Life Conversations with a Twist
Join me once a week for a new interview with a local, badass woman who has an amazing story to tell. Join me in conversation so you too can gain inspiration and empowerment from these stories! If you love hearing about leadership, relationships, families, motherhood and navigating hard times, then tune into my podcast and share with others. If you love what you hear, share and tag me on Instagram at @heathernelson.life. You can also visit my website at heathernelson.life.
Life Conversations with a Twist
The Brain on Music: Why Your Nervous System Loves Sound with Dr. Barbara A. Minton
“Music predated language. It validates how you feel… We're physiologically wired to inhabit the patterns that the music brings.” —Dr. Barbara A. Minton
Some moments hit us hard and remind us that our stories do not run on a straight line. Growth can show up in the middle of life, in the middle of loss, or in the middle of a song that stirs something we did not expect. This conversation explores how emotional shifts can open a new chapter long after we thought the book was set.
Dr. Barbara Minton shares her journey from classical musician to psychologist to neuroscience-based creator, and how each season shaped her work with the brain and the healing power of sound. Her path shows how music, science, and reinvention often collide in ways that change everything.
Press play for a mix of heart, science, and a reminder that we can rewrite our story at any age.
In this episode:
• How music became an emotional sanctuary and a bridge out of isolation
• The shift from traditional psychology to neuroscience-based interventions
• Why diagnostic labels often miss the full picture
• Real-world stories from neurofeedback and brain-based treatment
• The rise in ADHD and autism diagnoses and what neuroscience reveals
• How music activates brain networks linked to mood, regulation, and connection
• The early signs of personalized brain-based music therapy
• A behind-the-scenes look at Barbara’s new neuroscience music project
Connect with Heather:
Episode Highlights:
01:23 Meet Barbara: Psychologist and Music Innovator
07:48 The Power of Neurofeedback: Brain Training and Mental Health
14:32 Neurofeedback Therapy: Process, Timing, Real Results
19:20 Personalized Healing and Diagnosis
25:26 Music as Medicine: The History and Emotional Impact
32:27 Scientific Music: Composing Songs for Brain Health
37:12 Migraine Mysteries: What Happens in Your Brain?
46:45 Music in Everyday Wellness
Resources:
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Connect with Barbara:
Dr. Barbara Minton is a distinguished psychologist and neuroscientist with dual PhDs in developmental and child clinical psychology. With extensive experience spanning clinical practice, academic research, and systemic mental health innovation, Dr. Minton has served diverse communities from Alaska to Idaho and beyond. Her work blends deep clinical expertise with pioneering research in neuroscience-based interventions, particularly neurofeedback and music therapy.
Currently, Dr. Minton leads an innovative project developing therapeutic music compositions designed to target specific brain networks, helping clients manage conditions such as chronic pain, insomnia, migraines, ADHD, and PTSD. Passionate about the intersection of science, art, and healing, she is dedicated to advancing personalized and accessible mental health solutions.
Website (Work)
Website (Music and Healing)
Heather Nelson: Hey ladies, it's your host, Heather Nelson, welcoming you to another season of Life Conversations With a Twist. This is a space where we dive into stories of remarkable women who've conquered challenges and emerged stronger. Join me each week as we unravel tales of resilience, triumph and empowerment. These narratives aren't just stories. These are stories of inspiration, and I'm so honored to have the space to share them with you. Plus, I will be sharing my own personal stories of inspiration as I navigate starting my own business and achieving my own goals. So whether you're driving in the car or out moving your body, get ready for heartwarming stories and empowering conversations together. Let's raise a virtual toast to empowerment, because here at Life Conversations With a Twist, every story has the power to inspire. Cheers, ladies.
Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Life Conversations With a Twist. I have Dr. Barbara Minton on. We just met, but we just found out that we live like an hour from each other, which is super cool. And I love when I get to meet people close because I'm like, when do I get to meet you in person? And when do we get to collab together? So welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Thank you. It's just a joy to be here. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.
