welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host and my guest today is jim gavin and jim is a musician on a mission welcome you into action so let's talk about that what is your mission well it's pretty simple in the end it's really just i want to make a difference through music and improving the quality of life for people through music is especially in those in the time it's really what it is right yes all there's a lot of opportunity for that there is yeah and the population that you've typically been working with so far is adults with developmental disabilities mainly right at the branching a little bit out in sioux falls homer's dementia care unit yeah it is a nursing homes and this is living facilities but mainly those with developmental disabilities you know music for me is so powerful if i want to change my mood i can you know turn on a piece of music in there is just something that if you don't understand if you're in another culture and you can understand the language you can relate to the music you know you can connect through music so to me i did a little reading and it said one of the first things that happens when music enters our brains is the triggering of pleasure centers that reduce release dop neurotransmitter that makes you happy this response is so quick the brain can even anticipate the most pleasurable peaks in familiar music and prime itself with an early dopamine rush that's amazing like why our having a quick fix before the is there yet research has shown that listening to music is associated with optics immunity boosting antibodies and cells that protect against bacteria and other invaders music has also proven proven to be effective across a variety of treatments scenarios for conditions ranging from premature birth to depression to parkinson's disease wow that's a powerful instrument you're doing our full work so when you're going in and you engage with people who are developmentally challenged it's not just you they're making a difference in their mood you're creating a difference in their brains yeah i mean  like yeah sometimes they don't realize the effect that or maybe not that i have but just that the millions who yes music really does have this believe will power to like break the walls break down barriers make people come out of their shells i've seen some pretty amazing things for sure and i'm very lucky i'm blessed to be able to do what i do i mean i say that like every day yeah yeah so you were saying a couple of things but one of them is that you started this because you you wanted to make music you wanted to engage but you ended up in a job where you weren't engaging with music you were crunching numbers for a music company of is very peripheral yeah i wanted to do and so your mother suggested just go volunteer somewhere so tell us a little bit about that journey yes so leading up to volunteering i was working at a company in new york basically numbers it was in the music industry i thought it would lead to something yes i learned a little bit yes but no nowhere near as we're really where i really wanted to be so i started volunteering at this as a visitation home and yard ville not too far from here  with adults that live there that had some sort of developmental disability it was really just down syndrome and autism and individuals i would just go help out around the house but nothing to do with music just to kind of like reinspire myself again i don't like i was at a time when i was doing music on the side but all day at work at this place and not wanting not really feeling for filling fulfilled right and then with like i had a purpose it was kind of maybe going through the motions i didn't realize it initially but started to realize i mean i got to do something about this the so started just helping the run the house like doing the dishes you know cleaning a little bit they would have barbecues in the backyard just fun stuff and after the first couple times i started bringing my instruments i bring a keyboardist a portable keyboard i bring my guitar and i just sing like simple songs you know i didn't really know many cover songs back then i like eight years ago i was playing songs i wrote and they were not going to know what they work unless they heard about me before which probably didn't so here i was it was really quiet i love being there and did you notice that they were instantly responsive no not really at first i would say because it's they saw me as somebody just wanting to help and volunteer and i was just like a cool guy to hang out with right and so all of a sudden the bring in my guitar my keyboard and i though the first time i did it some of them like ially it wasn't like as much as i would have thought of brad right and it turned into yeah over over the first the next couple times it turned into basically like a party where people were clapping singing and getting up and dancing a little bit wow and you said that you know people who maybe spoke in one word fenton fiz like hungry food  whatever and wouldn't communicate in full sentences would sing us song from beginning to end without missing any words that's pretty miraculous unbelievable i mean i didn't see that it at the visitation room that was really moved on t ark mercer right which is the next best step that i did was make what i was doing volunteering and really getting a lot of joy and feeling like i had purpose so their community is developmentally  and when i moved on to the ark and started working there that's when i saw an individual who we were talking about hungry food that's not a real sentence right us we would say i'm hungry i'd like to eat now please or something along those lines right they sing the whole song front to back without missing a word and be actually in key singing lines so some other p was all literary and i'm a big fan of using literary devices to like teach people yes and for myself it just makes it fun that good writer puts a name on something instead of just being like a random occurrence and so yeah i started going around every day we had these six there were five or six rooms in this day program and i'd go every every morning to a different you know would go to all six rooms spend twenty minutes or would they always be happy to see you yeah oh yeah and i was so happy to see them too yeah yeah that's the great thing is that you were happy to see them so i asked you before and then from ark you moved to allies and i think the little video clip we're going to show is  at allies when i first started allies i believe ok so we're just going to show that video clip it short but it just is very kind of give the compelling picture i'm jim gavin and i'm at the greensleeves expressive art and movement studio in somerville new jersey i've been working in this field for three and a half years and i've been able to create a program