WEBVTT 00:00:07.765 --> 00:00:25.568 (Music) 00:02:22.825 --> 00:02:25.924 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:02:25.924 --> 00:02:31.284 Thank you very much. (Applause) 00:02:31.284 --> 00:02:34.957 Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:34.957 --> 00:02:36.881 A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube 00:02:36.881 --> 00:02:39.161 of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords 00:02:39.161 --> 00:02:41.320 at the early stages of her recovery 00:02:41.320 --> 00:02:43.505 from one of those awful bullets. 00:02:43.505 --> 00:02:45.626 This one entered her left hemisphere, and 00:02:45.626 --> 00:02:49.142 knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain. 00:02:49.142 --> 00:02:53.048 And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, 00:02:53.048 --> 00:02:54.837 and she's struggling to produce 00:02:54.837 --> 00:02:57.949 some of the most basic words, and you can see her 00:02:57.949 --> 00:03:01.128 growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately 00:03:01.128 --> 00:03:04.004 breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing 00:03:04.004 --> 00:03:07.980 wordlessly into the arms of her therapist. 00:03:07.980 --> 00:03:10.297 And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, 00:03:10.297 --> 00:03:11.932 and they start singing together, 00:03:11.932 --> 00:03:14.073 and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, 00:03:14.073 --> 00:03:16.736 and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate 00:03:16.736 --> 00:03:19.197 the words to a song that describe the way she feels, 00:03:19.197 --> 00:03:22.117 and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings, 00:03:22.117 --> 00:03:25.726 "Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine." 00:03:25.726 --> 00:03:28.707 And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how 00:03:28.707 --> 00:03:32.271 the beauty of music has the ability to speak 00:03:32.271 --> 00:03:37.047 where words fail, in this case literally speak. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:37.047 --> 00:03:38.800 Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me 00:03:38.800 --> 00:03:41.601 of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, 00:03:41.601 --> 00:03:45.352 one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard, 00:03:45.352 --> 00:03:47.771 and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called 00:03:47.771 --> 00:03:52.784 Melodic Intonation Therapy, which has become very popular in music therapy now. 00:03:52.784 --> 00:03:57.107 Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic, 00:03:57.107 --> 00:04:01.757 could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences, 00:04:01.757 --> 00:04:05.060 but they could still sing the lyrics to a song, 00:04:05.060 --> 00:04:07.009 whether it was "Happy Birthday To You" 00:04:07.009 --> 00:04:09.647 or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones. 00:04:09.647 --> 00:04:12.586 And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons, 00:04:12.586 --> 00:04:16.588 he found that the music was able to literally rewire 00:04:16.588 --> 00:04:19.040 the brains of his patients and create a homologous 00:04:19.040 --> 00:04:20.932 speech center in their right hemisphere 00:04:20.932 --> 00:04:24.431 to compensate for the left hemisphere's damage. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:24.431 --> 00:04:27.816 When I was 17, I visited Dr. Schlaug's lab, and in one afternoon 00:04:27.816 --> 00:04:30.332 he walked me through some of the leading research 00:04:30.332 --> 00:04:34.167 on music and the brain -- how musicians had 00:04:34.167 --> 00:04:37.231 fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians, 00:04:37.231 --> 00:04:38.741 how music, and listening to music, 00:04:38.741 --> 00:04:40.995 could just light up the entire brain, from 00:04:40.995 --> 00:04:44.469 our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum, 00:04:44.469 --> 00:04:47.296 how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality 00:04:47.296 --> 00:04:50.919 to help children with autism, to help people struggling 00:04:50.919 --> 00:04:53.704 with stress and anxiety and depression, 00:04:53.704 --> 00:04:57.119 how deeply Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor 00:04:57.119 --> 00:05:00.500 and their gait would steady when they listened to music, 00:05:00.500 --> 00:05:03.909 and how late-stage Alzheimer's patients, whose dementia 00:05:03.909 --> 00:05:06.805 was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize 00:05:06.805 --> 00:05:09.591 their family, could still pick out a tune by Chopin 00:05:09.591 --> 00:05:13.253 at the piano that they had learned when they were children. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:13.253 --> 00:05:16.300 But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug, 00:05:16.300 --> 00:05:19.518 and it was this: that I was at a crossroads in my life, 00:05:19.518 --> 00:05:22.303 trying to choose between music and medicine. 00:05:22.303 --> 00:05:25.264 I had just completed my undergraduate, and I was working 00:05:25.264 --> 00:05:28.137 as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe, 00:05:28.137 --> 00:05:31.600 studying Parkinson's disease at Harvard, and I had fallen 00:05:31.600 --> 00:05:34.467 in love with neuroscience. I wanted to become a surgeon. 00:05:34.467 --> 00:05:38.245 I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes, 00:05:38.245 --> 00:05:42.362 these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia 00:05:42.362 --> 00:05:45.193 and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant 00:05:45.193 --> 00:05:48.982 tuberculosis, or with children with disfiguring cancers. 00:05:48.982 --> 00:05:51.906 I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor, 00:05:51.906 --> 00:05:53.910 that doctor without borders. 00:05:53.910 --> 00:05:57.453 On the other hand, I had played the violin my entire life. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:57.453 --> 00:06:01.195 Music for me was more than a passion. It was obsession. 00:06:01.195 --> 00:06:04.358 It was oxygen. I was lucky enough to have studied 00:06:04.358 --> 00:06:07.437 at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played 00:06:07.437 --> 00:06:11.792 my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv, 00:06:11.792 --> 00:06:13.830 and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug 00:06:13.830 --> 00:06:17.054 had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, 00:06:17.054 --> 00:06:19.437 but had given up his love for music to pursue a career 00:06:19.437 --> 00:06:23.118 in medicine. And that afternoon, I had to ask him, 00:06:23.118 --> 00:06:25.654 "How was it for you making that decision?" NOTE Paragraph 00:06:25.654 --> 00:06:27.683 And he said that there were still times when he wished 00:06:27.683 --> 00:06:30.455 he could go back and play the organ the way he used to, 00:06:30.455 --> 00:06:33.672 and that for me, medical school could wait, 00:06:33.672 --> 00:06:36.447 but that the violin simply would not. 00:06:36.447 --> 00:06:39.007 And after two more years of studying music, I decided 00:06:39.007 --> 00:06:41.816 to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT 00:06:41.816 --> 00:06:44.392 and applying to medical school like a good Indian son 00:06:44.392 --> 00:06:47.250 to become the next Dr. Gupta. (Laughter) 00:06:47.250 --> 00:06:49.882 And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took 00:06:49.882 --> 00:06:52.825 an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic. 00:06:52.825 --> 00:06:55.827 It was my first audition, and after three days of playing 00:06:55.827 --> 00:06:58.853 behind a screen in a trial week, I was offered the position. 00:06:58.853 --> 00:07:02.771 And it was a dream. It was a wild dream to perform 00:07:02.771 --> 00:07:06.271 in an orchestra, to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall 00:07:06.271 --> 00:07:09.855 in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel, 00:07:09.855 --> 00:07:12.841 but much more importantly to me to be surrounded 00:07:12.841 --> 00:07:16.731 by musicians and mentors that became my new family, 00:07:16.731 --> 00:07:19.925 my new musical home. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:19.925 --> 00:07:23.635 But a year later, I met another musician who had also 00:07:23.635 --> 00:07:26.724 studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me 00:07:26.724 --> 00:07:31.082 find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician. 