Heather Nelson: So let our listeners know about who you are. I just ask you where you live. And I also like to ask if you're willing to share your age, because I also think that sharing your experience and your journey of where you are in life is super important and resonates with different women. So just give everyone a little background about who you are.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Okay, so I was born in Idaho. I'm a psychologist. But before I became a psychologist, I went to music school that lasted about three years. I'll tell you more details about that if people are interested. But I lived in Colorado for 10 years. Then lived in Alaska for 12 years, worked there in many different realms as a psychologist. And then moved back to Idaho, and worked here for many years. And then I got into this neuroscience based music thing that we'll talk about, and my collaborators in California. My husband died and I was like I'm ready to have a new life. And so I'm in this different Jersey right now. I still have an active practice in Idaho, but I'm also living and working on this neuroscience based music project in California. I'm 71, and I'm starting a new life at 70 years old.
Heather Nelson: Yeah. Here's the thing, I've had conversations many times on the podcast on how we all feel like we have to accomplish all of these things at such a young age. I just turned 43 and I'm like, I have so much more life to give, and this is where I think my life is. Yes, I'm a mom and have young children. But I'm trying to build a foundation to do something even bigger and better later. I'm finding so many more women doing that as they get older, so I'm here for it. I love it.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Well, you just never know. If you would have told me three years ago that I'd be doing what I'm doing now, I would have said, you are insane. And then here I am. So you never know where life is going to take you. And being open to that journey is not the easiest thing sometimes, but it is maybe the richest thing you can do.
Heather Nelson: I love that. Okay, so take us back to little Barbara. You loved music. What did you do in the music world when you were younger? How old were you? Were you elementary, high school? Where did your love for music stem from?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: I think I started like a lot of us did. My mom signed me up for piano lessons, so I took piano. But it was something I had to do. And I remember my music teacher one day just saying, you never practice. I was like the typical kid. I don't know why I didn't quit. My siblings quit. It was really when I got into high school and I got introduced to the pipe organ, which is not the most tricky instrument. But something about that instrument really, really captured me. And here I was a teenager, I was like a nerdy, skinny, underdeveloped. I was not a popular kid. And to be able to go over into these churches, in these beautiful resonant settings, and both the power of the pipe organ, the pipe organ is the instrument that has the biggest range of any instrument. So you can have very deep lows and very high highs, and then there's all this variation on these things. And it became a real, true sanctuary for me. An emotional way of expressing my agency. And I think, as a woman growing up in Idaho, that it was very traditional to be able to play this powerful instrument. Sometimes, I'm a psychologist. There's all sorts of psychological things I understand now that I didn't then, that I think was just a wonderful solace, a way of becoming, growing into who I was. I was just like, this is what I want to do. I went to music school at the Lamont School of Music in Denver, and I really got burnt out in music that started the other side of it. And I was very, very lucky that I found another love in psychology and just became fascinated by how people work. It's so funny about the women thing. Because I remember in my dorm going down the elevator with these women, and all of them were so self deprecating. They were like, oh, I'm not very good at math. I'm not so good at English. And I remember looking at these women and going, guys, you are way smarter than you think. Why do we do this to ourselves? And these were the questions in psychology that really started to fascinate me. I got quite interested in this, and it just led me on this whole other journey.
Heather Nelson: I love it. Can you tell our listeners, I feel like everyone knows what a psychologist is, but can you just give a little bit of background of what truly it is? And when you go to school to become a psychologist, what is it that you're studying specifically?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: I'm glad you asked that question, because there probably are a lot of misunderstandings. So I actually have two PhDs. There's a whole field in psychology, which is only research psychology. My first PhD is in developmental psychology, which is just a research degree, and that is studying through the lifespan, how do people change? So what are characteristics of children, adolescents, adults and older people? It's a fascinating area, and it ranges clearly from studying things like, how does your eye work? Stuff people don't think of psychologists even studying. How do we make sense out of the sensations coming into our bodies? Very basic science. And then my other one is in child clinical psychology, which is children and family stuff. And that's probably more what people think of as a psychologist. Which is as a therapist where people come to you when they're struggling or they want to grow in a certain area, and you help them work through that. And being able to work across these areas of research and clinical domains, I just love that. It was something I was very drawn to. But psychologists do not prescribe medication. That's what psychologists do, non medication interventions like talk therapy. Diagnosing you if you have depression, or anxiety, or schizophrenia, or something like that. And then what I have moved into in the last 12 or 15 years is neuroscience based interventions where we do brain computer interface, things like neurofeedback. I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
Heather Nelson: It's very fascinating to me, because you hear how everyone is talking. Especially like coaches, they talk about how the brain works and all that. And it's just so fascinating to me.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Yeah. We now have the capacity to get an EEG, so that's an electroencephalogram, the patterns that your neurons in your brain are firing. So the neurons in your brain create electricity and different patterns that allow you to do different things like drink a cup of coffee, or play golf, or solve a life problem. And we now have normative databases like, I could put out electrodes on your head, compare your brain to someone who has no issues, and look at different networks like the attention network, the depression network, the network related to optimal functioning, different networks related to executive functioning. And then we can identify networks that you want to improve in, and we can then train your brain where as your brain starts to activate that network, you get positive feedback. So either you're watching a movie and it brightens when your brain goes in the direction that you want to train it. Or you're listening to music, and the music gets louder. The brain likes that, and so it'll change itself to get that feedback. And then over time, your anxiety goes away, your attention networks get better. If you have ADHD, many olympic athletes do neurofeedback. Because once you get physically optimized, the rest of it's a mind game, right? You want your mind to be at the right level of activation in order to create the best performance. And so I've been doing that for the last 12 years. And there's a lot of stories involved with these neuro therapies that have come out, but people often respond to them when they haven't responded to medication or talk therapy. And so it's been a real fun journey, and that's what got me into the whole neuroscience based music idea, which we can talk about.
