Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Maricene Crus
I got my Britney Spears mic, finally.
(Laughter)
Life can be tough.
Music can help.
Okay, close your eyes.
For reals, close your eyes.
Imagine you're in a classroom and your teacher says,
"Get out a blank piece of paper and a pencil,
and you're going to do a 15-second exercise."
But remember: don't think.
Are you ready?
Draw your soul.
Okay, you can open your eyes.
This is a story that I loved from a book I read in elementary school
called "Walk Two Moons."
In this story, the kids look blankly at the page,
freaking out figuring out, "What does my soul look like?"
and then, furiously scribble.
And when they come back from recess,
they realize the teacher has put all the drawings up on the wall.
And the main character sees there's all different kinds of symbols and images,
and then she sees one of the drawings looks exactly like hers,
a circle with a maple leaf inside.
They're soulmates.
This totally fascinated me
because I had created countless imaginary worlds with my sister growing up,
but this totally took the cake,
the fact that inside each of us is an invisible world.
This must be where dreams and thoughts and feelings,
who you are, that can't be explained by biology or environment,
your consciousness -
It's safe to say this is kind of what started me on my journey,
for the rest of my life,
to figure out what the hell is going on inside.
So, I got a psychology degree
and I actually worked in psychology research labs
at Berkeley and Stanford,
but honestly, I didn't realize until very recently
that my obsession with this inner world
is very related to music,
which is what I do now.
Music is the original human tool to help soothe our soul.
Did you know music has been in every single culture
throughout history?
Every single one.
Early modern men, they found a bone flute
that was carved in the same pentatonic scale that we use today.
We're talking Ice Age, when your main concern should probably be,
"Don't get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger."
But they were playing music!
And they say, evolutionary wise,
something that exists in all these cultures and across all people,
something that universal,
must help humans survive.
So, what is it about music that helps us survive?
There's a lot of theories,
because music does a lot of really cool stuff for us.
Like, it enhances learning, it improves your memory,
it helps with insomnia -
I could go on for a while
because music lights up all the different parts of your brain.
But I really want to focus on one new line of study
that says, from the beginning of human culture,
music has developed separately from language
to help us deal with life.
The guy who's studied all this is named Leonid Perlovsky.
He says, "While language splits the world into detailed, distinct pieces,
music unifies the world into a whole,
and our psyche requires both."
So, what do I mean by "helps us deal with life"?
Well, every day, we go out
and information from the outside world comes in through our perception
and into our inner world.
And sometimes, it matches our ideas and our values and our knowledge,
and sometimes, it doesn't.
And when these two competing, conflicting concepts are happening,
they kind of have like a rub, an uncomfortable rub,
because we like things to make sense.
This is called cognitive dissonance.
Let me give you an example.
Too much science, right?
So, let's say you meet someone,
you love them, you think they're your soulmate,
and then you're getting ready to propose and they leave you.
This is uncomfortable not only emotionally,
but because you have the idea that they are your soulmate
and then the reality that they just left.
So, to deal with this uncomfortableness, people usually do one of two things.
You can reject the new information,
like, "They didn't leave, they're going to come back,"
or you could suppress the old concept,
"I never thought they were my soulmate."
If we could sit with this uncomfortable feeling,
we could face it and we could maybe make a tweak
and adjust our inner world to accommodate both.
Maybe we didn't give ourselves enough time to really know that person,
and then we can evolve, and next time we find someone we love,
we can spend a little more time checking off boxes before we buy a ring.
So where does music fit in, right?
Music soothes that uncomfortable feeling,
so we can focus on making better decisions,
so we can adjust and evolve.
The example is there's a study where they play music
while kids are working on really difficult math problems.
And as you all know, probably,
if you can imagine yourselves back working on a math problem -
it's the worse place you can be -
(Laughter)
the kids that are working on the difficult math problem
that have music playing
will spend more time on it,
and that's why they'll end up with better scores.
Kids that don't have music playing get frustrated and move on faster.
So music had always helped soothe the uncomfortable feelings in me;
for example, when I was little,
and I was afraid to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
There was like a real long dark hallway -
Don't judge, you all did this, I know this.
(Laughter)
I would sing to myself
because, that way, I had my own music going
and I could be afraid but also get to the bathroom.
(Laughter)
In my song "Burning House" that I wrote,
I had a similar set of conflicting concepts.
I believe that I'm a good person -
I like to think that -
but looking back on an old relationship of mine,
I treated someone that I loved very poorly.
I was a jerk.
And facing that made me very ashamed and embarrassed,
but in writing that song and singing that song,
I got to acknowledge and to accept the fact
that I can be a good person now
and I still can't fix what I did back then.
So when I sing these vulnerable songs onstage, in front of people,
the coolest thing happens:
people feel the urge to tell me their own personal struggles.
So people will come up to me every show, lots of people,
and tell me their marriage is on the rocks,
they're battling a terminal illness,
they love someone with an addiction
that probably they're not going to get out of,
really difficult things to face.
And their stories might not be exactly like mine,
but I know they're feeling the same underlying, complex emotion.
At first, it made me nervous
because I felt like maybe they were coming to me for answers,
and I can definitely tell you that I don't have the answers.
But I realized in times when I didn't know what to say,
I would just give them a hug,
and in those hugs, I really got it:
they weren't telling me these stories for their benefit;
they were telling me these stories for my benefit.
Those stories healed me.
And this is what's my favorite part about music:
the sharing of me being vulnerable and singing these stories
and them giving these stories back to me.
It makes us realize we are not struggling alone.
We are not struggling alone.
Let me say it one more time: we are not struggling alone.
We're no longer strangers. We're kindred spirits.
And I like to think that a part of their soul drawing
might look like a part of my soul drawing.
This new connection motivated me and continues to motivate me
to keep doing me and keep being me.
I really want to share one of these stories with you
that someone sent to me.
I want to read it word for word because it's really beautiful.
It references a song called 'Village,"
that I wrote for my friend who lost her brother.
"I just wanted to say a quick thank you for the song 'Village.'
A post I had made on Facebook a year ago popped up as a memory today.
I had lost my brother almost six months ago to the day,
and this song hit me hard.
My son Collin, then six years old, has autism and is nonverbal.
So, as you can imagine, communication with him isn't easy.
He saw me crying as I listened to the song,
and we had this incredible moment of connection.
He was empathic to my emotion and he seemed to completely understand.
My brother was a base jumper
and Collin always identified him as 'Fly.'
He found videos of him fascinating.
In this moment, a year ago,
he climbed upon my lap and embraced me in a hug.
When the song finished, he pulled back,
grabbed my cheek so I was looking right at him
and he said, 'Fly, Fly.'
Then he put his head back on my shoulder and continued to hug me.
It was a moment with my son that I will never forget."
She included a photo of her son and her in this message that she sent to me
that I want to show you guys.
So if music can help a nonverbal kid communicate with his mom,
can help us soothe our souls, can help us evolve our inner selves,
can make friends out of strangers,
are you getting the most you can out of music?
I really want to remind you
that music is not just the background at a shopping mall,
it's not just a weekend entertainment.
It's a tool that our species developed
to help us heal ourselves and soothe our souls.
Music carries the burden of our heartbreak,
it allow us to process grief,
it reminds us that good things are coming
and it lets us know that we are not struggling alone.
So, let music do its job.
Life can be tough. Music can help.
(Applause)