This season, we've already looked at how music can affect our mental health, but what about our physical health?

To explore this question, Bey and Kirsten sit down with sports psychologist Professor Costas Karageorghis to learn how music can improve athletic performance, including how to build your ideal workout playlist, according to science! Then, professional musician and Curtis Institute professor Mary Javian joins to discuss how music is being used to improve the world of healthcare for both patients to doctors.

Links for Today's Episode:

• Learn more about Prof. Costas Karageorghis, and check out the textbook he wrote on the topic, Applying Music in Exercise and Sport
• Listen to Michael Phelps' pre-race playlist
• Learn more about Mary Javian
• Explore Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs further

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, I'm Kirsten Michelle Cills!

Sorry, I was distracted.

And I'm distracted! He's The Bul Bey.

I'll just tell - spoiler alert, he's The Bul Bey!

Hey, guys. I'm The Bul Bey!

And this is So Curious! A podcast presented by The Franklin Institute.

And I guess that would make us your hosts? Absolutely.

This whole season of So Curious is about the science of music.

And today we're calling back to season one, all about Human 2.0 and biohacking.

And that's because today we're looking at

how music can affect our bodies and physical health.

And first, joining us from the UK, is

Professor Costas Karageorghis, to speak to us about his research into how

listening to music can make us better athletes.

Yeah, I can't wait for that.

And then we'll be sitting down with

musician and Curtis Institute professor, Mary Javian, about music's role in

healthcare, and how it can even help medical students be better doctors.

Okay, so music obviously is very abstract,

but it does give us, like, physical responses.

Yeah, it sounds kind of strange to frame this like this, but oftentimes when I hear

a song, or really well performed lyric or something like that, I feel grabbed.

That's a physical thing, like your brain zeroes in on it.

Well, maybe our next guest can help us get more answers.

Dr.

Costas Karageorghis, thanks so much for coming on the podcast!

Introduce yourself and let us know what it is you do.

My name is Professor Costas Karageorghis.

I work at Brunell University, London,

which is in the United Kingdom, just to the west of London.

My main area of research interest is how

music influences the mind/body relationship.

This is an area that I've been studying systematically for about 30 years, with a

specific focus on exercise, health, and sport.

Wow. And are you yourself a musician?

As it happens, I am, and that's how I got into this area in the first place.

Actually, I was an athlete and a musician.

I'm no longer an athlete, albeit I'm still quite heavily involved in track and field.

But, yeah, I'm known to tinkle the ivories from time to time.

(clip of Costas playing piano) I love that.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's great.

So we'll just jump into the first question, which is, what are some of the

different ways music can help improve athletic performance?

There's an incredible array of ways in

which music can enhance athletic performance.

And if we break it down to the ways that athletes use music, one of the main

applications is that athletes use music pre performance.

They do this to engender an optimal mindset.

Some athletes need to be psyched up.

Some need to be psyched down.

I guess one of the most famous exponents

of using music to psych-up is the celebrated American swimmer Michael

Phelps, who was famed for his particularly rap centric playlist.

I recall vividly when he was in London for the 2012 olympic Games.

He was listening to a track on a loop.

The title was "I'm Me", and that track has

the refrain, "yes, I am the best and no, I ain't positive, I'm definite.

I know the game like I'm reffing it." So you can see that he was drawing huge

affirmations from the lyrical content of that track.

Now, as well as using music before competition to stimulate or to sedate,

many athletes use it as part and parcel of their training routine.

We call this, in science, an in-task application.

These in-task applications come in two forms.

One is called asynchronous music.

This in essence is ambient music.

Music playing in the background to elevate

the athlete's mood, to relieve the pain, to reduce their perceived exertion.

Another type of in-task application is known as synchronous music.

And this is where athletes consciously

synchronize their movement rate to the rhythmical qualities of music.

And actually this synchronous application has also been used in competition.

I recall vividly one of the best known

middle and long distance runners of all time, the Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie,

made really instrumental use of synchronous music.

At one time, he was in Birmingham - that's Birmingham UK, not Birmingham, Alabama!

And he was competing in an invitation race over 2000 meters.

And his goal that day was to break the world best for that distance.

He made the rather unusual request to race

organizers to play his favorite piece of music, Scatman by Scatman John.

I recall that the starter's gun went off

and the music was blaring over the PA and Gebrselassie broke Eamonn Coghlan's world

best for 2000 meters by one and a half seconds.

Wow. That is a huge margin!

Yeah. Yes!

In track and field terms. Absolutely.

So with this synchronous music application, there is the propensity for

an ergogenic, or a work enhancing effect, with music.

Now, the third major way in which athletes

make use of music is as a recuperative tool.