Heather Nelson: Definitely get to that. I'm curious, what is your perception of taking medication? I know you can't prescribe it based on the work that you do, but do you feel that we don't really need it? But there's ways in order to train your brain or train your body to be a better version without having to do drugs.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Such a good question. So I'm going to say, of course, I hate these answers, but I'm going to give you one. It depends.
Heather Nelson: Yeah. I know, of course.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: So if you look at the research on medication, I'll just give you the example of depression because it's something many of us have experienced. So what the studies show on this is that medication will give you an initial boost. But the problem is, if you stop the medication, you tend to go back to where you were. If you do medication plus therapy, and then you get off the medication, the gains remain. And so I think we tend to look at these as either situations. If you're really suicidal and the medication is going to keep you from killing yourself, I want you to take the medication. There are probably times, this is just my opinion that's all we're talking about. I'm not the master of the universe, but I think there are times when medication is really important to take. And then it's important to have a plan to get off it. So we have so many people that take medication for years and years, and years, and years. And most psychotropic medications have not been studied for long periods of time, and the brain will change to adjust itself to the medication. And this gets into a longer conversation we probably don't want to have here. But mostly, you want to use medications for short term use only. Do these or other interventions to write your system, to self write your system, and that might be taught therapy, or hypnotherapy, or neurotherapy, or social, just solving problems in your life, just straight problem solving, and then you won't need the medication. I think that's probably the safest thing to do right now.
Heather Nelson: And that's great advice. I was just curious. I'm always curious, because some people are really pro to it, and a lot of people are not for it. So I'm always interested, especially as a doctor, where you see that fits? You've done psychology work, and now you're in this neuroscience space. What is like day to day work? Do you work one on one with clients? Are you just doing research? What is the work that you're doing now focused on?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Yeah. I'm so lucky because I have pretty much a full time neurotherapy practice, but I have an assistant that does a lot of that, who's just the best.
Heather Nelson: When you find that one person, you get it, but not let them go.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: You're signing that dotted line until the day one of us dies. I love that. And she does a lot of the hands-on work, and then I do still have some talk therapy clients. But mostly, I'm working on this music piece, which involves composing the music with musical collaborators, and then collecting the data, collecting case study data, analyzing the data and all that stuff. So I do support the neurotherapy practice. I do all the analysis on the EEG and do the protocol. So I would say day to day. If you had an image of what a psychologist does, I'm probably not doing that. I probably will not. I have had traditional practice where you just see client after client and talk therapy for a while, but most of my career has not been that. So when I was in Alaska, I worked on creating more culturally sensitive mental health systems for Native Alaskans. I was a university professor. I've always probably done system change or innovative work. Then more kind of fitting into the domain of what you would think of as a typical therapist.
Heather Nelson: I love that. I love that you want to explore other things instead of just doing the same thing. When you work with a patient in the neuroscience world, how long do you work with them for? Is it a one time session and you hook them up to the, what do you call them?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: The EEG.
