Dr. Francis Collins and Vivek Murthy | The Future of Music and the Mind

welcome and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us and for joining us in a discussion about music in the mind how many of you have come to either the concert or one of the presentations today oh good good good but some of you are here actually just having come to hear this particular talk is that correct how many of you are just my goodness okay what I think that's because we're free well that's that's good too so can you tell us a little bit about your own music and artistic backgrounds first well I'll start I was fortunate to grow up in a family where music was just something that you did it was a part of life my father had been a folk song collector in North Carolina he was trained as a classical violinist but he turned into a fiddler and loved bluegrass and in my house when I was growing up there was no television so what were you going to do in the evening you played music and if you didn't have something to play you felt pretty left out so well but you're also composer you play piano guitar and you sing and what didn't you write your first piece for the organ at five or six years old yeah I was five see he's being very very humble yes dr. mercy so you know I'm like Francis I actually didn't grow up with music in the house but I was really blessed to have parents who valued music greatly my mother noticed that I was drumming on everything when I was a little kid including often on her head and so she decided that if she enrolled me in percussion classes it might actually literally save her skull so that's what she did and she enrolled me in more than Jam classes and more than gum is a percussion instrument that's used in South Indian classical music it's said it's related so much of the table which some of you may be familiar with but it's a cylindrical instrument that's played with your fingers on both sides my sister began training at the same time as a classical South Indian vocalist and so she and I would perform together often throughout my childhood I will tell you that in the beginning I was resistant to going to classes and to practicing but now I look back on it and I am so grateful to my parents for opening up an entire world of music to me and it's been just an incredible gift and can you tell us about your actual expertise as scientists and doctors and and how that and if that's the musical training has had any effect on that at all so at the moment I have the privilege of serving as the director of the National Institutes of Health which is the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world located in its headquarters in Bethesda Maryland just about a half hour drive from here I have the privilege of overseeing a program that has incredible diversity of its activities everything from very basic science to clinical trials of new treatments for cancer or diabetes that in a big Orchestra is meant really at Gorky right in town and yeah the score sometimes gets bigger than will fit on the podium but it is an incredible opportunity right now because science is moving so quickly there's so many things were figuring out and one of the reasons that you and I Renee have had the chance to get to know each other and work on programs like this very one which has just been amazing is because neuroscience the understanding how the brain works is so rapidly moving forward and there's a lot we have to say to each other about how music is interpreted by the brain and how we produce music in our own thoughts and our own creativity it's just a wonderful coming together so having grown up with music all around me having you know the experience when I need to unwind of playing the guitar or sitting down to the piano because it's my own music therapy for myself I'm really happy that these parts of my own loves have come together in this way and I think that's true of an awful lot of scientists when you talk to people who are really at the top of their field in science it's amazing how many of them are musicians too it is remarkable I found that in my own career as I travel the world I never have trouble finding the best doctor in any given town because they know who we are as classical musicians or as musicians in general it's extraordinary and you improvise which i think is so great dr. charles lim is here and he's giving a talk later on about the power of improvisation in terms of creativity and brain health so please put that on your calendar for this evening and dr. Murphy you discovered dance I love this story could you repeat this for us well sure when I was a resident in Boston working really long hours before they really really started cracking down in the hours restrictions and residency during that time I would come home from these long-haul nights and you know having spent 36 40 hours sort of straight working and you know I would sort of pop into bed and I would just be exhausted and against them next morning I really I wouldn't feel that much more rested honestly and until one day when I was walking back home from being on-call for again 36 hours and I passed by a dance studio and unlike many dance classes which were you have to sign up for all eight weeks or ten weeks of classes this one offered drop-in classes and I said well for somebody with an erratic schedule maybe this might work for me now I had never thought of myself as a dancer but I in my sort of post call induced haze I made a decision to actually go inside and I think the fact that I was you know post-call because maybe I wouldn't have made that decision that I've been fully rested and it had my defences up but I went in and basically that's what introduced me to salsa dancing and I spent the next several