Clinical neuroscience

Marija is a neuroscientist, music therapist, and pianist, and is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston's Children's Hospital.

She also teaches the course Clinical Neuroscience and Music at Harvard University.

Her research examines how early sensory and environmental factors influence neurodevelopment trajectories, including those associated with ADHD and autism, and how enriched contexts such as musical engagement and creative play may provide protective influences that support resilience.

Marija was a delight to have on this podcast, and I think that you'll feel like you get many takeaways from this conversation about the importance of early childhood m-music education.

And so it's really interesting to now start to use, and there is a line of research called music neuroscience or music cognition, where researchers are really trying to map how these processes are happening, how they're happening in infants, how they're happening as we age.

But the part that really excites me is this translational part.

So if we had clinical neuroscience of music, that's where we start to think about, okay, if music is processed, so playing an instrument or even actively listening to music, if it's processed across different parts of the brain, those brain areas also correspond and play a role in some other functions, right? And so the most exciting part for me is that music really is activating this so-called overlapping area.

So for example, it's very easy to see how this works if you think of, like, infants who are really not just sitting quietly and then they start talking, right? So there is this transitional period, and they are vocalizing, their parents are vocalizing, everyone is kind of using this very melodic way of interacting with kids.