Heather Nelson: Yes. Or is it like a couple months, a year? What does that process with a client look like?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Yeah. So with neurofeedback, most of the research on neurofeedback and the whole story of neurofeedback needs its own podcast, because it's so fascinating. It really started as very effective, and it still is a very effective intervention for seizure disorders. But because all this work came out of neuroscience and not the medical field, it's been very slow to be accepted in traditional medical and psychological interventions. So neurofeedback itself, it depends on the complexity of the issue. If you just come in and you're like, I have straight line ADHD maybe 4 to 6 months of coming twice a week. The research shows we have 10 year follow ups on kids with ADHD, showing the changes hold. I mean, that's like a miracle. That's your life. Actually, the first person I trained was on the autism spectrum. And the second person I ever trained had ADHD and went within about six months from getting in all our classes to getting straight A's. And she's out of college now.
Heather Nelson: I actually wrote down, because I wanted to revisit this conversation with you, is doing this work like, what have you discovered with ADHD and autism? Because I feel like, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on it, that there's more cases of like, especially ADHD, I feel like more people are talking about it, or more people are diagnosed with it. And I'm wondering if it's because our environment has changed so much, or that there just wasn't enough testing or research done back in the day. I'm thinking like, when I was like a child, 40 years ago, it wasn't as common. And like, why has that shift changed so much?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Here's what's really interesting is, what we're learning in neuroscience does not match our diagnostic categories. So people will come in and say, I have a diagnosis of ADHD. Well, ADHD is a behavioral diagnosis. It looks at behavior. You're not able to pay attention, but there's lots of reasons you might not be able to pay attention. You might not be able to pay attention because you're so anxious. Most of us have been in that space. We're so anxious. We're like, I'm not even processing what I'm supposed to do next. So it looks like ADHD, or it might be because you're incredibly depressed, or it might be because you have trauma and you have PTSD. Or it might be because you're genetically actually true, what we think of as ADHD or neuro divergence. I could go on with this. So what neuroscience does when we can image the brain is we can say, oh, actually, you have attention issues, it's because you're anxious, because you're anxious, actually. And if you go on stimulant medications, you're the one that won't be able to eat, won't be able to sleep at night because your brain's already firing too much. And so trying to parse this stuff out in an easy way. Like, is it because we have cell phones? Or is it because our mothers took Tylenol? Or is it this? Or is it that? It's a lot of things. And also that our diagnostic system is very imperfect, and we're finding this over and over that our diagnostic manual is made up by a bunch of people sitting around. A bunch of, generally speaking, historically white guys sitting around in Washington, DC deciding what's pathological and what isn't. And then because of an insurance industry and all this other stuff that has maintained itself over time, but it is not matching what we're finding out about the brain.
And even 15 years ago, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health was saying that we're going to have to throw our diagnostic system out. Well, theoretically, that's probably true, because it isn't matching neuroscience. But we have big industries built around this, so I don't think anything will happen soon. So when you ask this question of the autism spectrum, we now have like, wow, there's these women who look perfectly functional on this and that, and we're calling them the autism spectrum. And then we have kids who are hitting their heads against the wall with no speech and no eye contact, and we're calling that the same thing. Does this really make sense diagnostically? Their brains look very different. So I think the diagnostic issues are very fraught. I love being able to look at the brain like we can actually look at this organ that we're treating, and we've never really been able to do that before.
Heather Nelson: Well, and it's like anybody that's diagnosed with anything, it's like everyone's process to get better. Or healing is going to be so different, again, because there's so many things that it's based on. And so it's so true that you're going to put autism in the same bucket when they're very, very, very different people in different lifestyles. And how do you navigate that is so interesting.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Yeah. People like to talk about personalized medicine. And if we get a chance to talk in more detail about the music thing, I'll tell you about this, because not everybody has the same reaction to music, just like not everybody has the same reaction to an antidepressant or an antibiotic. We like to talk about personalized medicine, but we're really not there yet. We're still kind of fits and starts, really trying to think about how you are different from everybody else, even though you have the same label as the autism spectrum. What does that tell you that at 45, someone who's been a lawyer for that long gets an autism spectrum diagnosis? And it's the exact same diagnosis as someone who's institutionalized because they can't feed themselves.
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Heather Nelson: I do want to talk about music, because I have a sense of where this is all gonna connect. But I wanted to ask you, based on your experience of doing this work, is there one story that has changed your perception? Or a cool story that you can talk about of the work that you do, and how that's changed their lives?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: You mean, as a psychologist in general? Oh, my gosh, there's so many.