years actually just delving more deeply into salsa I just really enjoyed being out of my mind and into my body and I found that that really opened up my creativity it actually enabled me to be better rested because it recognized that what I needed in fact to the arrested was not just sleep but I needed inspiration and that's what I found intense and I loved that you actually incorporated some of these values into your work as Surgeon General that the messaging had to do with holistic the whole person can you talk about that a little bit sure yeah you know when we when I began my tenure research and generally I spent about two to three months traveling around the country listening to people and asking them what they wanted from me and what could I do to help and in the process of having those conversations I heard just incredible things but what I heard from people is that they were struggling with their health and they wanted to be healthier but they didn't always know what to do and I'll say what really concerned me is I came away from those conversations feeling that we are a country that has tremendous potential but that he's being held back by pain and I'm not talking about just physical pain I'm talking about a deeper emotional pain that people are feeling and this is in rural and urban areas it's among people who are rich and poor among people who are ethnic minorities and people who are not and the real question I began asking myself is what is a deeper source of that pain where is it coming from what does science tell us about how we can address it you know this is a problem I thought of also when I was a doctor in Boston taking care of patients I recognized pretty quickly as I think all doctors do that there are some places that medicines cannot reach and there are parts of us that can't be accessed with traditional therapies we need a different tool to get there we need a different language if you will and what is so beautiful about music the music is a different language it has a power to reach people in deep places where sometimes speech or even touch can't sew medicine really pushed me to think about what other languages we have at our disposal to party in to contribute to the process of healing and I came to realize and not just music but really the arts more broadly are an incredibly rich and untapped source of that healing couldn't be better said we we are so benefited by what's happened in medicine in the last century plus it's extraordinary when I when I think about all of the the benefits that we have now so why you know we met at a dinner party two years ago for some of you who don't know this story dr. Francis Collins and I were at will you tell it so well about what the dinner party represented and how its led us to this conjoining of these two huge institutions well maybe it was a good example of how music can bring people together when they didn't expect necessarily that that was going to be possible because this was a dinner party which was held on a Saturday night in the summer which was it happened to be the Saturday after the Supreme Court had concluded their activities for that particular season and there had been three major decisions I won't tell you what they were that particular week where the court was very significantly split and at this dinner party a were three Supreme Court justices and they had not been on the same side of this Oh well except for I guess Anthony Kennedy who was in the middle so uh and in it was a little tense I think all unwind but maybe carrying some residue of what had happened that week and then a lot of eye contact at 19:30 call I mean not a lot and it was after dinner a band that was not particularly spectacular and somehow I had brought my guitar and somehow Rene was there so I had to ask her to sing and although we had never sung anything before and the way in which that affected the mood of that group it was just magical and it's such a typical example I think of how music can bring people together music gets into your brain in a way that taps into those deep emotions about bonding with people about longing about love about all those things that sometimes get a little far away from you and music brings you their spirituality is it any wonder that spiritual experiences are often happening at the time of great musical experience as well I think there's a connection so I don't mean overstate that we had a spiritual experience but it was still pretty significant example of how that kind of music can change the whole environment well and I find it so extraordinary you know so many scientists have kind of quietly said to me in the last two days that this is this experience as validating their work the work at the research etc and that this is often considered a soft science but now that the NIH that U and n of it NIH have taken this on with the workshop which I'm going to ask you about why music from amongst all the other arts therapies and why now well I think the answer to that is a wonderful confluence one part of that is the advances in neuroscience which are moving at a pace unprecedented where we now have the ability with some of these new technologies to actually visualize what the brain is doing in people who are having experiences some of them sort of profound emotional experiences based on music for instance so uh when you sang last night the song to the moon I got cold chills and I bet an awful lot of other people in the place did I thought I was going to melt down thank you and I also know that I was releasing dopamine in my ventral striatum because that's what that's what happens when you have that kind of an emotional experience to music we didn't know that until pretty recently and that that's just