How singing together changes more than the brain

Silent Voices

There was a time when everyone used to sing. We sat around campfires, at church and at school. We sang our stories and our dreams. We sang alone and we sang together.

Can't sing? Won't sing? Told not to sing? Like me, about 85 percent of people have been told by their parents, children, partners or teachers that they can't sing… so they don't. We worry that people will think we are strange or that we will be judged and not as good as the celebrities we idolise. There is a taboo about singing or even speaking in public.

We have such a fear of failure and it makes us vulnerable to being judged. Yet we all have a voice to share with the world. Our voices have been silenced and it's not doing us any good.

When I was 14 I desperately wanted to have singing lessons. One night after school I went to her place and asked her to teach me one of the songs she had learnt at her lessons. After a while, I sang it to her and she accompanied me on piano. She told me that I should never bother having singing lessons as I was not good enough.

I believed her (just like many of us believed it when we were told we couldn't sing), but finally in Year 11 I got up the courage to audition for the chorus of the school musical, Oklahoma. To my surprise, I got the lead role! Singing has been the greatest joy, passion and sustenance to me ever since.

Ten reasons to make singing your drug of choice:

1. Release endorphins and increases levels of oxytocin
2. Improve posture, breathing and blood-flow
3. Save money: our voice is our free human instrument
4. Create new neural pathways and improve brain meta-plasticity
5. Ward off age-related decline by continuously 'exercising' your brain
6. Heal depression, strokes and speech abnormalities
7. Promote social bonding and cohesion; and rediscover your own identity
8. Relieve mental health issues; feel happier, better connected and supported
9. Connect with other diverse voices and your community
10. Be smarter, healthier, happier and more creative

Sing From The Heart, Spark Your Brain

Singing has so many great benefits for our brains, our psychological function, our thinking and learning skills and our social functions. One of the many great advantages of singing is that it connects us to our right brain and then to all of our brain which benefits our thinking.

The right hemisphere of our brain is in charge of our imagination, intuition and all of our creative functions. Our right brain enables possibilities and connects us to everything that is. The brain is like a battery - the right side charges it and the left side uses the energy and empties it. Our goal is to always keep our mental battery charged. But what really happens is we're overloaded with too much information…too much analysis, so we spend 85% of the time using our left brain. We're literally draining our batteries.

The best way to change the balance and recharge our mental battery is to use the right brain more. And the most awesome activity for doing that is singing. The University of Melbourne's Professor Sarah Wilson, one of the leading researchers on the neuro-scientific benefits of music, said that "Music is to mental health what sport is to physical health." I would agree that participation in music and singing is critical to mental health and also important for physical health.

Sarah Wilson's research shows that music makes connections at multiple levels including the level of the brain, the level of the mind, at a personal level and at a social level. These connections have been shown to translate to academic benefits, including improved literacy, numeracy, spatial abilities, executive functioning and intelligence as well as greater school attendance and participation. They also extend to psychological benefits for self-confidence and self-discipline, and social benefits for teamwork and social skills.

Neuroscience proves that singing connects the neural pathways differently and fires up the right temporal lobe of the brain releasing endorphins, making people healthier, happier, smarter and more creative. Music-making and singing activate multiple brain networks. Not surprisingly, music has been dubbed the 'food of neuroscience' and provides a powerful model of how the brain can change in response to the environment.

What I love about this research is that it's way more powerful when we sing together. And it's important to note that group singing is on the rise. According to Chorus America, 32.5 million adults sing in choirs, up by almost 10 million over the past six years. There are similar increases in Australia. This is a very good thing. Go out and sing!

Singing has been shown to activate our pleasure networks and improve our mood by lowering cortisol and other stress hormones.In one study, people's levels of oxytocin, the hormone associated with pleasure, love and bonding, were measured before and after singing sessions. The levels increased significantly.

Other research has shown that participation in music and singing improves our ability to learn by creating brain meta-plasticity which provides an enriched learning environment as our whole brain becomes ready to change and engage in learning. Increasing research illustrates the benefits of singing for enhancing all kinds of learning, language and other skills. Music and singing is also proven to be neuro-protective, warding off age-related decline and continuously 'exercising' our brains. It also enhances our physical health and autoimmune function by improving our posture, cardiovascular and respiratory systems.

Further international research and studies have shown how singing together heals those with strokes, speech abnormalities and depression. Doctors are increasingly interested in the ability of music - particularly singing - to allay depression. Stephen Clift, director of the Sidney De Haan Research Centre at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, United Kingdom, says that "Singing together helps people with mental health issues feel happier, better connected with others and more supported." Singing can literally retrain the brain!

Singing for Community Wellbeing

These days, we talk more to boxes and screens than to one another. I have a theory of 'boxes' I'd like to share with you. We are born and put in a bassinet-like box in a box-shaped hospital. We are brought home into a house we would draw as a box with a triangle on it. Then at school we are often educated to think in a box. We go to the supermarket and come out with boxes and tins. We go to work and have our mobile phone 'box' in our pocket and our computer 'box' in front of us. We tick lots of boxes on lots of forms. And finally, when we go out of this life… we go out in a box!