Heather Nelson: I'm sure there's so many. But is there one that's so good and juicy that you're like, this is so cool, that the work that you do truly works?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Gosh, I feel so lucky to be doing what I'm doing. It's hard to choose, because there's this sort of system that changes things I've done that I don't even and will never know the stories, because I will never know the people that it's helped. The reach is so broad where you're helping hundreds or thousands of people. That is super cool when you fix one thing in a bureaucratic system that's messing people up, and you get that one little thing fixed. And all of a sudden, it's changed things. I'll never know those things in terms of individuals. One that pops to mind is this autism spectrum kid who came into my office and lived in a very extreme rural area. No eye contact, no language, just flip the lights off and on, or what you would think is traditional moderate to severe autism spectrum training. The mom was so dedicated to this kid, put them on the diet, did all the behavioral interventions, and we didn't have feedback with this kid. And this kid is in college now. Got taken out of special ed, put in the gifted program. He's got a whole life. He'll be able to get a job, be married and talk to people. It's like a miracle when these things happen.
Heather Nelson: It's interesting. There's actually a story here locally. I was looking it up because I wanted to get the right thing. But in general, what happened is he wasn't speaking for years too, and what brought him to speaking now and singing is music. Music is what made him come out of the state that he was in not communicating. And now, he goes on stages, and he has a band. He's doing these, and he got this guitar from John Mayer.I get chills because I'm like, it's such a cool thing. Because I truly believe music is such a great thing in life to change anyone's mood, and that's why I really want to talk about that too. But we had a local story that happened to, and it's just really cool to see the transformation from him.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: It's so beautiful. And one of the interesting things about music, I just read an article a couple of days ago that this person made a very interesting argument that music originally was used as a healing emotional modality. And then over hundreds of years, it became more and more distant from that, and more and more commercialized, or performance based, or whatever you want to call it, entertainment based. But that the actual guts of music is really this sort of emotion, this capacity to be able to connect emotionally with what you're feeling, and also with other people. And that popped in my mind as you were giving that example because there's something so powerful about this that it drew this child or this person out of this internal world and into a bigger reality.
Heather Nelson: You hear so many people that the power of music has changed people's lives. I would just happen to listen to the documentary on Eminem and how his rap and stuff has truly changed people's lives. And it's a really cool concept to think of. I'm curious now how you've taken all of your psychology work and your love for music? How did you intertwine them and talk about the work that you're doing in that realm?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: Well, I'm going to give you a little bit of the personal story, and then I'll give you the more academic story because I know you're interested in women's journeys. But what happened is, a few years ago, I was perfectly happy. I was doing neurofeedback, doing talk therapy, perfectly content in my job. I have a successful practice. Life is good. I'm on YouTube and I'm like, oh, I was looking at some music, and I heard this guitarist, his name is Mike Dawes. He's from the UK. You guys can find him. He's what's called a percussive or modern finger style guitarist. I'm listening to the song, and all of a sudden, some weird thing happens and I am just like, I get all this combination of agitation and grief. I'm like a hyper, stable person. So it just surprised me that I'm watching this YouTube video, and all of a sudden, all this emotion starts to flood me. I'm like, what is going on? I was just like, I have to do this. I have to learn to play this guitar. I'm like 68 years old.
Heather Nelson: So you learn how to play this specific style of music because it was that impactful for you?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: It was like, when people talk about, I don't know, a bolt coming out of the blue or something, I was like, oh, it'd be cool to play the guitar. I think I'll take lessons, nothing like that. It was this imperative from, I don't know, somewhere. So I got online and I'm looking for a guitar instructor that does this kind of guitar, and I found this guy in Victoria, BC, named Calum Graham. He was my first guitar instructor a couple months into our guitar lessons. Learning a new instrument is just so challenging, and I'm totally embarrassed and blah, blah, blah. But I woke up and thought, you know this song, this guitar song would sound incredible on the pipe organ. And so I wrote this to him as a joke. I wrote him a little email. It's like out of 8 and a half billion people in this world, I bet I'm the only one that's thinking about how to play your song on the pipe organ. And the next time we met, he said, Barb, you should do that. And I was like, are you insane? I haven't touched a pipe organ in 25 years. This is what I'm thinking to myself. I didn't say that to him. Calum, if you see this, I did not say that to you today. And so I'm like, oh, okay. So I called the church, can I practice on your organ? And they were like, yeah. And that really started. Then it's sort of like it snowballed. And then I was like, actually, maybe we can compose music based on EEG. There's all this data out there about the power of music, it decreases depression by 40 to 50%.