an example of the way in which by studying the impact of music whether listening or producing we are learning so much about how the brain works and Rene you contributed to that as people who were there last night knows by putting yourself into an MRI scanner for not 15 minutes but two hours while you sang and then thought about singing and I don't know what else going on for two hours but it must have been a long long haul so that you could be contributing to this database of understanding what is the brain doing in the circumstance of a world-class singer how do you do that which parts of the brain are activated that's pretty amazing well and I found - first of all it was two hours of an experiment that had to be repeated enough times for it to be validated and I discovered - that the powers of concentration are greater for imagining for the creative imagining of doing something rather than doing it because as everyone said I'm skilled at singing so I didn't have to think about it quite so much in that part but you know this sort of brings us back you know you were talking a little bit dr. Murphy about what the country needs I mean can you speak of what would you what would your now prescription be for our country we have hotels I mean yes the larger wellness thank you for Niro trying to keep it focused and safe around here haha you know that what really concerns me the most and what could make I think the biggest difference in the trajectory of our country is a focus on improving emotional well-being in America we talk a lot about physical well-being but will we talk a lot less about both in the hospital and outside the hospital in the community is about the importance and power of emotional well-being I was in a room in Philadelphia with 400 people a few months ago and I asked them the following question I said do you think of emotions as a source of weakness or source of power and nearly every single hand went up saying that emotions were a source of weakness now what's striking to me about that is that the people who know otherwise are certainly artists but also elite athletes every athlete knows that to really succeed and be at the top of your game it's not just enough to go to the gym but you also need to focus on your emotional well-being and on your mental game they know that's what makes a difference between a good player and a great player and as we think about our country in the future our emotional well-being in turns out has a big impact on our health but it also has an impact on our school performance on our productivity at work on our civic engagement on a whole range of things that we deeply care about and you can start to understand the reasons why when you look at the drivers of emotional well-being now some people will say well there are a lot of factors that are contributing to the poor emotional well-being or chronic stress like in our country and those are poverty experience of discrimination violence in our communities and change just more broadly but while we have to work on the external circumstances there are also internal tools that science tells us we can equip people with that can help them improve their emotional well-being and one of the most powerful is actually social connection and this is actually where music comes in because social connection it turns out is an incredible driver of emotion well-being and health to the converse of that is that isolation is a big risk factor for disease people who people categorize themselves as lonely live shorter lives in fact the mortality impact of loneliness is equivalent to the mortality impact of smoking or obesity that's how powerful loneliness is it also contributes to inflammation in our body increases our risk of heart disease our risk of dementia and a host of other illnesses that we care about but music actually has the power to build a social connection and to do so in various ways the creation of music the process of creating music is a powerful way of bringing people together the experience that I and so many people had last night listening to both of you and so many other talented artists for form that was an incredibly powerful moment of unity that I felt that these people all around me who I had never met on but also we learned last night and through science that even listening to music also has an influence on our oxytocin levels and the brain which contribute to our experience of creating bonds of trust and so we have to think about this and I think about this a lot because if we really want to improve health we have to address the root root cause of illness and that is emotional well-being and music it turns out is a powerful tool for cultivating that emotional well-being I you know I love that because you know and I have to say we now have good dinner party language oxytocin and dopamine I'm very excited to expand my vocabulary I have to say but in thinking about this I always say that performing arts centers should be capitalizing on the fact that we offer a shared experience that it's not just you know coming in sit and of whatever performance is being occured but share build a community around what it is that we're presenting can you talk about all of us because you are about to embark on an extraordinary extraordinary initiative yeah well I just want to say one other thing though about what Vivek is very I think powerfully explaining is the social aspect of music it's useful to think about why do our brains respond to music and and what is that all about it does seem more and more clear that we probably had music before we had speech it's hard to prove that Charles Lim showed a picture of a flute made from a bird's leg bone that was probably 30,000 years old it's hard to look