00:07:31.082 --> 00:07:34.363 Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard, but 00:07:34.363 --> 00:07:38.102 he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s, 00:07:38.102 --> 00:07:40.448 was treated with thorazine at Bellevue, 00:07:40.448 --> 00:07:43.924 and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row 00:07:43.924 --> 00:07:46.370 in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later. 00:07:46.370 --> 00:07:49.815 Nathaniel's story has become a beacon for homelessness 00:07:49.815 --> 00:07:52.673 and mental health advocacy throughout the United States, 00:07:52.673 --> 00:07:54.818 as told through the book and the movie "The Soloist," 00:07:54.818 --> 00:07:57.964 but I became his friend, and I became his violin teacher, 00:07:57.964 --> 00:08:00.474 and I told him that wherever he had his violin, 00:08:00.474 --> 00:08:03.445 and wherever I had mine, I would play a lesson with him. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:03.445 --> 00:08:06.124 And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row, 00:08:06.124 --> 00:08:08.933 I witnessed how music was able to bring him back 00:08:08.933 --> 00:08:11.900 from his very darkest moments, from what seemed to me 00:08:11.900 --> 00:08:13.860 in my untrained eye to be 00:08:13.860 --> 00:08:17.660 the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode. 00:08:17.660 --> 00:08:20.914 Playing for Nathaniel, the music took on a deeper meaning, 00:08:20.914 --> 00:08:23.472 because now it was about communication, 00:08:23.472 --> 00:08:26.382 a communication where words failed, a communication 00:08:26.382 --> 00:08:29.540 of a message that went deeper than words, that registered 00:08:29.540 --> 00:08:33.029 at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel's psyche, 00:08:33.029 --> 00:08:37.576 yet came as a true musical offering from me. 00:08:37.576 --> 00:08:41.553 I found myself growing outraged that someone 00:08:41.553 --> 00:08:45.462 like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid Row 00:08:45.462 --> 00:08:48.801 because of his mental illness, yet how many tens of thousands 00:08:48.801 --> 00:08:51.906 of others there were out there on Skid Row alone 00:08:51.906 --> 00:08:56.662 who had stories as tragic as his, but were never going to have a book or a movie 00:08:56.662 --> 00:08:58.924 made about them that got them off the streets? 00:08:58.924 --> 00:09:02.937 And at the very core of this crisis of mine, I felt somehow 00:09:02.937 --> 00:09:07.032 the life of music had chosen me, where somehow, 00:09:07.032 --> 00:09:10.001 perhaps possibly in a very naive sense, I felt what Skid Row 00:09:10.001 --> 00:09:13.012 really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer 00:09:13.012 --> 00:09:17.153 and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:17.153 --> 00:09:19.203 But in the end, it was Nathaniel who showed me 00:09:19.203 --> 00:09:21.930 that if I was truly passionate about change, 00:09:21.930 --> 00:09:26.253 if I wanted to make a difference, I already had the perfect instrument to do it, 00:09:26.253 --> 00:09:31.022 that music was the bridge that connected my world and his. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:31.022 --> 00:09:32.694 There's a beautiful quote 00:09:32.694 --> 00:09:35.158 by the Romantic German composer Robert Schumann, 00:09:35.158 --> 00:09:40.367 who said, "To send light into the darkness of men's hearts, 00:09:40.367 --> 00:09:42.792 such is the duty of the artist." 00:09:42.792 --> 00:09:45.228 And this is a particularly poignant quote 00:09:45.228 --> 00:09:47.967 because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia 00:09:47.967 --> 00:09:50.075 and died in asylum. 00:09:50.075 --> 00:09:52.537 And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel, 00:09:52.537 --> 00:09:54.901 I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians 00:09:54.901 --> 00:09:58.094 called Street Symphony, bringing the light of music 00:09:58.094 --> 00:10:00.738 into the very darkest places, performing 00:10:00.738 --> 00:10:03.325 for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics 00:10:03.325 --> 00:10:07.355 on Skid Row, performing for combat veterans 00:10:07.355 --> 00:10:10.765 with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for the incarcerated 00:10:10.765 --> 00:10:14.569 and those labeled as criminally insane. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:14.569 --> 00:10:16.962 After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital 00:10:16.962 --> 00:10:19.483 in San Bernardino, a woman walked up to us 00:10:19.483 --> 00:10:21.800 and she had tears streaming down her face, 00:10:21.800 --> 00:10:24.266 and she had a palsy, she was shaking, 00:10:24.266 --> 00:10:27.288 and she had this gorgeous smile, and she said 00:10:27.288 --> 00:10:29.270 that she had never heard classical music before, 00:10:29.270 --> 00:10:31.696 she didn't think she was going to like it, she had never 00:10:31.696 --> 00:10:35.798 heard a violin before, but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine, 00:10:35.798 --> 00:10:39.167 and that nobody ever came to visit them, and that for the first time in six years, 00:10:39.167 --> 00:10:43.970 when she heard us play, she stopped shaking without medication. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:43.970 --> 00:10:46.928 Suddenly, what we're finding with these concerts, 00:10:46.928 --> 00:10:49.970 away from the stage, away from the footlights, out 00:10:49.970 --> 00:10:53.591 of the tuxedo tails, the musicians become the conduit 00:10:53.591 --> 00:10:56.713 for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits 00:10:56.713 --> 00:10:59.806 of music on the brain to an audience that would never 00:10:59.806 --> 00:11:01.608 have access to this room, 00:11:01.608 --> 00:11:07.440 would never have access to the kind of music that we make. 00:11:07.440 --> 00:11:10.871 Just as medicine serves to heal more 00:11:10.871 --> 00:11:14.169 than the building blocks of the body alone, 00:11:14.169 --> 00:11:17.936 the power and beauty of music transcends the "E" 00:11:17.936 --> 00:11:20.671 in the middle of our beloved acronym. 00:11:20.671 --> 00:11:24.309 Music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone. 00:11:24.309 --> 00:11:27.319 The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we 00:11:27.319 --> 00:11:30.576 hear an opera by Wagner, or a symphony by Brahms, 00:11:30.576 --> 00:11:34.222 or chamber music by Beethoven, compels us to remember 00:11:34.222 --> 00:11:38.130 our shared, common humanity, the deeply communal 00:11:38.130 --> 00:11:41.545 connected consciousness, the empathic consciousness 00:11:41.545 --> 00:11:45.118 that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired 00:11:45.118 --> 00:11:48.194 into our brain's right hemisphere. 00:11:48.194 --> 00:11:51.590 And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions 00:11:51.590 --> 00:11:53.751 of mental illness within homelessness 00:11:53.751 --> 00:11:56.534 and incarceration, the music and the beauty of music 00:11:56.534 --> 00:12:01.166 offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them, 00:12:01.166 --> 00:12:04.548 to remember that they still have the capacity to experience 00:12:04.548 --> 00:12:08.500 something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them. 00:12:08.500 --> 00:12:11.361 And the spark of that beauty, the spark of that humanity 00:12:11.361 --> 00:12:14.161 transforms into hope, 00:12:14.161 --> 00:12:17.121 and we know, whether we choose the path of music 00:12:17.121 --> 00:12:20.330 or of medicine, that's the very first thing we must instill 00:12:20.330 --> 00:12:22.269 within our communities, within our audiences, 00:12:22.269 --> 00:12:26.200 if we want to inspire healing from within. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:26.200 --> 00:12:28.876 I'd like to end with a quote by John Keats, 00:12:28.876 --> 00:12:30.921 the Romantic English poet, 00:12:30.921 --> 00:12:33.859 a very famous quote that I'm sure all of you know. 00:12:33.859 --> 00:12:36.878 Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine 00:12:36.878 --> 00:12:40.199 to pursue poetry, but he died when he was a year older than me. 00:12:40.199 --> 00:12:45.272 And Keats said, "Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. 00:12:45.272 --> 00:12:51.770 That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know." 00:12:54.527 --> 00:15:38.650 (Music) 00:15:38.650 --> 00:16:07.126 (Applause)