Transcript

Neuropsychology and Performance Anxiety | Priyanka Potdar | TEDxNapaValley

the human brain starts working the moment you're born but never stops until you fall in love or come up to speak on stage 10 years ago I came up to a stage very similar to this one I was walking up I was freaking out so much I looked at the audience and I actually bowed in the other direction in the corner because I was freaking out so much but um I eventually got up there was a grand piano in front of me I was going to play a Sonata I got down sat on the piano started playing the intro I was really enjoying my piece until I forgot the next chord suddenly my hands started sweating I felt clam I I had clammy hands I started perspiring and for the first time I never knew what I didn't know what to do so I stopped I stared at my teacher a teacher standing behind me me she had a blank steer on her face so I decided to get up walk through the audience and leave the venue at the age of 16 I met with an very interesting pianist actually a piano teacher she also happened to be on the her side job was being an experimental neuropsychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine now we had a very interesting conversation and I came to talk to her about this problem performing anxiety because I didn't know exactly what to do about it how to cure this how to cure this problem so we talked about a concept called neur neurod actic basically this concept was mixing Neuroscience with the art of teaching which is the future now music is not tangible we can't eat it we can't play with it we can't mate with it it doesn't protect us from natural disasters and it doesn't Vanquish Predators however it's very prized we actually love music so why does a mere sequence of Beats sounds and um rhythms actually hold such in why are we why do we value this so much the answer to this lies in the neuropsychology of Music moving on how many of you in the audience have heard of Music actually affecting the right portion of the brain there we go so there has been research that proves that music actually affects the creative mind and eventually gets you to be better a better to be a better logical thinker so now there's been a lot of research conducted concerning the effects of Music on the brain however not that much research concerning how to use Neuroscience to reform the Performing Arts and instruction in general so reforming teaching so now here we have music in the corner those are some sound waves not French FES and here we have a frontal cortex and an auditory cortex which are two main things I'll be referring in my speech so the frontal cortex actually works to provide satisfaction after we're done playing a piece it makes us very happy the auditory cortex actually um recognizes many beats and values and converts them so that our brain can process them so basically when we play a very challenging piece we get very anxious and we get very bored easily this is why you see very um very prominent performing artists Play In the Zone when they're um be in the zone when they're actually playing the piece they're not thinking about what they're playing but they're simply going going through with it that's why they don't get anxious and this is something we wanted to actually reform with the experiment that we were trying out now I'm going to talk to you about the human fight ORF flight response how many of you have heard of this response in Psychology awesome okay so what we have is we have threat perception when I came up to that piano I realized that there were there was a huge audience and that if I messed up people would probably laugh at me I could probably never come up and play piano again so now we have three portions of the brain that actually are involved with this response we have the hypothalamus pituitary gland and adrenals and basically what these do are they send hormones to our brain telling us to run while we're actually um playing a while we're actually playing a piece that's what I ended up doing so these three parts of the brain lead to stress now stress is obviously detrimental to the body stress leads to different thoughts beliefs and attitudes perceptions behaviors and problems their relationships leading to even more stress stress and this increased stress this prolonged stress can actually affect the way we think and um think and perceive the future now moving on this is actually an experiment that we conducted so it's not really creepy because we got the parents to sign waivers so not that big of a deal basically this girl was playing a piece in front of um her peers and she messed up in the middle and suddenly put her hand over her mouth because she realized that she's done something wrong this is called an evaluative response and mean realize that if we can reduce the effect of this evaluated response through biof feedback we could actually have kids have less performance anxiety as in general so now I'm going to talk about the fear the cycle of performance anxiety and what it actually is why it's so traumatic to human beings first of all we have fear and apprehension about performance probably the two months leading up to a recital we start freaking out saying oh my God I'm practicing so much I don't know what to do it's coming up in another two weeks I don't know what to do then we we have um psychop phys physiological arousal which is basically clammy hands an increased body temperature all these things that happen in our body that that leads to reduced dexterity