And now, these are certain songs that researchers pick out. It helps kids and babies in neonatal intensive care units. It helps them suck better. They gain weight faster. There's all this extensive research out there that no one's using, and it's really sad. It decreases anxiety when you're having hospital procedures. And I could go on and on. I actually have a two day workshop, which I'm squishing into one day to do in Berkeley, and it's about all this research on how music affects ADHD. Music increases reading comprehension in kids with ADHD. These are such cheap interventions. So I'm thinking about that. I'm feeling compelled to change my life and pour myself into this music thing. And then I'm like, I know about the brain. I know all these frequencies. I know all these networks. Can we compose music? Because the brain tries to pattern itself out of the music that comes in. So can we use this in order to help the brain? And so Calum had gone off on tour, and I found another amazing world class guitarist whose name is Peppino D'Agostino, who is in the Bay Area. This guy's just incredible. I was like, would you be interested in working on this project? This is like the Yo-Yo Ma of fingerstyle guitarists. And he said, yeah, let's give it a shot. And so we composed these songs, and I collected pre and post data on volunteers and listening to this song.
And so I designed the musical input to affect the chronic pain network, the insomnia network and the migraine network, all of which are interconnected networks in the brain. And holy cow, when I saw the changes, I just couldn't believe it. I was like, this actually worked. And if you go on the website, which is, I don't know if you had a chance to do it, musicandhealing.net. Go to it where it says new album, and scroll down to the bottom. I posted a couple of the pre and post brain images, 3D brain images from just listening to one song on the chronic pain and insomnia network. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is actually working. If you could buy something for 20 bucks that helped you sleep that has no side effects, wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you do that?
Heather Nelson: Well, you trigger something with me because you said migraines, I used to get migraines. I get them occasionally now, but I know people who get them. So you're telling me that there's music that I could play when I have a migraine and it will make it go away?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: What I am telling you is that when I imagine people's brains, the migraine network went towards normal. So now, I only image the first album I did with Calum, and I did 27 people. This one, I did with 10, because it's my money. I have no external funding. It's tons of work to do this. But the migraine network starts to go back to normal now, whether that will come out in a migraine, depends on how close you are to the threshold. So some people might not experience anything, even though their network is starting to normalize. Some people will experience, maybe you get if your pain is at an 8, it goes to a 6or something? Might be worth it. We did have one brave soul who schlepped into our office with a migraine, and it did go away when they listened to the music, and it stayed away for about three hours. But whether that would happen to you or anybody else, I have no idea.
Heather Nelson: I'm so intrigued by this conversation because, I think, you can study the brain the best. If you can create music to overcome stress or overcome migraines, or all these things in such a way that you're not taking medication, or those kinds of things in more of a holistic way, I think it's so cool.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: I'm telling you, there's data out there to support this. The data that I have is case series data. It's evidence based, but it's not a study. But there are other studies using music that's not as curated as the music we compose. Our music is composed based on brain stuff. Most of the research is on. They just chose something like Beethoven's Third Symphony, or something by Enya, or something that works. But if you could use more curated music, it would be more powerful. That was my vision of this, and it seems to be working. And we're now working on an album for PTSD. We just are getting the songs together for that. But I do want to tell you, I had someone with PTSD who's not been able to sleep for 40, 50 years. And I said, look, listen to this three times a day. Just listen to the albums. There's 31 minutes. It's very lyrical. I put pipe organ and guitar, so you got the warm intimacy of the guitar with this beautiful resonant container of the pipe organ. And she started sleeping. She was, oh, man, I've never slept this deeply in my whole life. So it's like the fact that you get that input. The thing that's cool about music is you can give yourself a lot of input. You can come and talk to me once a week, but you can listen to this album three times a day, or four times a day. You can loop. You can give your brain all this input, telling you to go here. Just let yourself relax a little bit. And it's the thing I love about music is that it is cheap, and you can use it anywhere.