We are building boxes, bricks and mortar and walls between us – the rates of depression, anxiety and other mental illness are constantly rising. Yet I believe it is on the bridges between the boxes where life happens, through loving relationships, in nature and by unleashing our creativity. And when we regularly engage in music-making, singing and other creative pursuits our attention and cognition improve and we are connecting with others and building bridges, not boxes. It is fundamentally important to nurture the attributes of humans that set us apart from machines, love, compassion, creativity, courage, caring and so on. Otherwise, we will become redundant.

Singing promotes social bonding and cohesion. When we sing together, we transcend our isolation and feel part of connected, empathetic world. Not only do we breathe together but studies show that our hearts start to beat together! How good is that?

Singing for Creativity and Innovation

Music is considered to be of adaptive and evolutionary significance in terms of its multiple benefits for human learning and development. Furthermore there are theories that speculate that our brains developed along with singing and music as a survival mechanism. Before there were governments or nations, tribes and groups used songs and dance to build loyalty to the group, transmit vital information, and ward off enemies. Those who sang well survived because the world was a scary place.

Well, not only do we think we can't sing, but most people say they are not creative either. Creativity is not a unique talent. Yet futurists Watts and Wacker recently said: "Creativity has become the most universally endangered species in the twenty first century." I believe that creativity is the strategic tool of the 21^st century. A recent IBM CEO Global Study of 1,500 global CEOs ranked creativity as the number one leadership attribute in an increasingly complex and uncertain global environment.

Steve Jobs said that "creativity is just connecting things". Those "things" are all your experiences in life up until that moment when you want or need to be creative. So rather than desperately trying to be creative, the challenge is to make sure that you collect enough brave and broad experiences to fill up your toolkit for when you get creative.

And I believe one of the most effective devices to build your toolkit is the concept of "positive human collisions". Literally engaging and connecting with people who are very different to you on a regular basis. We surround ourselves with people who make us feel safe, who think, feel and dress like we do and who agree with us and endorse us. Yet our biggest gains as humans come from "creative abrasion", where we rub up against people we do not agree with and who make us feel a bit uncomfortable or even very uncomfortable…who challenge our notions of ourselves and the world we live in. And it sparks creativity and innovation.

A Song for the Future

In light of all the amazing benefits of singing, I thought it would be awesome to develop an innovative social enterprise movement that used the science of singing and fostered positive human collisions to build wellbeing and creativity, to change the world!

In 2008, I founded Creativity Australia's With One Voice program, which is building a happier, healthier, more inclusive nation through community choirs. We bridge the gap between people experiencing disadvantage and build supportive networks that help people connect to brighter futures.

Our choirs welcome people aged 9 to 90, from all faiths, cultures and backgrounds. One of the most amazing features of the program is the Wish List. Each week, participants are encouraged to express what they are thankful for, ask for what they need in life and grant wishes for others. Wishes granted include free music lessons, language tuition and jobs.

Rather than bringing together a choir of just young or older people, or migrants from one nation, or homeless 'hard knocks' people, or a choir of jobseekers, we deliberately bring together the most diverse people possible, a global village.

Following my recent TED Talk How Singing Together Changes The Brain, we've had enquiries from around the world, with pilot With One Voice programs now under development in the USA and Holland. Since 2013 the charity has been named one of Australia's top social innovations in Anthill's Smart 100 every year and we won the Melbourne award for Contribution to the City of Melbourne by a Community Organisation.

The choirs are a haven, a hub, a home. The neuroscience of singing puts people in a great headspace for people to feel safe, express themselves freely and ask for what they need in life.Through the program hundreds of people have discovered new friends, mentors, skills, networks and employment. It's all about joy, freedom and inspiration.

I love hearing stories of how the program touches lives every week. Board members who I asked to come along to the first few rehearsals are now in their six year of attending. They talk about the program as the highlight of their week and how the power of helping others has changed their lives.

Creativity Australia's annual participant survey shows that a vast majority of members have made new friends; learnt new skills; improved their wellbeing; reduced their feelings of stress, anxiety or depression; and improved their understanding and appreciation of diversity.

When many diverse voices come together as 'one voice' on a regular basis the outcomes are transformational. It is said that most of us go through our lives with our music unplayed. Imagine if we can just unlock a little bit more of our brain's creative potential. We were all born with a voice so let's not sit in silence any longer.

As Mark Twain said: "Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like no one's watching and live like it's heaven on earth."

I invite you to visit www.creativityaustralia.org.au and discover your local With One Voice choir or get your family, workplace or club involved in our Sing for Spring video challenge. Simply gather a group of two or more, sing a song, enter it online and challenge your friends! With your help, we can get all of Australia singing!

Together, we can change the world… one voice at a time!