further back and say what was music like but now that we have pictures of the brain that shows that the brain has a different area of the auditory cortex that responds to music than responds to speech that tells you this has been really important for a very long time why would that be why would this ability to produce and respond to music have provided us with some kind of survival advantage I mean that would be the conclusion you'd have to draw and I think it must be in this space of music as a force to bring us together whether it's a force to bring us together to grieve to celebrate or maybe to get ready to go to war music has that potential to activate your brain in a way that words simply cannot do and to give you comfort to give you a sense of relief of sense of belonging to something that's powerful and what you're saying is that we've lost a lot of that and that the sense now of isolation which probably also results in an absence of that kind of shared musical experience because you got to be with somebody to share is contributing perhaps to the malaise and the sense of discouragement that so widely seems to be around us so again I think that says if we're looking for a prescription for our current circumstance maybe that is a good place to put more emphasis and I hope what we're doing here at this particular conference in a small way sends that message you asked about all of us and maybe it was the way this fits together all of us which actually started it's a very test launched last week aims to enroll 1 million Americans in a prospective long-term study of health and illness this is for everybody so that's why it's called all of us to sign up for the full launch will happen this fall so if you want to pay attention to some of those announcements and think about signing up please do the idea here is to ask these million individuals to be our partners and try to understand what really are the factors that contribute to good health or if illness strikes to the management of that illness in an optimum way and we don't know the answers to that in many ways this is precision medicine where we're trying to get really detailed information but also understand individual differences so those 1 million folks well because they are interested in being partners will be invited to contribute information about themselves they will give a blood sample they'll have their genomes completely sequenced which is a pretty exciting thing to contemplate for a million people they will have the opportunity to walk around with wearable sensors and see what's happening on a daily basis as far as their body's performance and their environmental exposures and they will be available for all kinds of follow-up studies to see what kinds of things are contributing to health or illness so one of my dreams is if you had those million folks right now and they're excited about research and they want to be asked other things let's find out what role music is playing in their lives and how that's contributing to their general sense of well-being because we've never had the chance to do something like that on that scale before so the NIH had an extraordinary workshop in January and one of the one of the thoughts was to this idea of nesting so it would be doing bed I think certain research ideas into this study as you just meant exactly so you might not want all 1 million people to take part in every follow-up study but if you have a million people who are interested then you can do a nested study where you study maybe a few hundred thousand or twenty or thirty thousand and get an answer that otherwise would have taken you ten years maybe you can do it in two months it's incredible and can you talk dr. Murthy about the Surgeon General's role how could you take a study or information from a study like that and use it as you're in your work well absolutely I often tell people before I begin any chocolate I was Surgeon General I would always tell people what my job was because I realized everyone had heard of the Surgeon General from cigarette warning labels and from alcohol containers that were I know exactly but they had no idea what I actually did and in fact most commonly I was mistaken for being an airline pilot at the at the airport but it turns out the Surgeon General has two main responsibilities one is to oversee the United States Public Health Service commissioned Corps which is one of the six when it's seven so our uniformed services in the federal government along with the army the Navy the Air Force cetera but the other role is to provide the public with scientific information about health so people can make good decisions for themselves and for their families and the results of this study that dr. Collins is talking about is going to be incredibly interesting it's going to help us really expand our understanding of so many different areas of health but when we think about the results that come out of this this is exactly the kind of information and data that the Surgeon General can actually take out to the country and share more broadly and I want to emphasize how important this is because it's the creation of research is one thing the dissemination of research as Francis knows as well is a whole other challenge that we have to deal with it takes a very long time especially in the world of medicine to get ideas translated from research into practice but we also have an important need an urgent need right now to make sure that people in the general public also understand accurate information about science there a lot of myths you know out there about what science says and doesn't says say when I first actually took office there was a measles outbreak and one of the first things I had to deal with