied Intercultural Arts Research Program and the music department and that's doing that important work of setting up frameworks where students from very different backgrounds can find a course, take that course and in that course not only learn about the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives on aging in the arts but also study alongside people that are very different from them so I think in the previous courses that I built one of the most powerful things I saw was sending like a cellist and a nursing student out to do a project together right because then again that peer-to-peer learning is so powerful of what skills each of you can bring in and I think that that can be very transformational. I know there's research that shows arts programs and music programs mostly at the level of medical students or nursing students and that arts interventions can be used to address ageism within clinical programs but I've felt for a long time that if we move upstream, if we take you before you get to nursing school, before you get to med school, when you're first into college if not prior and really start planting these seeds that you have every holistic way of thinking about aging through a lens that is artistic, I think that then you will approach all those other pieces of your education with a little bit more of an open mind and that toolkit accessible to you. Yeah, I think one of the most powerful things about interdisciplinary just expanding on that here in a minute is most programs understandably so are very focused on the output of the career that you're moving into right and so it's always I'm going to learn this skill and then this skill and then this skill and then get there and so you can usually see that later and while you don't know what you don't know I think the nice thing about interdisciplinary is you can get exposed to concepts that you would just not normally have any reason to even explore as part of your discipline and say oh this arts and aging thing is that's amazing this totally makes sense as to how this can help me I would never have explored that for any other reason but that also illuminates to me that there are other connections that I probably just don't know about and so you can actively look for those things as part of the process of moving into that career. And also doing so innovation happens that it's we as an instructor in real learning the way of conducting research from the arts perspective and health science perspectives and I'm learning from collaborating with Jenny quite a bit because my research is mostly outcome based and number based and I was having a problem how I can combine this express part with the outcome based research right but then Jenny opened up by just learning about how the art based research and ethnomusicology what does that do right it's exciting to see how to come you can expand the way to conduct research what you know how you carry out your question like research is based on your question how you answer those so you have more choices by working collaboratively and arts for the choices that we can make and also you know we talk about the delivery of message that how impactful that is tap into the emotions and connections and so we probably can reach much more you know different groups many more different groups compared to health science that's going to reach out to the population of you know diabetes or you know using the art in the part of how to promote the health you know in the public space I think you are strengthening your background with the new skills and new perspectives so the interaction in the different field it's very exciting I think one of the challenges when you're looking at interdisciplinary work about arts and aging is building projects where there is balance between all research all of the researchers so I think in in some ways sometimes if you talk to researchers in the arts there's a feeling that sometimes when you collaborate with health sciences artists are brought in just to sort of show in pretty pictures what it is that the researchers in health sciences are doing right and in doing that which is fine because I think that arts can be such a powerful way of communicating ideas telling public stories but I think sometimes you miss an opportunity to actually think about what if we start the research from the arts and then move into if we even want to other forms of research that are more based out of sort of outcomes based studies and so I think that the challenges are real and it goes back to if we all started with training that was more interdisciplinary we would be more open to thinking but sometimes there's an enormous amount of unlearning that has to happen in order for people from two different disciplines to collaborate on a platform that feels like both parties have the same amount of agency and that's something that's exciting and takes time and anyone that comes into an interdisciplinary field I think you're willing you recognize that you're going to be spending a lot of time doing that translational work but I think it can be very powerful and you take what you mean saying you know I have a student right now who is doing some exciting research she's just at the beginning of her doctoral career and she was interested in music and dementia and virtual reality and when she first arrived to the program she was talking about how her summer project was going to be proving that virtual reality could be helpful for people with dementia and that it was it was a very outcome she had a hypothesis and she was going to do a study and figure out that and we started talking I said you've never spent time with older adults with dementia with virtual reality and we're sort of rethinking her whole project where I've suggested maybe for your first summer it would be better to do a research project that's more arts based that's more process based that's about getting to know people really telling their stories giving them a platform and agency to speak for themselves about what they think about virtual reality telling a story about that and then using that to inform future research which might get you to that next step of being able to you know maybe in six years they do something that's more outcome based but I think that that that process of thinking where's the most effective place to start is really hard because there isn't always one way there's always there's always many doors that you can start into but I think when you teach students like there's all these different channels where where might we start and then how might that blend into other things I think we see more exciting research emerging yeah then outcome based research often time when we explore that based on the numbers we miss how and why part and the art based research really explore and provide the in depth information for us to you know produce a better support mechanism and I think it was mentioned earlier about a systems approach and I think that's really important because it speaks to that agency piece as well and not only in the communication between researchers but disciplines but also with older adults and I think I know there's a fair amount that you both have focused on regarding the agency that older adults have and not only the aging process but in your work so would love to hear a little bit more about that piece in particular so if I think about where we started in