And within this type of application there are two main ways in which it's used.

One is where it's used in between high intensity bouts of training.

So for example, many athletes use HIT - high intensity interval training, which

I'm sure is also used by many of your listeners.

One of the main consumer resistances

to HIT is that people feel really bad while doing it.

It's unpleasant!

And so by using music not during the exercise bout, but during recovery, it can

be used to assuage some of the negative feelings that people experience

while they're engaged in high intensity interval training.

And another type of application is the recuperative use of music.

This is when you're done and dusted with your workout, or your training session,

you're feeling exhausted, and soft, gentle, slow tempo music is used to bring

you back to a state of physiological homeostasis.

With the interval type exercise and the respite music, our research has shown that

it's medium tempo music that is most effective in that regard.

If you're using it recuperatively, it's best to use music from around 90 BPM

down to 60 BPM in order to return the athlete or the

exerciser towards physiological homeostasis, a natural resting state.

And you also mentioned earlier reducing pain.

Can music reduce pain? And I guess, what BPM helps reduce pain?

Yeah. I'm glad that you've raised that as a

question, because it's something that's really occupied me over the last three

decades or so, is how it is that music makes exercise feel easier.

And we've looked at this in many, many different ways.

Laterally, in fact.

We've been using neuroimaging techniques which allow us to take a sort of under the

bonnet perspective, to peer into the brain to understand exactly what is going on.

And using techniques such as

electroencephalography, or EG for short, a technique that uses

electrodes to scan electrical activity in the brain.

What we found is that the presence of

music during exercise reduces the degree to which somatosensory

areas of the brain, or to put it simply, areas of the brain responsible for

communicating fatigue, communicate with one another.

So we've discovered a mechanism that

accounts for the fact that when you listen to music during exercise, your perceived

exertion is reduced, on average, by about 10%.

Even if the music is very middle of the

road and not the sort of music that you would ordinarily listen to.

I mean, let's imagine we played you some

Metallica, or some Rip Roaring Iron Maiden.

Right.

That would still reduce your perceived exertion by about 8%.

But if we were to play you your favorite tracks, the tracks that you have a

predilection towards, the benefit in terms of reduced perceived

exertion would be around 12% with an average of ten.

So it's quite a small range, but going against what we hypothesized originally,

it's not the case that specially selected music reduces perceived exertion.

Any music can reduce perceived exertion.

But there's one important caveat, and that is that when we work out or when we train

at a very high intensity, let's say it's beyond around 75% of our aerobic capacity,

music is relatively ineffectual in reducing our perceived exertion.

It doesn't reduce our perceived exertion at very high intensities.

It's extremely effective in doing so at low to moderate intensities.

Having said that, our research has shown

that although music doesn't reduce perceived exertion at high intensities, it

goes on influencing the affective - the emotion centers of the brain such as the

cerebellum, the reptilian brain, and the amygdala.

And it can make us feel better even at very high intensities of exercise.

So during a really intense workout, even

though music can't influence what we feel it can influence how we feel it.

I like that, I love that.

You're really blowing my mind with this whole perceived exertion phrasing.

I know for me, when I'm at the gym, I don't want to hear myself struggle.

I don't want to hear myself go, like "Ugghhh"

Totally, right! Or be out of breath.

Like, I don't want to hear the strain.

So that's why I put on the music and I turn it up loud, so I can just kind of get

lost in the lyrics, or the beat, or the themes, or whatever the case may be.

I mean, as someone who works out, it is so

interesting how much of that kind of stuff really is like, you against you.

Or you against your brain! Right, exactly.

Your brain is communicating to you and messaging and disguising certain things.

Yeah.

So we wanted to play a little game because we are trying to build what would be like,

the most scientifically optimal workout playlist.

So if we were going to do that, what are things that you should be considering?

And then also, is there specificity in the order that things should go in?

Well, as a preface to that, the Roman philosopher Lucretius said that, "One

man's meat is another man's poison." And if we translate that into modern day

parlance - one person's music is another person's noise.

And so, really, you're touching on the Holy Grail in my area with this question!

Because it's not the case, necessarily, that you can come up with a universal

playlist that will work with equal efficacy for a large group of people.

Music is a very individual stimulus.

It's shaped by our peer group influences,

the kind of listening experiences that we have during our formative years, our

personalities, the type of activity that we do, the intensity of that activity.

Taking this at an individual level to tackle the question that you've posed, a

fundamental is the energy level that you're looking to attain in your workout

and the energy level that is conferred by the music program.

So the music program, ideally, will follow the ebb and flow of the workout.

If you're just preparing mentally.