which means that when we actually come up to play in play the piano or play the play the particular instrument we can't play it as well anymore that leads to negative interpretations of performance so when we leave that recital when we leave that performance we realize that we did very poorly and we don't want to actually play again that leads to threat and once again threat leads to fear and apprehension about performance so what we want to do with this research is actually cut that cycle now this is an accurate learning curve so what this describes is how learning is how learning actually occurs learning is never a straight line you know we have those bad days where we don't understand anything that's going on we just want to sleep get some Starbucks in the morning chill but this is actually how learning occurs we have very bad days and then one day we reach Mastery after numerous trials now we came up with this uh performance pyramid after researching so we came up with multiple group lessons so that these kids get accustomed to each other we want to reduce competition and I'm sure that you guys have heard of uh uh piano exams instruments uh instrumental auditions annually that's something that kids do for college apps I'm sure you've heard so we want to reduce that competition and allow students to actually enjoy the Performing Arts enjoy the instruments that they're taking part in so multiple group lessons will soon lead to rehearsal and as soon as these kids actually get to rehearse in the place that they're they're going to perform at they suddenly get accustomed to The Venue one fear is gone right there and then we have the and then we finally have the recital the recital is obviously High threat because it's it's in front of many people and it's a very interesting experience but you're going to be less anxious at the recital if you get to play at the venue and if you don't have that sense of competition with other people here are a couple of pictures the top image is some adorable kids they are basically learning and learning from each other being friends and right here we have a group lesson going on and the best part about group lesson is that there's increased amicability between all the students and there's simply less competition we want to we want to reduce that competition so that these students don't have any performance stress so now I'm finally going to get to the more technical part of our experiment so neurotechnology is a fantastic field that involves MRI imaging um pet scans and this has so many applications in the real world we have this can actually diagnose psychological disorders this can diagnose this can find tumors this can actually provide many solutions to Everyday problems however we're going to be talking about brain Imaging and stimulation and specifically electrography which is also called EEG EEG is basically looks like this and these are these are one of our prettier electrodes he has a little Rainbow wire going on there but basically the wire is usually going to connect to a computer there's various electrodes on different sites in the on the head we have fp1 we have P3 so those stand for frontal lobe and parietal lobe and basically what these uh electrodes do is pick up on signals in the brain and actually convert them to waves on a computer showing you where the most activation is occurring when you're playing a piece finally these are how EEG findings look there's your brain and there is that's how sequential learning occurs so sequential learning is when you don't actually know a piece well enough you can see all that activation in the frontal region you see all those different colors and that means that your piece is still very rough you still haven't mastered your piece so that's how we can tell if we actually hook you up hook you up to a computer that's how we can tell that you haven't mastered your piece yet now the picture on the right is when you're actually fluent with a piece when you've actually allowed your me memory consolidation process to take place and that means that you see that huge blue region meaning that your brain has actually had time to absorb the information and that you're truly ready to perform so now these images so just simply hooking up a person to a computer um while playing the piano can tell us whether or not they're ready to play that piece whether or not they're going to be anxious while playing and whether or not they're going to be um they're going to be ready for playing this piece so I'd like to leave you with one more statement from a psychologist named Albert bandura he stated that even the most talented people beset by self-doubts from time to time um because no one ever experiences increasing ever Rising accomplishments now the amazing part that I learned about this experiment was that there was a lot of um controversy about it because everybody wants to stick to the status quo nobody wants to change um music lessons because they've been the same for the past couple of decades weekly lessons and um you go you go to the lesson your teacher gives you um your teacher gives you some homework you have to attend a recital after a while or perform in an orchestra that's very typical however what we want to do is use applied scientific research to truly reform this and reduce anxiety in the Performing Arts so what I'd like to leave you with is you can combine any two passions and truly make a difference with it so go against the grain and change your life today thank [Applause] you for