was a lot of misconceptions about the measles vaccine and it links to autism when it turns out there is no link to autism but many people thought there was so it's very important that we have those voices for communication that raises not to say that the Surgeon General needs to be the only voice for that but in fact if they just the opposite which is that we need more voices than ever to be standing up for science for the truth disseminating accurate information so people can make the decisions for themselves and their family thank you and to that and about this sort of difficulty of bridging the research with practice can can you talk a little bit about the workshop and why music therapy was such an important part of that yeah I'd love to and again Rene much credit to you for the way you've helped me think through this over the course of this last year as we've been partners in this but I started to say earlier one of the motivations from NIH s perspective to get into this idea of music in the mind was the development of new tools for neuroscience that give us ways of imaging the brain when the brain is doing some really interesting things but the other part of this is seeing the field of music therapy which has been around since World War two maybe World War one having increasing opportunities to be applied to all kinds of disorders many of which we've seen demonstrated in workshops even today and dramatic outcomes but yet still an uncertainty about exactly how does that fit together with what's going on in the neuroscience of the brain could we bring these areas together and further enrich the basic science by the study of music and further enrich the clinical aspect of music therapy by bringing them neuroscience alongside the workshop aimed to try to see what we could do in that space and so we invited music therapists we invited musician performers and we invited some spectacular neuroscientists and we ought to understand each other's language and by the end of the day in half we were pretty excited about what we had discovered might be there as a potential to bring these fields together and I got to give a shout out to the music therapists because they really taught me a lot can I see hands for all the music therapists who are here yay some of these folks came from all over the country to be part of this discussion and I think for them this was a moment of a recognition that what they've been doing is something that we are all pretty interested in and want to try to see can we partner up to make this field even stronger so at the end of that workshop we came up with a number of things that we might do next and that would include maybe building teams that would include a basic neuroscientist with a music therapist consider what kind of trials we might do to try to identify rigorously what things work and what don't work try to get the outcomes really nailed down maybe develop what we would call biomarkers of response to music therapy that would give you a sense about whether something has really produced the outcome that you want without having to wait a long time to find that out those are things we do in other areas we had really thought about doing them in this space and now we are so I was amazed for instance if you could explain to the audience what what what the nature of research is why it's important why it has to be rigorous because music therapy as you said it's been around for 70 years and music therapists are saying hey we know this work we see the videos that have gone viral we think it works so what is it this about this research I was so amazed at how granular it is you know I thought of it like a wall made up of tiny tiny little bricks and you have to build it up from the bottom up if you could sort of help us understand that well that's the nature of research you come up with an idea you think it might work you try it out sometimes in a very small-scale way and see if you could actually get some encouragement your ideas right and if it does then sometimes you stop there but maybe that's not the the right thing to do we have misled ourselves so many times down through history in terms of interventions that we thought were beneficial and then ultimately it turned out they weren't and you don't even have to go back few hundred years to find examples of that we're probably doing some of those things even now so from the perspective of somebody who really wants to have the evidence to document whether some intervention is successful there's not really a substitute once you think you have a good idea to designing a trial to really test it in a way and ideally that trial even ought to be randomized where you have people who are in a similar circumstance and some of them get the intervention and some of them get some controlled intervention and then you ought to watch closely and see what happens over the course of time in terms of whether it change outcomes I know that sounds sort of cold and heartless when you're talking about something like music therapy but ultimately that's how you find out what works and frankly it isn't just the experiments where it worked that you get excited about you should also get excited about the ones where it showed it didn't work and we can stop doing that one and do something different that might work better all of that is just adding to a foundation of evidence that we want all fields to have so when we sit in front of somebody who has a need who meat has a need for healing we can say we're going to offer you this because we have the evidence that it's going to help you god that's so exciting and you know you talked a lot about last year about joy and about meditation and I'm wondering if meditation as you said it works