the Tango bars the whole reason that I research aging is because I have had the privilege of knowing some extraordinary older adults who are musicians and those individuals have taught me so much about the power and the importance of the arts in their everyday life and you know how they will sing until the day they die no matter what if they can if they can avoid it that you know that they've said you know the day I can if the day I can't sing anymore is the day that I'll leave you know and I really believe that so much of what's keeping them going I mean one of my closest collaborators is in his 90s now and he's still singing you know multiple times a week in live music venues and so I think I learned to really celebrate him and so much of my doctoral research was about how do I celebrate this person and other older adults like him who are able to live within systems where they are supported and they can be giving so much and and receiving so much you know so that intergenerational piece and so in the work that I'm doing now here in Tucson of trying to build both a storytelling platform and a series of intergenerational collaborations with Hispanic older adults in Tucson I've been thinking a lot about how do I build that not for these older adults with these older adults but really from these older how do I put them in the position of talking to each other of talking to young people of telling their stories in such a way that they can inspire others and so I think instead of me going and finding isolated older adults and thinking about how I might help them when I'm trying to think about how do we use different cultural models different models of popular music from across Latin America to shift the way that we're thinking about creative aging systems here in Tucson there is so much knowledge out there in the community and how do you tap into that so that people can then help lift each other up and I think that's a huge hugely important thing because I think that older adults most all of the ones that I know don't want to be thought of as older adults they don't want to be thought of as helpless they don't want to be served they do often feel wonderful when they can do something that is helping others you know and so it's that really gentle shift of perspective that I think is so empowering that is hard to do because again it requires a lot more time it's a lot easier to go out and say I have a service that I'm going to give you would you like to sign up it's a lot harder to go out and say hi nice to meet you I'd like to get to know you to the point in which I can explain to you that I would love to empower you to tell your story and invent something with me you know there's a lot of steps that go into that kind of research collaboration but I think it's really necessary to do the work that we're doing and to really shift for younger people understandings of aging because if we don't do that then we we fall into that trap of thinking that young people need to serve older people as opposed to how do we build communities in which we are supporting one another using all of the knowledge and wisdom that we have across the lifespan yeah so agency working with the population with intellectual disabilities I learned a lot how much emotional and lived experience you know in form how to live with lifelong disabilities right how to manage and navigate but then still be happy the life navigation part that you know as I adjusted from Japan to living in the United States the population of intellectual disabilities that they were coming to my art studio they are the one who kind of grounded me to how to navigate my own challenge and I think it's applied to the population of aging when they start declining their functions and others but I truly believe that you know we underestimate really the power and the wisdom of lived experience and I think the older people has that and why we don't use that to support our society and I think arts are fantastic advocate kind of tool to project that to you know this healthy society and healthy aging in general I know I've told too many stories but I'll make this one quick one one example of why I think shifting to arts and aging across the lifespan as opposed to just arts and older adults I worked with a student in Bloomington who was in my course and was working with an older woman living with dementia and about three quarters of the way through the semester he told me that his best friend had committed suicide that semester and that he had dropped all of his classes and that he was barely hanging on and that the only thing that was getting him up in the morning was this collaboration he was doing with this older woman and he had connected with her found that she loved old folk music and she said that she missed the crackle of the sound of vinyls when they were on when he played her MP3s and so he got her husband to bring in all of her records digitized her entire record collection so that she could listen to every track on an iPad was a whole album with all of the original cracks and you know of the sounds of her albums and he just dove completely into that project you know and I was so moved to hear about that relationship and I don't think she knew that his friend had committed suicide I don't know you know she had no idea what he was going through but that relationship was so powerful so meaningful for both of them that that was one of the moments that really motivated me to think this program that I sort of I didn't even think that much when I I didn't know what I was starting when I built it but and I certainly wasn't thinking that it would be so important for students but I saw that it was as important for students as it was for the older folks that I was working with and I think that just speaks to if we can shift our perspective to supporting one another and we all know especially now coming out of COVID how much students are stressed and lonely and isolated and really needing that kind of meaningful engagement and as educators I think we have a responsibility to thinking about how we can educate young people not only to know skills but also emotionally give them that support and connection that we all need I think that is a great closing story for for this podcast a good message at the end there about the importance of connection which we've talked a lot about throughout this podcast and helping each other as well as the value of having a perspective other than yours both interdisciplinary and just in life generally so thank you both so much for an amazing conversation and all the stories I love them I'm sure our listeners will too and thank you for your time thank you for your time today thank you both thank you very much to all our listeners thank you for tuning in the innovations and aging podcast is supported by the innovations and aging graduate interdisciplinary degree programs and the University of Arizona Health Sciences Global and online if you're interested in the career of gerontology or adding new skills to your current profession you can learn more about University of Arizona academic programs in the podcast description see you next time and remember as Eduardo Galliano once said I don't believe in charity I believe in solidarity charity is so vertical it gives from the top to the bottom solidarity is horizontal it respects the other person and I have a lot to learn from other people