I mean, for me, if I'm preparing mentally,

let's say, to go outside for a run on a very cold winter's night, I might listen

to a track such as "Chariots of Fire" by Vangelis.

It's a slow but evocative track.

It conjures imagery of Olympians of old, striding across the sands of St.

Andrews, and trying to self actualize and

be the best version of themselves that they can possibly be.

That inspires me.

And then I might use some music for warm

up as I'm going out in the dark and the cold.

It might be "Running With the Night, Lionel Ritchie!

And as the intensity of the workout grows,

so the intensity of the music will grow also.

And then as I'm warming down, I might use softer tracks.

And then when I'm recuperating, I might

use a very soft and gentle track, such as one by Enya or Enigma.

So thinking about the various

physiological contours is really key, I think, when you're selecting music.

But interestingly, our research shows that

when you're using music during an activity, let's say it's a rowing ogometer

workout, or a cycle ogometer workout, or going on the treadmill.

There's actually quite a narrow tempo band

that is effective, and that is

between around 120 and 145 BPM.

So when you're using the music asynchronously in the background, that

tempo range actually caters for quite a broad range of intensity.

I want to ask about future research.

What is the future as far as exploring how

music relates to athletics and making us better performers?

Yeah. What are you excited about in your field?

Yeah, that's a super question.

So as well as doing more work that is related to neuroscience and understanding

what happens within the brain when we're responding to music, that is an ongoing

program, I would say that a lot of the research that's been done in my field

historically has been out of kilter with what technology has been doing.

And what technology has enabled in recent years is for the synchronization of music

with physical activity to be automated, to happen without any conscious processing.

So this is a very exciting field of

exploration for me and something that I'm working in at the moment.

I actually have a related article coming

out in Leonardo with a colleague at the University of Manchester later this year.

But we have a whole program of research planned to understand how automating

synchronization influences the human organism.

And that's something that I find very exciting.

Trying to get on a par with the technologists.

As I say, they've always been slightly

ahead of where research is because, you know, it takes a long time to plan

research, to get ethical clearance, to recruit participants, maybe spending a

year going through peer review, editing, proofs.

It's a really involved and arduous process to publish an article.

And so I tend to always think a few years ahead.

And so the research that I'm working on

right now will probably be published in two or three years time.

Well, we can't wait to see it, really.

I know, but yeah, that is quite like the turnaround time there.

Wow. Well, thank you so much for being here and

chatting with us, Professor Costas Karageorghis, thank you so much!

It's good to meet you both. Thanks.

You too.

Well, thank you so much, Professor Karageorghis, definitely going to need to

reevaluate my workout playlist next time I hit the gym.

Do you have a playlist?

Yeah, for sure.

But now that I know there is, like, that

scientific side behind it - I mean, obviously this is the So Curious podcast

presented by The Franklin Institute - of course there's a scientific aspect!

But when he was hitting you with the BPMs, I was like, that's pretty dope.

Yeah, sometimes I go to the created playlist by whatever streaming platform.

Yeah, those are good.

Yeah, generally speaking, they are actually good.

And they do actually work.

And I guess it's because of those BPMs and that energy that's in there.

Yeah, I love the curated playlists.

I love how specific they've gotten because they used to just be like, "Workout", and

now it's like "Workouts from Summer Hits of 1995, Written by a Man Named George,

Whose Mom's Name was Karen." It's like, damn, how'd you find all this songs!

I couldn't agree more.

Now we're going to shift from the gym.

We're going to go to med school to talk about music in healthcare.

So Mary Javian, welcome so very much to the So Curious podcast!

How are you? I'm good, thanks.

Can you, Mary, introduce yourself?

Tell us who you are, what you do?

You yourself are a musician, right?

So feel free to brag.

Sure! Well, it's great to be here.

I have always had many jobs, but I am on

the faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music here in Philadelphia.

I'm chair of department we call Career Studies, which I helped found, and it is

basically all of the parts of your artistry as applied to society.

So I teach entrepreneurship and social practice.

I'm a double bass player.

I've been playing with groups like the

Philadelphia Orchestra for the last 23 years or so.

This week I'm playing with the Philadelphia Ballet, and I'm a curator.

I have a group that I'm artistic director

for down in Memphis called the Iris Collective.

And I'm also an artistic advisor for

Astral Artists, which is a young artist support organization here in Philadelphia.

(Clip of Mary playing bass)

One of the things that I know we're going

to talk about today, that just finished up, was I teach a class at the Perlman

School of Medicine called Humanism and Professionalism Through Music.

Oooooo! Awesome.

Yes. I definitely want to hear about Humanism.