with free rein that listening to music appreciation to music participation and it's it's really engaging in and involved and today happened to be a little bit of percussion and so i did some woman activities and then we moved on to a couple of other really fun activities that i do with individuals in this field i see the guys benefiting from the music programs that i do just by being able to increase their and attention as well as increasing their mobility with you know their hands in their their legs even and just learning learning rhythm overall a lot of what i do is rhythm based and i do that on purpose because you know if you can't ever if you don't have great rhythm you're not to be able to play an instrument that's the overall eventual goal is to get our guys to be on their own independently their own instruments some overall goals i have is just to be confident enough with an instrument to maybe do in house concert in a year or so to see if there's a couple guys that can get together and play as a unit together almost as a band that would be amazing more long term goals i would love to be able to record records of these guys would be great to maybe get someone who's really really involved in singing and wants to record a karaoke style record or even have me accompany them i'll play the guitar and they'll sing but again it would just be all of them singing or all of them doing their respective instrument of choice for the record i get a lot out of it i feel like even i get more out of it than maybe the guys do  it's not immediate satisfaction you get back from trying to help someone else learn something new and then they get it and the moment they get it you can see that they get it and it's amazing it's a great feeling of right so you know you could really get a feel for what you did and you said to me i said you know what's your favorite population to work with because there are different there's artists and there's down syndrome and you said and sometimes it mixed in there was a you know schizophrenia bipolar and you said you loved working with down syndrome people especially yeah if i'm going to pick a favorite yes we're told not to really pick a favorite but right there's just something just to talk about that so when you know i spend time with a lot of lots of different groups of people in the development of the disabled world i guess you would say and there's just something about when i'm with individuals who have down syndrome they just show me things that i really i'm not shown otherwise and that would be things like a conditional love and really present state awareness when there's nothing else that matters to round of right here there's all the noise of the world is almost like i just i see it in them they want to give you a hug because they feel like it and they don't care if it's a minute long hug they don't care for it's a you know five minute long hug i might think oh that's kind of odd but right he just embrace it now yeah it's like come here man you know wow you know and that i've had people tell me straight up i love you and i don't know how often they say that the people i mean that means all that's the best thing you could say to somebody and they're saying that to me like mr holmes makes me want to cry like i do get emotional because i'm sure it's a human like expressing themselves in one of our most not kind of paying attention to all the stuff of the world that we pay attention to they're just fully engaged and where they're at isn't that they're there and most of us are going to mindfulness meditation so that we can learn that you know and so it may in them yeah yeah it sounds like that great so i want to read something else and this was interesting to me too because you said at first you know you would play songs that weren't that familiar to them and so there is something about familiar music so it says many of the beneficial effects of music on the brain are not limited to any single genre different styles can produce the same results as long as they align with your musical preferences and it's the brain's relationship with familiar and favorite music that is the key and they talk about how if you play music that when they were in their thirty's and before that that really they connect to it and set up more yeah it's from their childhood songs from that their childhood they remember they remember like the good times in their life maybe were made in have to go to an institution or maybe they weren't in one yet or maybe they were still at home with their families a lot of these individuals that are in day programs like i was going to at the arc and then at allies once you move pas the age of twenty one at least in the state of new jersey right you move on to a group home situation where you're not really with family anymore and so that age is huge right so anything from i've seen twenty one and younger if i can tap into something that they've had from the years from birth to twenty one that's even more impactful yeah yeah wow yeah so you've had to learn a lot of new music  does pretty well to wow again he's very theatrical though yeah i think he's always dancing around how you know so fascinating that whole thing also like the evoking an emotion not just a memory but triggering the emotion is so powerful yeah so they talked about some doctor i think i have his name somewhere brain scans were made of twenty one people while they listened to music that they said they most and disliked from among five ish andras classical country rap rock and chinese opera and they listen to a thong or a piece of music they had previously named as their personal favorite the scans showed a consistent pattern the listener's preferences not the type of music they were listening to had the greatest impact on brain connectivity especially on a brain circuit known to be involved in internally focused empathy and self awareness this circuit called the default mode network was poorly connected when the participants were listening to music they dislike and they also found that listening to favorite songs altered the conic to vittie between auditory brain areas and a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation it's dr jonathan burnett he said if you're trying to restore neural plasticity in the brain to reestablish some of the connections that were there before the music the part of the brain that processes music and it's the scaping you know what that actually is is the last part that goes when you have also has a dimension that's why music is so important for people of all stars and the measure the part of the brain the process is the last thing that a you know it's so actually quite moving because if you think that everything else is gone but yet you can without language or whatever you can connect and awaken something yeah there's a great documentary out there