Music Medicine: Sound At A Cellular Level | Dr. Lee Bartel | TEDxCollingwood

[Music] many years ago I grew up on a honey farm in Western Canada and so every summer and fall I'd be in the honey house extracting honey from the honeycomb a very sweet job and without fail a couple of drops of honey would land on one of the belts of what are the machines and start to go squeak squeak squeak to drive me nuts and just as inevitably a cricket would walk into the honey house and would go chirp chirp chirp what always amazed me was that it didn't take very long before what started as a sort of a random chirp would synchronize with the squeak on the belt why this was happening was a question that lingered in my head for very many years until I discovered the principle of an Trainmen tin physics how one rhythmic vibrating object will synchronize with another and so I used that idea and started creating music to effect your brainwaves music like this Pleasant music but that had a very specific rhythmic structure that would allow me to help you go to sleep help you relax even help you focus many years after I started doing this I discovered that I could just use a single pitch like this 40 Hertz remember this sound very low it's like low e on the piano but with this I found I could help people reduce their pain and even reduce Alzheimer symptoms these three sounds the cricket the music and the low-frequency pitch are all potentially music medicine each of these sounds features a rhythmic structure that allows it to impact cells in your body in fact my research recently has shown that stimulating cells with sound of this sort can reduce the risk and impact of some common health problems this is where you're supposed to say wait what if so there are two parts to this that I need to unpack for you so you can understand what I'm getting at the first is how sound impacts cells in the body sound which includes music but not all sound as music but all music as sound is in essence vibration molecular compressions in the air that come to your ear or to your skin if you feel it as vibration as you may have done with a 40 Hertz the ear has hair cells in the cochlea that translate this vibration into electric signals so that the auditory nerve carries this to the brain so when you encounter a click like this what's happening is that compressions of air air molecules are coming to your ear and your ear is translating that into an electric impulse and sending it to your brain something like this so it goes up the nerve and into the neuron except it's not just one you're on it's probably a thousands or millions of neurons that are responding right to that click just a bit of information here when we when we have one click coming to our ear we call it one Hertz as a measure per how many per second when it's five per second we call it five Hertz when it's 40 we call it 40 Hertz and the brainwave is measured in the same way as Hertz so 40 per second or 40 Hertz sound will be called gamma because it's in the category of gamma brainwaves the other part of my assertion is that brain waves are important to issues of health so let's look at that for a minute what we know about the brain is that although there are millions of neurons they're not just randomly firing unconnected what we know is that neurons that fire together wire together and so we have circuits within our brain so for example the motor circuit is multiple parts of the brain that need to connect so that you can initiate a movement so you can control that movement and stop that movement the memory circuit again connects multiple parts of the brain so that what you're experiencing now you may actually be able to remember tomorrow as the present experience perception turns into short-term memory and into long-term memory what else we know about the brain is that healthy circuits that are functioning for you now require steady brainwaves in other words if one part of the brain is going like this and the other part occasionally like that they're not going to connect this circuit will not work and what we know is that the frequency at which neurons like to connect and respond most easily is around 40 Hertz there seems to be a pattern developing here when circuits do not function correctly bad things happen for example when the parts of the brain that are supposed to initiate and control movement do not connect you may not be able to initiate a movement as in dyskinesia or you may not be able to stop as in a tremor so you may have Parkinson's when parts that are supposed to give you a long term memory do not connect you may have dementia or Alzheimer's so let me talk about a case of Alzheimer's that we treated she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's about 6 months before she came to our experimental vibra acoustic low frequency 40 Hertz treatment and so we gave her a prescription of 30 minutes of 40 Hertz sound stimulation three times a week for four weeks and we used this chair the next wave chair that had speakers built into its six speakers so that that low frequency 40 Hertz sound you heard you would actually feel as vibration at the end of the 12 weeks we realized that her test score had gone up she was giving us indication that she could remember her grandchildren's names more easily she seemed more cognitively engaged in clearer and so the question is what is it about forty Hertz stimulation as vibrations sound that might make this happen why would this happen in the case of Alzheimer's so one of the things we know about Alzheimer's is that as a person develops this there seem to be fewer neurons firing together at the forty Hertz level so there's less power and forty Hertz that means the circuits are decaying we also know of course that sound stimulation increases 40 Hertz firing and so we can increase their number of neurons firing at 40 Hertz and hopefully restore those circuits the cricket principle so let me tell you about a study we did next then which is we took 18 patients this was just a short little study to see whether we could have some effect and we spread these across mild to severe we used watching a DVD as a control and the prescription was 30 minutes of sound stimulation in this chair at 40 Hertz twice a week for only three weeks so a total of three hours of stimulation and the results surprised us what we saw was not just in effect at every session which is what we thought might happen but this was accumulating session two sessions over three weeks across the sample we had an increase of 13% in the test score we were getting results from patients such as people saying in the third week oh I remember doing this before and generally greater engagement with the world around them and in conversation so it's a very strong evidence that stimulation might in fact improve notice the DVD had negative effect they just got bored and got worse watching the DVD so one of the questions that came out of that study is how long does this last like can we have this effect for three weeks and then it goes what if a person continued this for a while so this our first case after the 12 weeks they were quite happy with the results and they wanted to continue it although they were