What would happen,
if you woke up tomorrow morning in a world without music?
You would’ve lost something beautiful,
something that you like.
But would it be simply a case of giving up something that you like,
like eating pizza on Saturday evening?
Or would you encounter a much more profound change?
Music is everywhere,
it’s found in all cultures,
in every corner of the world,
because it’s what allows us to connect with each other.
It’s a relational glue,
just think of what normally happens at concerts,
and it’s the soundtrack to our lives and events.
Music seems like something we’ve always had inside us.
The strange object that you see behind me
is an archaeological find, more precisely it’s a bone.
It’s the bone of a cave bear dating back to about 55,000 years ago.
What does it have to do with music?
Some scholars have focused on this bone, precisely on these holes;
and have tried to reconstruct it,
formulating a hypothesis that, today is much more appealing.
In fact, it could be the oldest musical instrument in history,
subsequently nicknamed the "Neanderthal Flute".
It often happens, what we stumbled upon
in the first steps of human evolution
can also be found in the first steps of our personal evolution,
as single individuals, in the evolution of our lives.
Neuroscience studies show us that we are natural born musical.
Our brain as newborns,
in the first hours of life,
manage to specifically respond to music,
musical structure, melody and rhythm,
to music’s different emotional nuances.
Indeed, the presence of music in our lives
seems to deal precisely with our brain
and, in particular, with changes
that occur in the oldest circuits at the evolutionary level,
the deepest ones, even anatomically speaking.
A substance plays a key role here
which is crucial for the regulation of our behaviour, every day.
This substance is dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that we usually release
right in the oldest, deepest areas of our brain
in response to stimuli such as food or sex.
They are stimuli that attract us, give us pleasure,
that motivate us, reward us
and are also somehow related to our survival.
However, what we have recently discovered
is that dopamine is also released
in response to music.
So let's see how many of you, at least once in life,
listening to a song, a piece of music,
have experienced this feeling here.
I’d say at least 90%.
These are chills, goosebumps
they’re our body’s physiological or psychophysiological responses
that we can link to intense pleasure.
Part of my research
precisely focuses on this kind of phenomena,
approaching them, however, in a rather particular way.
In fact, with colleagues based in Barcelona and Montreal,
we directly activated and deactivated the mechanisms in the brain
that we thought could account for these phenomena,
and in particular the release of dopamine.
A pharmacological study allowed us
to increase and decrease - temporarily, so don't worry -
the release of dopamine in people's brains.
We did this while our attendes were listening to music.
It could be their favourite music
or pop-rock music we had chosen,
music that is normally heard on the radio.
What we discovered
is that when dopamine increased compared to when it decreased,
their pleasure responses also increased.
Namely, the participants told us they'd rather hear a certain song
and they also had more associated physiological responses:
shivers, goosebumps.
Additionally, when the dopamine increased,
what we call motivational answers did also increase.
In this case, the participants were willing to pay more
to obtain the song they were listening to.
Namely, they were willing to give money to have that song,
that music in their life.
So the pleasure and motivation linked to the release of dopamine
are key to the understaning of the role of music in our life,
or at least why it’s in our life.
However, the fundamental question remains:
all of this cozy pleasure,
so intense that it affects our lives positively,
is an end in itself?
Namely, what is the true role of music in our lives?
To try to answer this,
I suggest to keep exploring brain activations together,
and I ask you, as much as you can,
to try to imagine being here alone.
Put on your headphones, your earphones,
and start listening to one of your favourite songs.
What will happen
is that your brain starts to switch on,
creating a veritable cascade of activations
concerning areas that are activated and regulate our emotions, our behaviour,
as well as the areas that are involved
in perception, movement, language, and memory.
Music creates a veritable neural symphony in our brain.
It activates and modulates it entirely.
In doing so, it’s able to modulate the anatomy and its functionality.
So now we can take a fundamental step forward.
Given that most of these neural substrates,
most of these areas activated by music
are actually areas that we activate every day
to perform many other activities - hearing, reading, talking, walking -
then we can start thinking about using music
to stimulate these other regions
and then these other daily functions.