called alive inside that talks about this really and it's about waking somebody who otherwise would normally just sit there pretty much in their own right head you know with their head down not really being engaged in anything that it's pretty pretty new it's it's quite remarkable see the effects that it has almost immediate effects on people right so so you're no longer working for for anyone you've started your own business to do this you know talk to us about that yeah  of go out on my own and not just be with developmentally disabled adults even though that is near and dear to my heart like i said already i've been going into some nursing homes very consistently at a few places in the mercer county area and working with the  has dementia care units playing songs from their childhood and earlier you know maybe early adulthood and also reaching out to places like drug and alcohol counseling centers mental health organizations places like the rescue mission the soup kitchen i want to just help people in that it's very basic what i want to do and i'm doing that right now with a bunch of individual lessons i do in people's homes i do group sessions at different day programs usually involves vocals percussion and maybe an element of sign language in there to wow so getting back to so when you work with individuals why would i hire you like what would i be looking for when i hired you to maybe learn an instrument or be able to i mean i would hate to so it's not just people who are developmentally challenged or could be anybody right i'm fairly well versed on guitar as my main instrument and i also sing but i play keyboard like piano bass ukulele and drums so your regular music teacher you could call it that ok what would you chals yes somebody else might put after their name but this is your passion it is you have experience you have expertise and you love working with people he is not so printer may not show you the latest so then do you do individual parents hire you to come in if they have developmentally disabled children that has happened yes i'm also able to work with right now a company called p p l which stands for public partnerships and they anybody who has a developmental as like what level you're right in your disability and you get a certain amount of money to use per year for a budget in whatever you want to use recreation you know maybe a therapeutic service you want i can actually fall under what's called the goods and services like line item in there and that's where parents have come to me there's been some private pay things and you're right also been where i'm able to use people's goods and services budgets so it doesn't affect our movies that's really growing and it's beautiful that i've been able to do this yeah and really make a difference in their child's life is so what would you do in let's say in a drug rehab program i would probably go in there and be very uplifting and then play a lot of songs that have to do about having a great day and being your best version of yourself that's probably what i would do songs like the best day of my life from american authors and love i try to and sessions no matter where i am with that so and that's the chorus and it's i couldn't think of a better way to really either start a session or and this is usually i and group sessions without so long a lot of people seem to know it or if i hit the road jack because it's fun it's very model right sorry i love this better hurry so i could see i can puter energy and what you bring to the table yeah and you know it's really interesting because your journey is very evolutionary yes and you know as you said you started out in the music industry but work in kind of a corporate type job but here you know i'm a life coach and so i look like for pivotal moments and kind of following the thread and the fact that you know so your mom suggested go volunteer but somebody else might have said what that's not going to provide me with any answers but something about that something it connected and resonate in you and then you go and you volunteer and you're not even voluntary with music but i heard her say oh yeah and you're just out there hanging out with people and having a good time and then you introduce music and then all of a sudden somebody says hey we've never had an organization we've never had music person here but we'd like you to come and do that and then now you know your on your own and you are volunteering your services to the entire population rea really it is that with this special focus on people who really need it in a time and i mean we all need help at one point yet or another in our life yes there are some people who are really struggling with not just one like day it's like whoa a habitual struggle yeah and that's really where my focus is but yes it is for everybody yeah and here's the thing you know you're right everybody's got something going on and some people have more something than others and some people have it more consistently than others and so what we tend to do is we kind of blanket our life with that one statement god life sucks or god my life is difficult and if you start to introduce those little moments of delight those moments of waking up and seeing just in a different way feeling different for a moment it reawakens the possibility of it's not always going to be this way or it doesn't have to be this way are there are moments of delight yeah that's all we need sometimes just these little moments to get us through a tough day yeah at the end of every day i try my darndest to remember something that made me happy or something that fill me with joy or was something special that did not happen the day before and it could be something soon very simple a good sandwich at lunch yeah it could be something like that right it doesn't have to take much yeah it's interest we always try to have this like a light bulb oh yes we dated that have to be that when that happens beautiful awesome even better but doesn't have to be that yeah and you know i have my clients do this i call it creating a wind list or a moment of delight a list because at the end of the day what we're usually left with is god i'm exhausted and the list of things that we have to do the next day so i have them take time to write moments of delight didn't necessarily have to be something you did but somebody came and shared a giggle with you or a story or somebody connected with you and in a very private way  or and then you start to kind of develop a different picture i just realized we are at the end so jim thank you so much for being my guest thank you for what you're doing and i know your information is going to be onscreen i hope people reach out to you because you're a musician with a mission taking it which i appreciate thank you my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us