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(Music)

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(Applause)

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Thank you very much. (Applause)

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Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here.

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A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube

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of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords

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at the early stages of her recovery

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from one of those awful bullets.

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This one entered her left hemisphere, and

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knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain.

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And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist,

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and she's struggling to produce

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some of the most basic words, and you can see her

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growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately

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breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing

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wordlessly into the arms of her therapist.

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And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack,

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and they start singing together,

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and Gabby starts to sing through her tears,

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and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate

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the words to a song that describe the way she feels,

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and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings,

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"Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine."

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And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how

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the beauty of music has the ability to speak

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where words fail, in this case literally speak.

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Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me

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of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug,

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one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard,

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and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called

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Melodic Intonation Therapy, which has become very popular in music therapy now.

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Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic,

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could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences,

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but they could still sing the lyrics to a song,

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whether it was "Happy Birthday To You"

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or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones.

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And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons,

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he found that the music was able to literally rewire

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the brains of his patients and create a homologous

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speech center in their right hemisphere

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to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage.

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When I was 17, I visited Dr. Schlaug's lab, and in one afternoon

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he walked me through some of the leading research

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on music and the brain -- how musicians had

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fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians,

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how music, and listening to music,

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could just light up the entire brain, from

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our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum,

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how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality

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to help children with autism, to help people struggling

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with stress and anxiety and depression,

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how deeply Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor

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and their gait would steady when they listened to music,

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and how late-stage Alzheimer's patients, whose dementia

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was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize

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their family, could still pick out a tune by Chopin

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at the piano that they had learned when they were children.

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But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug,

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and it was this: that I was at a crossroads in my life,

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trying to choose between music and medicine.

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I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working

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as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe,

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studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen

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in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon.

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I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes,

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these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia

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and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant

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tuberculosis, or with children with disfiguring cancers.

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I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor,

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that doctor without borders.

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On the other hand, I had played the violin my entire life.

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Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession.

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It was oxygen. I was lucky enough to have studied

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at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played

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my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv,

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and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug

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had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory,

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but had given up his love for music to pursue a career

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in medicine. And that afternoon, I had to ask him,

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"How was it for you making that decision?"

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And he said that there were still times when he wished

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he could go back and play the organ the way he used to,

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and that for me, medical school could wait,

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but that the violin simply would not.

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And after two more years of studying music, I decided

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to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT

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and applying to medical school like a good Indian son

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to become the next Dr. Gupta. (Laughter)

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And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took

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an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic.

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It was my first audition, and after three days of playing

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behind a screen in a trial week, I was offered the position.

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And it was a dream. It was a wild dream to perform

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in an orchestra, to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall

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in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel,

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but much more importantly to me to be surrounded

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by musicians and mentors that became my new family,

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my new musical home.

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But a year later, I met another musician who had also

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studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me

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find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician.

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Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard, but

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he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s,

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was treated with thorazine at Bellevue,

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and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row

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in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later.

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Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness

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and mental health advocacy throughout the United States,

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as told through the book and the movie "The Soloist,"

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but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher,

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and I told him that wherever he had his violin,

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and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him.

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And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row,

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I witnessed how music was able to bring him back

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from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me

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in my untrained eye to be

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the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode.

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Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning,

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because now it was about communication,

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a communication where words failed, a communication

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of a message that went deeper than words, that registered

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at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel's psyche,

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yet came as a true musical offering from me.

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I found myself growing outraged that someone

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like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid Row

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because of his mental illness, yet how many tens of thousands

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of others there were out there on Skid Row alone

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who had stories as tragic as his, but were never going to have a book or a movie

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made about them that got them off the streets?

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And at the very core of this crisis of mine, I felt somehow

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the life of music had chosen me, where somehow,

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perhaps possibly in a very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row

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really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer

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and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill.

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But in the end, it was Nathaniel who showed me

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that if I was truly passionate about change,

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if I wanted to make a difference, I already had the perfect instrument to do it,

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that music was the bridge that connected my world and his.

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There's a beautiful quote

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by the Romantic German composer Robert Schumann,

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who said, "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts,

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such is the duty of the artist."

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And this is a particularly poignant quote

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because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia

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and died in asylum.

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And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel,

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I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians

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called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music

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into the very darkest places, performing

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for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics

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on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans

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with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated

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and those labeled as criminally insane.

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After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital

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in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us

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and she had tears streaming down her face,

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and she had a palsy, she was shaking,

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and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said

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that she had never heard classical music before,

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she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never

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heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine,

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and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years,

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when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication.

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Suddenly, what we're finding with these concerts,

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away from the stage, away from the footlights, out

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of the tuxedo tails, the musicians become the conduit

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for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits

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of music on the brain to an audience that would never

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have access to this room,

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would never have access to the kind of music that we make.

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Just as medicine serves to heal more

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than the building blocks of the body alone,

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the power and beauty of music transcends the "E"

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in the middle of our beloved acronym.

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Music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone.

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The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we

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hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms,

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or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember

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our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal

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connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness

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that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired

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into our brain's right hemisphere.

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And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions

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of mental illness within homelessness

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and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music

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offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them,

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to remember that they still have the capacity to experience

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something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them.

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And the spark of that beauty, the spark of that humanity

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transforms into hope,

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and we know, whether we choose the path of music

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or of medicine, that's the very first thing we must instill

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within our communities, within our audiences,

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if we want to inspire healing from within.

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I'd like to end with a quote by John Keats,

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the Romantic English poet,

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a very famous quote that I'm sure all of you know.

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Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine

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to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me.

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And Keats said, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.

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That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."

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(Music)

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(Applause)