Heather Nelson: That's so cool. I love this. Now I'm intrigued, and want to go listen to your album, which we can include how people can find it. Because now I'm like, I gotta hear this music. That's so cool.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: We also wanted the music to stand alone. You don't have to have these issues to listen to it. Very strongly about that, because you can find things on YouTube like 432 hertz, but you're not gonna just listen to that all day. You want music that you like. That it's rewarding to you.
Heather Nelson: That's so cool. I just love how you've taken two of your passions and two of the things that thrive for you, and you've migrated them, and you have made them one. And I think that's what's so cool. And people always talk about how you find businesses, and how you find your passions. It's like finding that little niche of something that nobody else is doing, and I think that it's so cool. I do have a quick question about migraines. Because now, I'm curious. So it is a neurology like, what happens in the brain when you have a migraine?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: I'm going to say migraines a little bit like these other diagnoses like autism spectrum and ADHD. They're in a way, junk categories. You have vestibular migraines, and you have migraines where the symptoms are in your stomach, and you have all this other stuff. You probably have other headaches that get shoved into the migraine category. I'm not saying that I know everything about migraine, but I'll tell you the study that I read that led me to this is in the brain, migraine tends to get expressed as what we would call a dysrhythmia. So in the brain, these networks all have to communicate with each other, just like we're communicating. And I noticed this like I started to talk, and you stopped. And then when you talk, I stop. So we're in phase with each other. We're actually working together in this conversation, and that's what the brain has to do. Well, in migraine, what happens is you get this dysrhythmia. So one part of your brain, one wave, an alpha wave.
So for readers who know that alpha is that zen calming wave, it actually slows down. And so it gets slower and slower. So it's as if I start to, and then you start to feel a little bit amped. And so there's another wave called a gamma wave, which is a very fast wave, and it fires in between the alpha waves. And so when the alpha wave slows down, you get more of these gamma waves going. And what's interesting about gamma waves is that they're sensory processing waves, so they make you more sensitive to light pain. I'm reading this article, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, music releases the brain. I'm getting chills talking about this. Can't we put music input in to repay the sound away, and then the gamma will go back to making the right amount, not too much, and then that should decrease the symptoms of a migraine. And so that's how I got into the migraine thing. But because it shares notes with the chronic pain network and the insomnia network, that's why all these things are related. When you have a migraine, you have pain, obviously, and it is often hard to sleep. All this kind of stuff, because the brain is dysregulated across these networks.
Heather Nelson: So interesting. Thank you for explaining that. So crazy to think about. But I'm here for some kind of music that will make it go away, or at least make it.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: It would be really interesting to find, maybe you're gonna be my person. I would love for somebody to listen to this as a preventive measure, to keep track over time.
Heather Nelson: Actually, I have a friend who has chronic migraines. She has a thing inside of her body that when she gets them, she's like pushing a button and it releases, and she gets them so bad. And I would love to send this to her and say, try this. I'm curious, because it's really bad for her. It's debilitating for her, and she's done through surgeries and everything.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: So tough. Actually, neurofeedback might be good for somebody like that, because you can train the migraine network in neurofeedback. So somebody like that isn't that severe, you really need a multimodal intervention. There's not going to be the probability of there being a magic bullet. But it's quite interesting. We have a fair amount of people that have headaches, and they might not even mention it. They come in for some other reason. They're like, oh, that's weird. I'm having fewer headaches, or I'm having the same amount, but the intensity is less well. It's because when your brain starts to normalize and become more stable, neuroscience or neurofeedback, people look at migraines, we call it an instability. An instability in the brain. So the more you can keep your brain stable, so when the weather changes, your brain doesn't get dragged along. So a lot of people, weather changes, barometric pressure changes, are triggered. You don't want your brain to be dragged along by everything that goes on externally and internally. And again, we don't have good data on this, but we have clinical experience. I didn't post the migraine network on the website. I should do that. But when that person's migraine went away, she was just like, what happened? Listening to this music, my migraine went away.