Before we get to that - so through your work at Curtis and also your personal

endeavors, you carry classical music in and outside of the spaces where people

might expect to see it and may not expect to see it.

Why is this work important to you?

Well, it's something that I've always been

really passionate about, even when I was a student.

I started the first version of our

outreach program when I was still in school at Curtis, and I just always had a

feeling that this art form could mean more to more people, that needed to be kind of

brought out of the concert hall and more into neighborhoods, communities.

I initially started with schools.

There are a lot of music teachers in the

schools, but there's also a lot of need to collaborate and support those programs.

So I started doing that early on, and then I also started to get really interested in

how other genres can collaborate and connect.

And even I would say I'm sort of genre agnostic now.

I feel like we're living in a post genre world, and so I don't like to kind of keep

things in just one box when it comes to those sort of things.

That's awesome. What would you say is, like, the standard

way that people kind of interact with classical music and also where's the most

awkward or strange or weird or silly place that you brought classical music into?

Oh, yeah. I'm always taking it to strange places.

In fact, whenever anything like, weird

shows up at Curtis, the security staff will call my cell phone.

"There's a, I don't know, an oud here in the lobby.

We don't know what to do with it. It's probably Mary."

It's probably Mary...

Well, I mean, not the weirdest place, but one of the most amazing places where I've

performed music was actually inside a maximum security prison.

So I worked with my grad students at

Curtis at Greaterford Prison for two years.

And then we moved over to the Phoenix, and

we were working with Villanova University, which has an awesome program where guys

can get degrees while they're incarcerated.

And so, one of my grad students was

teaching the music class, and I was bringing in my Curtis students to help

support that because we couldn't use recorders or anything.

They were writing music and they couldn't

hear it, unless we came in with our instruments and played it for them.

So that was actually really awesome.

Now let's talk about how music, I guess, affects health and interacts with that.

What are some of the residencies Curtis has set up in healthcare settings?

Right.

So after working in schools, later on, I started getting really interested in

health care, and it's been an amazing experience.

The first thing I think that happened was

one of my friends, who was a professional violinist for 15 years, went to med school

at 40 at Jefferson, and she's now a psychiatrist.

Her name's Dr.

Lee Beverly Shen, and she got us into Jefferson.

So we were working with a palliative care doctor, and I had a grad student at Curtis

who was a harpist that was there for two years doing bedside.

And actually the nurses would assign which room she would go to.

And we worked very closely on the cancer floors and the dialysis center.

We even worked in the neonatal unit with the newborn babies.

Wow.

And that's all under palliative care? What's palliative care?

Well, the palliative care was mostly the

cancer floor, where you're just treating people to make them comfortable.

They're not going to be cured, right?

So they're at end of life.

We also had residency at a hospice, and we

worked with music therapists, and I would send undergrads in and they would play

music on the floor with the guidance of the music therapists because that's a

really specific skill set that's different.

When you're in music therapy, you have clinical outcomes.

When you're a musician working in healthcare settings, you're sort of aiding

the environment, making the environment better.

And it's always good to work in collaboration with professionals, so

you're there to benefit the environment and not cause any harm.

So we love stories here, like, if you have

any that you can share of, like, personal anecdotes experiences, anything specific

that you've noticed in terms of the healing power of music and your work in

the community, I'm sure that it's endless, but anything that sticks out to you?

Well, one of the most moving projects I've been a part of has been working with the

Penn Memory Center, that is an Alzheimer's research center here at Penn.

And it's an amazing place.

It's run by a social worker, Felicia

Greenfield, but it's founded by a neurologist and a gerontologist, and they

do tons of work not only with patients, but with caregivers.

So we've been running a weekly music class

at Curtis for patients and their caregivers together to come.

And it's called Creative Expression Through Music.

I think there's a lot of thought around Alzheimer's being remembering the music of

your youth, and hearing that will somehow bring you back.

And my mother in law, who I was very close to, had Alzheimer's.

And my husband and I and my brother in law

and his wife were her caregivers for years.

It's a disease that really affects the entire family for a long, long time.

And the thing that was really beautiful about the class is that we saw couples

that were coming together to actually write music, create music with our

musicians, and they started new rituals together at home.

Like this one couple, I remember, they wrote a song about their garden and the

Curtis students performed it and recorded it.

They just got into this ritual each night

of listening to music together, which they had never done before.

And it's so beautiful to have a new thing

entered when you're in something as difficult as dealing with Alzheimer's.

Yeah.

How does understanding music make for better doctors?

So that class at Pearlman was really interesting.

There is a Dean at Pearlman, Dr.

Horace DeLisser, who reached out to me.

He found me through the Philadelphia Orchestra.

He is the Dean of Humanism and Professionalism.