That's what have done today many psychology and neuroscience studies.
For example, studies on music's ability to stimulate areas involved in movement,
and how this can be used in cases of movement deficit,
such as Parkinson's disease.
Or studies focused
on the close relationship between music and language:
music is a veritable universal language,
and we can use this relationship
to improve, for example, dyslexic children’s reading skills.
Much research has been done
and, as often happens in scientific research,
there is still much to do and support.
Today I would like to talk to you about a portion of this research.
It’s something that particularly interests me
but actually profoundly affects us all.
It’s the relationship that exists between music and our memories.
But first, let that neural symphony activate in your brain
thanks to the notes that Andrea will play.
[Music and memory]
(Music)
Music has a very strong -
(Applause)
Obviously this presentation wouldn’t have the same value
without all of this.
I know it's an added value.
Music has a very strong evocative power.
A song has literally the power to let us travel in time,
because thanks to a song we can rediscover feelings,
experiences, people,
emotions we associate with that song.
Perhaps this is what happened to you now with this version of "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Judging by the applause, I’d say so.
Because it’s undoubtedly familiar to you.
Others recognised the song.
Fans, immediately, from the first notes,
and others took a little longer.
Along with the recognition,
some remembered the associated lyrics
and others went beyond this
and were able to associate this song
with memories from their own lives.
We brought music's evocative power into the laboratory,
aiming to understand what its base mechanisms were
and, therefore, better understand what was behind it.
We ran several studies: on young people, elderly people,
where we asked them to retain information, with or without music,
while monitoring in the meanwhile their brain activities.
What we discovered
is that music can really help us remember information better
and in doing so, while it helps our memory processes,
it modulates our brains.
Modulating those areas that we know are important
to store and retrieve information,
as well as areas that are involved in the expression of our emotions
and, therefore, our pleasure.
Here we encounter our pleasure responses again.
Here they aren’t an end in themselves:
they become relevant and fundamental.
Because we found out, the better we are
to activate our pleasure, reward, and motivation responses
in reaction to music,
the more chills we have,
the more these responses can activate regions
that play an important role in forming our memories.
And consequently, the benefits of music on our memory will be greater.
Obviously, this has very important implications,
especially if we consider cases of memory deficits,
especially if we consider our society,
which is experiencing an increase in ageing,
both normal and pathological.
During my research I had the greatest opportunity
to see Alzheimer patients
who were completely extinguished by the illness,
being able to recognise a song from their past
and emerge from that apathy, even just for a second.
Music has the power, through these people’s emotions,
to bring back some personal memories,
that is, memories of their lives
that seemed lost until a moment before, precisely because of the illness.
And in some cases,
music also manages to facilitate the learning of new information.
This type of research lets us understand a little more about how we operate,
how our brain works,
our most complex, perhaps most fascinating organ.
I believe, these studies also teach us something.
In this case, they teach us that our emotional responses,
emotive, pleasure, those we deem
more instinctive, archaic, shallow, irrational,
we can actually take them
and use them to modulate, improve, and stimulate cognitive functions
that instead we deem high and complex, such as learning and memory.
All neuroscience and music studies move in the same direction,
stressing the importance of music in our lives.
In our lives means in our society.
Not only in our homes, in our headphones:
but also in education, when we take our first steps in society;
and in a clinical setting,
when instead we deals with hardships on our journey.
Music is a powerful instrument, but this power is non-invasive, cheap
and not only it can, it must be accessible to all.
So let's fill our lives with music,
giving our brains the chance to profoundly change, transform itself,
throughout our entire existence.
Let's give our brains the chance to change,
which is fundamental for our cognitive functioning.
Let's listen to music, let’s make music,
let's not miss out on even a second of that pleasure,
of those shivers that it can give us.
Let’s release as much dopamine as we can.
But let's carefully choose the music we listen to today,
because it could be the very music that will reactivate us tomorrow.
Thank you.
(Applause)