going south for the winter and so I suggested they use this device a portable consumer based device that produces very good vibration at 40 Hertz and had onboard has onboard sound that or music in fact the piece of music that you heard in the middle of the after the crickets that has a lot of low frequency at 40 Hertz in it so she used it for 30 minutes she'd have 10 minutes of 40 Hertz sound stimulation I suggested they use it every day I met the couple three years later and my first reaction was I really can't tell that this woman has Alzheimer's and so I asked whether they would come back into the hospital to be reassessed and we might be able to complete the case that in fact the case was published just this past July and so what we found when we reviewed the case file and the testing was that she had the exact same MMSE this standardized Alzheimer's score three years later as she had had when she was first diagnosed and so it gives us great hope that potentially we can to reduce the impact of the development of Alzheimer's we may be able to slow it down even if we can't cure it so we're planning another study now in which we will do a much more intense look at the mechanism here with Emmie G imaging of the brain we will also look at amyloid beta which is the plaques and tangles because a study at MIT almost a year ago showed that 40 Hertz light flicker in the room 7 hours of just flickering 40 Hertz in the room reduced amyloid beta by more than 50% and so we're gonna compare that with the sound stimulation and probably we expect that sound stimulation would also reduce amyloid beta and in that sense to help to reverse the basis for Alzheimer's just for the record here some publications let me tell you next about a case that came to us for treatment with fibromyalgia she had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia about six years before with a severity scale of about 17 out of 20 she had many of the classic symptoms she had pain all over her body as she used medication she had real trouble sleeping she had was depressed she had stiffness in her neck and shoulders she couldn't sit and stand for very very long at any one time she missed many days at work so we gave her a prescription of 23 minutes of 40 Hertz sound stimulation two times a week for five weeks on this device the next neuro lounge that has two transducers in it and what we found after five weeks was that she had stopped using all her medication she's reported that she could sleep much better she was less depressed the chiropractor checked her neck and shoulders and she had more mobility she was missing fewer days of work and so the question is why would 40 Hertz sound stimulation have this result in fibromyalgia that many doctors just say oh it's just all in your head it's often diagnosed as a psychological problem I believe it's all in your head or at least a good portion of it is in your head in terms of brain connectivity because research shows that fibromyalgia has connectivity issues between parts of the brain and then the pain circuits so the theory would be in our assumption was that 40 Hertz sound stimulation would restore this connectivity and she demonstrated that there were positive results so we then did a study with 19 patients completing in an open-label study the prescription was the same as hers 23 minutes two times a week for five weeks publication and what we found is that before the treatment started the patients tended to cluster toward the negative side of the scale the right of the far right and at the end of the study they clustered toward the positive side of the scale what we found was that a quarter had stopped all medication had to reduce medication we were getting a positive response on across the board so we then went on to do much more rigorous double-blind randomized controlled trial Mount Sinai prescription here was forty Hertz for 30 minutes a day five times a week for five weeks thirty-eight patients completing and we used this same sound Oasis device but with an mp3 plugging in the treatment track and what we found at the end of that study was that all we again saw a significant reduction in fibromyalgia symptoms and 52% of the patients symptoms improved on average by 40% so some had considerably more improvement some had somewhat less the next study which is already funded will again use brain imaging and in this case we'll also do a blood draw to look at the effect on gene expression proteomics and on inflammatory markers I can't talk about all the exciting applications one we're just analyzing now is with major depressive disorder initially seeing some very good results my colleagues at Laurier University have done some good studies with Parkinson's my colleague at University of Toronto has even shown that vibration can increase bone cell density one that I'm excited about and just starting is with blood flow dr. arkady yuri ash in miami has done some pioneering work on this and has developed a device that you can attach to the wrist or to the chest and so we're using sound that i've created in a study at an LA to reduce the impact of stroke with sound stimulation we're just working in our proposal to reduce the risk of heart failure in this next video i'm you're going to show you briefly how quickly this effect happens so at the start of this video we've got the cell phone type device attached that size to this person's risk the wrist the blue indicates normal blood flow level and once the device gets turned on you will see very quickly that the yellow and the red will increase as blood flow starts to increase in this in this hand so this is an area of research that we're just starting to do intensively and I think has real promise for some very serious cardiac and blood flow treatments fifty-five years ago I was working sticky and and sweet by listening to crickets in the honey house and I could never have foreseen that the questions I was asking about crickets and belts might turn into music medicine I could not have foreseen that the idea that came from this cricket could start to create sound that might impact cells in your body that stimulating cells with sound can reduce the risk and impact of health problems like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and fibromyalgia and depression but what I do foresee now in the not-too-distant future is that when a doctor encounters something like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or depression they might take out their prescription pads and write a prescription for sound stimulation and that's music medicine at the cellular level [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 522,512

Rating: 4.9327579 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Aging, Biology, Cells, Medicine, Music (topic), Research, Science, Sound

Id: wDZgzsQh0Dw

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Living-Striking]

What is the FASTEST, cheapest, most efficient way (on earth) to get a PhD? ...and remain BEING the BIGGEST Gamer in the world? ... Answer: You Watch, Listen and Learn from THEM (eg. on Youtube, TED, etc.) until you need them and their knowledge ENOUGH to HIRE them to ADVANCE your business forward! http://Goodwinx.xyz