so well for students if that if music and meditation have something in common well they do I believe that music and meditation both have the common effect of whitening the noise in our lives and we have a lot of noise in our life right now that may come from things that are happening in our families and our workplaces if you are and the unfortunate position of being somebody who consumes news a lot then you may have also a lot of noise in your life because there's a lot of noise in the headlines a lot of reasons to feel anxious like when you read the paper and this is not something new this has been happening for years but we've a lot of noise in our life and that noise contributes to anxiety which is a form of stress and that chronic stress actually leads to chronic inflammation in our body and causes disease and illness not to mention reduces our performance in life so meditation is powerful in music are powerful because they they have quiet and that noise in the case of meditation quiets our mind in the case of music it takes us to a different place that can actually be more fulfilling more healing and more wholesome and as we think about this and I was thinking about this deeply last night in the midst of the concert you know I've since leaving office I have continued to be really passionate about how to improve emotional well-being for our country and I really want to make that a major focus of what I do in the future because it's so important for us to build that movement promotion well-being in our country and I've been thinking about what's in our toolbox what does science tell us we can use meditation is one of them but it's not the only one we know physical activity has a powerful effect acutely and long-term on emotional well-being you know sleep has a really big impact social connection extremely powerful in improving emotional well-being music also very powerful and as I was sitting there last night I thought to myself we have to include music and the arts in our toolbox for how to improve emotional well-being so thank you for that inspiration last night both of you thank you and can you can you talk about your time ahead now I mean you you you we spoke briefly on the phone and you said you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about how you feel now that you've stepped down as a Surgeon General and I'd love to know how you'd characterize your time as Surgeon General what you plan to do in the future what you're thinking about sure well I you know I had two and a half of the best years of my life at Surgeon General I'm incredibly grateful for having had the opportunity to serve and I will tell you that I was perhaps the most surprised of anyone that I was asked to serve in the first place this is not a position that I had sought out or ever dreamed that I would have the position to or the opportunity in tribute to and frankly just slide background I was probably the last person or one of the more unlikely candidates you know my my dad was a destined to be a poor farmer in a village in India you know his life was governed entirely by probability I should be growing coconuts rice and tamarind and a small village in South India right now but it turns out as I have been grateful to find that in a dream sometimes take hold in unlikely places and my father in the midst of the bracing poverty that he was experiencing not even having enough to buy pencils for school or shoes to wear on his feet in the midst of that poverty he found himself dreaming of opportunity in a land far away he found himself dreaming of America and I was fortunate 40 years ago that my parents had the chance to come here with the hope of the simple hope although the profound one that this would be a place where their kids my sister and me would be judged not by the basis of the color of our skin or the fact that we had a funny sounding name but by the fact that we had ideas and that we were willing to work hard and for me to be offered the opportunity to serve as Surgeon General and to look out for the health of an entire nation having just a generation ago had a father who was a poor farmer in a small village in India that speaks to the power and the promise of America and I'm incredibly grateful for it and as I think about the future you know as I mentioned I feel even more committed now than ever before to improving the health of our country I feel more optimistic about America now than on the day that I began and the reason I do is again not because of what I read you know in the media it's because what I heard directly from people all across our country people who in their stories and in their in you know in their own lives they reflected an optimism a courage if you will that is so important to the future of our country these are people who in many cases face incredible hardship they didn't give up they still retained a hope that they could be a better life ahead for them in their kids they still wanted to contribute to making their community better for the other people who live there in those stories in those people who I met their courage their values and their kindness is ultimately what I believe is going to move our country forward you know I have believed for a long time that there are fundamentally two qualities that or emotions rather they drive our decisions and those are love or fear and you know love has its many manifestations like kindness joy compassion fear has its manifestations as well like anger cynicism insecurity rage and right now the world is locked in a struggle between love and fear and the question is which way will the balance tip and what is so powerful about music and the arts is that those manifestations of love that I mentioned inspiration kindness