So that's where the title of the course came from.

And one thing that I think is really

interesting is that medicine is sort of looking differently at how they train

people for the profession and that there's so much more than just the list of

symptoms on the page, but how do you regard the whole human?

And so there's really interesting things where doctors are even considering

prescribing arts experiences for general health and wellness, which is what I think

we should run towards if you're really dealing with the whole human.

And then there's the issue of extreme stress and burnout in the medical field.

I mean, even before the pandemic, it's very intense.

And we need those talented young people to

stay and stay close to the why, why they went into this in the first place.

And those arts experiences often kind of

help feel them connected to their own why and their own purpose.

I'm really intrigued by you saying about prescribing experiences.

Is the goal in the future, like your

insurance would maybe one day cover something like going to -

A museum visit! Right, a museum or a concert.

Can you imagine? Oh, my gosh, it would be amazing!

Right, well, I mean, that's one of the things in my undergrad class at Curtis.

If you look at the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

We have this partnership with Philly

House, which is the largest and oldest homeless shelter in Philadelphia, and we

actually work with them and the staff and the musicians.

We were all looking at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

You think about a shelter, and they're the basic needs, like food, shelter.

When you move up the pyramid, there are

things that every person still deserves to have a sense of belonging.

And if you want to get all the way up to

the top and self actualization, creative activities are what do that.

And all people should really have those

experiences in order to live their truest, fullest lives.

So the name of the class that you were teaching to the Penn Medical students was

called Humanism and Professionalism Through Music.

Is that the humanism aspect when you say that?

Right, yeah.

I mean, some of the course goals were kind of lofty, like

increasing tolerance of ambiguity, which artists tend to have a lot of, or we

should have a lot of! You know, and increasing empathy.

The cognitive qualities of empathy are developed through things like the arts.

Have you had any feedback from any of your

med students that you've been teaching, in terms of what they took away from it as

people who maybe have never had an experience in the arts side of things?

Well, so it's interesting because the

class was originally developed for people that didn't have a background in music.

And then my last cohort was super musical.

But, I will say that even though they had

all played music and studied music, except for a couple of them, they had never

really connected that to what they are going to do as doctors.

And so one of my guests came up from Johns Hopkins Peabody, and her name is Sarah

Hoover, and she wrote an awesome book on music and health care.

And she was kind of opening up to all

these possibilities for what the future could hold between these two spaces.

And that was really, kind of eye opening to them, particularly that point about,

what if we get to the point where we're prescribing arts experiences?

And then when we had Jason Karlawish from the Penn Memory Center come and talk,

he said the same exact thing and they had never even talked to each other.

There is something happening.

There's something moving that we need to keep playing with and keep poking at.

Well, I mean, this was amazing.

Thank you so much, Mary Javian, and it was so great to chat with you.

It was, it was awesome.

And we look forward to seeing what your work has to come.

All right. Thanks so much, guys!

Thanks!

Thank you so much, Mary, for finding the

time between teaching and performing to come on and chat with us.

Humanism is such an interesting word

because it sounds so vague, but like no, it is just like the innate side of us that

we can't really - I mean, I guess she found a way to pinpoint it and teach.

A class on it. But just like like, you know?

This is the reason why I really enjoy this

podcast, So Curious - presented by The Franklin Institute - is because we

oftentimes, we know this innately in ourselves, but we don't have the language

or understand the actual, kind of like, academia framework around these sensations

and these experiences and these ideas and values and things like that.

But we absolutely understand that the

health of a human goes beyond the boundaries of doses of medicine.

Yeah. And as somebody who has, and I do not say

this lightly, A LOT of doctors, I go to the doctor a lot, I can tell you

that kind of stuff is so noticeable when I have a doctor who I can tell is like,

taking interest in me and my feelings and my life.

Mmmm, chef's kiss.

So we've got some awesome guests coming

up, so please be sure to subscribe to So Curious wherever you listen to podcasts.

And please make sure if you have a second, just give us a five star review, write a

little something nice, or just the stars if you don't have time.

It goes such a long way so we can get this

word out to other people who are interested.

Thank you so, so, so much.

And be sure to join us next week when we

look at the science behind how we understand music and language, and how the

two may not be as different as you might think.

And what that seems to do, when you look at the brain, is it seems to take circuits

in the brain that were more specialized for singing and retrain them for speech.

This podcast is made in partnership with

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The Franklin Institute's Director of Digital Editorial is Joy Montefusco.

Dr.

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runs Marketing, Communications and Digital Media.

Head of Operations is Christopher Plant.

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And I am Kirsten. Michelle Cills.

And I'm The Bul Bey. Thank you!