Heather Nelson: Because I always say, going to a dark room with no light, and so I could totally see vegging out in the dark, listening to some music to make it go away, or at least feel better.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: I'm like, man, when I've been in situations where I've been in pain, if I got a couple points of pain relief, I'm all over that, especially if it costs me 20 bucks. I think the downloads--
Heather Nelson: Speaking of music in general, not even just to calm yourself in depression or things like that. I know a lot of people, they talk about how music can change your mood. Put on your favorite playlist, or if you're in a funky mood, can you talk about why that's so important?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: So I'll tell you a couple things about this. So music can be bad for you. It's not all good. So I wanted to start about like, let's say you've just broken up with the love of your life. I think it's very interesting. We have dirges and funeral music, and breakup songs, and those things are important. And I think this harkens back way, probably, to the beginning of music. And historians in general believe that music predated language. So when you listen to a breakup song, it kind of does what a good friend, or a good therapist, or a good physician would do. It validates how you feel. It says, the connection has been broken. This is painful, and this is a very human experience, and this is how you should be feeling. It's normal and it's sad. There's something I think about having that expression of what we're experiencing emotionally be validated by the external world. And I think at that level, music is so powerful because it can express what it is we're feeling emotionally, and we feel just a little bit less alone. Now, if you're still listening to that breakup song a year down the road, you shouldn't do that. But if you just broke up with somebody and they're like, no, put on. Don't worry. Be happy. Or some little upbeat thing, you're like, that's insulting to me. I'm not going to listen to some happy song when my mother just died. I need that emotional expression.
And so if you're a good consumer of music, you can start to connect. A lot of times, we don't connect to our body and our minds about what the music is doing. We're just like, oh, I like that. Or I don't like that. So if you can start to connect to yourself, how is this actually making me feel internally? Is that where I want to go? And then you can start to become a more sophisticated user. So I would say that there's that level of expression of how we're feeling, and then there's changing how we're healing, which is what you were talking about. I'm all groggy in the morning. I put the song that I really like that's a little upbeat. Yes, it's going to activate my sympathetic nervous system, which is a kind of wake up system in your brain rather than your body, and so it's going to make me feel better. Or I'm on a long drive and I'm starting to get drowsy. I'm going to punch the rock music on, and my system will activate because we're physiologically wired to inhabit the patterns that the music brings. And then there's sort of another whole level of music that a lot of musicians get into. And other people are sophisticated listeners, which is the intellectual component of music. So if you love Bach, for example, one of the fascinating things about Bach is the intertwining of the themes and the counter themes, and the nuances, and this, and that. And people who need intellectual stimulation are often very drawn to these more complex parts of music. There's so many other things. So you go to a rock concert, and part of it is about the music, but a lot of it is about the crowd. So it's a social connector. You're all resonating in the same way you're all feeling part of a group. There's so many aspects to this.
Heather Nelson: It's crazy how you'll listen to a song, and then you'll listen to it again, and it totally brings you back to that moment with that person and all the feels. So I love music, and I need to listen to it more. I'm like, even when I'm just sitting in my office, I enjoy the quiet because I have many kids, and it's never quiet. But then when I put on music, I'm like, yes. I need more of this.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: If you go to the website, musicandhealing.net, you can listen to some of the little, there's like 18 second samples. I'd be curious if you played that really softly in the background of what you would experience, because it should bring your system down a little bit. But it is good too. Humming is actually good too. If I were going to tell you one thing to do, I'd be humming, because it activates the vagus nerve. It helps balance out sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So there's tons of things you can do. And this stuff is so frustrating because it's all in these academic journals, and it needs to be out there in the real world. And that's one thing I've been trying to do.
Heather Nelson: That's the work you're doing, right?
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: So the opportunity to be on your podcast, I really, really appreciate it.
Heather Nelson: Oh, my gosh, it was such a pleasure to chat with you. I love this conversation so much. I always feel like people that are on my podcast, I say this every podcast, come on my podcast certain days for certain reasons. And so I thank you for the work you're doing to share your story, and I cannot wait to listen. I'm literally gonna go later and listen to all the things.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: I would love that, and I'm very curious to hear your feedback. We're really looking for feedback from people because we want to keep this work going, and we need people's experience to help us get better and better at what we do.
Heather Nelson: I love it well. Thank you so much, and we'll put how everyone can find you, find your website, and listen to your music. But I just want to say thank you again for being here.
Dr. Barbara A. Minton: You're very welcome.
Heather Nelson: I hope today's episode resonated with you. And if it did, don't keep it to yourself. Spread inspiration. Share this episode on your socials, and tag me. And if there's anyone in your life who can use a dose of encouragement, pass it along. Looking forward to continuing this journey of inspiration with you, until next time. Stay empowered and connected.