compassion these are all feelings that are evoked by the experience of music in the arts it turns up in music and the arts can be what helped tilt our world away from fear and towards love and if we can do that then we can build a country and a world that is prosperous that is kind and that is one that our children ultimately truly deserve and that's what I want to contribute to during my life after a Surgeon General thank you thank you you know and I I think that is so incredibly true and I because I come from an operatic tradition which is build storytelling into the musical presentation I think we can also say that the history of art in terms of whether you're talking about Shakespeare or Bach or all the great operas in fact tell that same story of human conflict of human resolution of what great leadership is and can I tell you I'm so inspired to hear two of our greatest leaders in the world who are really responsible for our health talk about well-being and about a much more holistic sense of what health is you know because I imagined that the NIH s job as an entire unit with secure cancer and yet here you are right I mean so I'm a layperson and here you are building in a future that looks at us as human beings at quality of life can you just briefly talk about stem versus steam for instance or what a future care facility would look like or a future corporate world what how should we be living our lives from day to day based on what you are doing and learning well one thing again going back to what we've learned from science is that the opportunity for children to be exposed to the arts and specifically to music has powerful consequences lifelong Nina Krauss this morning in her wonderful workshop showed some of the data there that that kind of musical training not only gives that child a gift that they're going to be able to derive personal pleasure from over the course of a lifetime it also enhances their ability to learn in other ways about other things and certainly that kind of scientific data is another reason why if we're the National Institutes of Health we should be thinking about health in a very holistic way and yes we are going to cure cancer along the way - that's a big part of our agenda but people with cancer are also struggling and they're needing healing in all kinds of other ways that perhaps that latest cancer immunotherapy won't directly take care of in all of the possible ways that need to be attended to I confess I'll be a little bit autobiographical before I went into medicine I was focused instead on physical science my PhD is in quantum mechanics it was very much sort of reductionist approach trying to understand everything in terms of mathematics of how atoms and molecules behaved and I ultimately felt there was something missing there and went off to medical school which I was rather poorly prepared for because of this hunger for the human connection and the human connection clearly won me over rather quickly as being a lot more than second-order differential equations it was it was about the whole person about the emotional side the spiritual side and I went from being somebody who thought that was all kind of gobbledygook to actually becoming a believer and that's all wound up and what we're talking about here in terms of the role of music in our daily experiences one of the most touching moments I heard this morning was the foreo lanes of music therapists in Cleveland talking about some of the ways in which she had reached out to patients in that hospital system but at the end of her presentation she didn't tell us she sang to us and she sang a very simple song that I guess she had heard from someone else I hear music in the air three times over I hear music in the air there must be a God somewhere that's a legal God to me that was so beautiful and you know in terms of quality of life too and and you talked about last year about the will to live that that's a real thing that's that's not an imagined thing no I mean anyone who has cared for patients in a hospital or people who have had loved ones who have been in the hospital and have come probably come to realize that you can measure all the numbers the blood pressure the heart rate the you know oxygenation and you know in the blood and and so on and so forth and those can help you predict whether something to do better or worse but one's own will all tool is is a powerful predictor as well and most doctors and nurses come to realize that very quickly when a patient has given up that's often a very bad sign because our will is what helps you recruit so much of our resources including our own immune system to come to the fight if you will and to st. sustain ourselves and that's to me why it's important that we think about the will to live not just in those who are ill and in the hospital but among all of us we have to strengthen that will to live it's not only sufficient to just be okay you know when we talk about emotional well-being most people think we're talking about mental illness and our focus for far too long has been on just ensuring people don't have mental illness that's important to address mental illness let me be very clear about that so that we don't talk about enough that we have to focus much more attention and resources on but our goal should not be just to be free of mental illness it should be to function at the optimal end of our scale to be at the top or our peak state emotionally so that we can do more experience more and contribute more now when I think about I'm sure that everyone in this room has had a relationship of some sort either romantic relationship or a friendship and when you think about what kind of relationship you want in your future no one ever says gosh you know I just really want to have an adequate relationship just really just looking for something that's not pathological you know people usually say I want an extraordinary relationship and they should say that and that's what we be sure we should be aiming for in terms of emotional help so the will to live is powerful but we need to think much more broadly about how we strengthen the inspiration in people's lives which fuels that will to live and how we do that for everyone my hope for the future is that health systems will not just be hospitals and clinics but they'll be networks extended throughout our community that in fact focus on prevention that contributes to the will to live and I think really broadly about what contributes to help you mentioned steam versus stem one of the things that concerns me and bothers me a little bit is when people talk about pejoratively sometimes about sort of real sciences and the soft sciences with the assumption being that this stuff in the soft category that's sort of fluff it's it's not really real stuff or at least it's far inferior to the hard sciences but really there should only be one distinction science and not science and if we pursue research and find evidence that something works then that should be science and as we think about how to create a culture of prevention in our country I think we have to redefine health we have to redefine what hospitals do and my hope is that one day in the future we can become a country that is as good at preventing illness as we are at treating it that will be a truly healthy and strong nation Oh fabulous thank you so much so I I want to ask dr. Collins if really you think you will further this work and continue to try and and bridge this world of music music therapy and research that is our goal and we have to figure out what's the best way to encourage that to happen certainly this comes at an interesting time because we are engaged have now been underway for three years in a 10-year efforts to actually understand how the human brain works how those circuits in your brain are capable of doing amazing things and we still have some big gaps in our understanding this is after all the most complicated structure in the known universe so you have to forgive us that we haven't quite get it out yet I mean they're fundamental things we don't understand yet we don't know how you actually lay down a memory and retrieve it in terms of exactly what's going on there with the molecules and the electricity we don't understand how when you hear somebody's voice down the hallway that you maybe haven't seen in two years you already know who that is after the first few words that's a very impressive amount of processing and all kinds of other inputs and of course we don't understand how when you listen to a particular piece of music it affects you profoundly we can say some sketchy things about that we're going to figure that out some people are a little worried that our brains aren't complicated enough to actually understand our brains but we're going to have computers to help us hear that's good I love that well listen I'm speaking of the brain I'm very encouraged by the plasticity of the brain that we've been I plan on learning a lot and more than I think I probably thought I could in this stage of life and I welcome you all hopefully to dr. Ronnie Patel's session which is coming up soon on creative aging dr. charles lim is giving a session tonight on the power of improvisation and creativity with esperanza spalding and Vijay Iyer so we have some very exciting programming I've learned a lot I hope you've learned a lot too and I really want to thank dr. Collins and dr. Murphy one more point I feel like I have to say that I just have to emphasize that what we're seeing right here the fact that Renee and Francis have brought us together to build this larger movement around music and health and well-being this is not something we should take for granted because this is an incredible opportunity and an extraordinary movement that they're seeking to build and I just feel very grateful to both of them for doing this but movements are often built by visionary leaders but they have to be sustained by people on the ground and that's why as all of you leave here and as you think about how as you think that the inspiration that you heard from Renee and Francis last night and from all the amazing speakers this morning as you think about how to continue and contribute to that I would love it if everyone could think about how they can one start with experiencing music and the arts more in their own life by making it a priority and second how they can think about making that an opportunity experience for people around you as well it's in this way that we will actually spread greater health and well-being and if you believe and understand as I believe that science tells us that emotional well-being is in fact a powerful force for our country at a time where we really need it and if you understand then music can be a powerful force for improving emotional well-being then it turns out that expanding access to music and the arts could be one of the most powerful and patriotic things that we do so I would encourage you to build this movement with Francis and Renee and I will right be there right with you there with you helping out your here thank you so much thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Kennedy Center

Views: 5,288

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Francis Collins M.D, Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General, Renée Fleming, Music and the Mind, Sound Health

Id: -rNFq3MkVco

Length: 46min 25sec (2785 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017