 Now, if you are a fan of rock music, you're going to love our next exhibit. Fran is down there in the mosh pit. Can you hear me Fran? Fran, can you hear me? Sorry Roma, I was in my own little world then, but it's a world that is about to be joined with a Marcus from the University of Chichester and Jules from Rowland. So obviously we have the drum kit, but what has that got to do with science? So we're building up this scientific understanding of the drummer. So what we want to expose you to today is a little bit of an insight into the technical requirements and the physical requirements of drumming. So if I'd like to pass you over to Jules, my colleague from Rowland, he'll give you some basic instruction and let's see where we end up. Oh gosh, that sounds a bit ominous. So what is it that we're going to do Jules? OK Fran, so I'm going to teach you to play a really basic drum beat and what we call a drum fill as well. OK, really basic, yeah? For sure. Totally be able to do it. So actually what you're going to do here is you're going to use four limbs independently of one another and coordinate them in order to be able to play this beat. So what I'd like you to do is to start by playing the hi-hat here with your left hand and I want you to count a nice four beat. Right, so like one, two, three, four. Great, so then we're going to introduce the kick drum and we're going to put that on beat one and beat three. So one, two, three. I've got it, I've got it going, right? OK, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. You've got it, one, two, three, four. Amazing. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. This is the hard bit, this is the easy bit. And the next part is you're going to introduce this drum here called the snare drum. There's more? Oh yeah, so you're going to put that on beats two and beats four. So the big drum down here with the kickboard, three and no. One and three. One and, totally got it, one and three, this one on two and four. And this one on all four, all at the same time. Go for it. One, two, three, four. And I thought patting your head and rubbing your belly was it? OK, so one, two. Amazing, you got it, you got it. Yeah, absolutely, that's it. You've been kind. And then the last thing we'll do to finish off with the drum fill, so we're going to go. Do this or just do, do I do it all, not just this bit? You can bring it all together. OK, OK, OK. Oh, you're ready. Right, so one, two. Just counting on the one. Yeah, one, two, three. So your heart is now pumping. It really is. It really is. So if you can, that's roughly 60 to 70 beats per minute at rest. If you can play as fast as you can with both hands on that high heart now. Right. So in a gig, someone like Clemberg playing with Blondie will reach 180 to 190 beats per minute. Oh, gosh. So imagine that level of concentration. 80,000 people expected you to hit every note. That is the world of the elite drummer that we're looking to share with everybody. And I think I could see you at Glastonbury next year. Absolutely, a headlady. But I've worked up a sweat here. It is like you're a performer, right? Doing this. So very interesting for us. Drummers drop two litres of fluid per hour, which is similar to a world-class endurance athlete. Oh, gosh. So I think after we finish, you might be the time for a slight beverage. I'm always up for that. Roma, you should come and join me with the drums and with the beverage. This is Fran. I'm getting some real animal from the Muppets vibes from you. But I think we're going to have a slightly more chilled out chat here in the studio now. I've got Ruth Lurie with me. She's a sport and exercise psychologist, and she's here to tell me more about what we've just seen. Hi, Ruth. Hello there. Great to have you here. Nice to meet you. How long have you been drumming? So I'm not a drummer myself. You're not a drummer? No. No, so I'm the one with the clipboard behind observing and recording different data. Are you interested in music? I mean, what brought you to this particular line of work? So it's probably a bit of a long story, but I used to be a nurse-truin nurse before I went to university. So I had another career before I then went as a mature student to university. And I've always had an interest in music and its ability to reach out to children. So then when I started a job in particular, I used the psychology then to try and understand the benefits of music for children, in particular, rock drumming. Why rock drumming in particular? So one of my colleagues at the time, Dr. Marcus Smith, who's our professor, he had looked at the physiological demands of elite, if you like, or professional drummers. And what he found was that as they go across a concert, which might last 90 minutes, they're expending as much energy as an athlete might spend in a 90 minute football match or a competitive bout. So if you imagine that they're doing that night after night, not just at the weekend, they need to think about both their preparation and their recovery so that they can finish the tour, if you like, which might run for six months. So as we talked about that research, we had a lot of parents would come and tell us that children who had autism, who had dyspraxia, dyslexia, really benefited from rock drumming. So we wanted to set out and provide evidence for that. It's really interesting because my initial reaction would be that, oh, calm classical music or violins or like a nice little piano thing would be the thing that comes, a child I know that might make you feel more at ease with yourself or whatever. So what is it about the rock drumming that you're finding in particular that actually brings that sense of, I don't know, peace or stability? So it's interesting that you say that because we see similar parallels to sport and exercise. So people assume that after doing sport or exercise that you might have elevated mood. So you might be running around and still continue to be hyperactive. But what we see is almost the opposite that they have that experience and then there's a calming period. So it's about the concentration and the absorption in the moment. And then after that, that just leaves them with a sense of satisfaction, having learned something that they enjoy and they really want to do. So I like knitting and crochet. And someone told me that because I'm using kind of both my hands and both sides of my brain to do that, that is actually quite therapeutic. Is there some parallels with the drumming? Yes, so with knitting, what you'll find is that it's very, when you start to knit, you're very mindful of what you're doing. So everything's very laboured. And you might have used those old analogies of knit one, purl one, slip off and those sorts of elements. With drumming instructors, you use a similar technique. So they use words like paradiddle, paradiddle. And that's to mimic the sound that they're looking for and particularly the difference between one stick and the other. As you then perfect the skill, you drop the words, you don't need them anymore and you become less conscious of what you're doing and it becomes much more automatic. So you might have noticed that you can watch the TV or have a conversation with somebody else. Now I can, yeah. What the drummer can do is that they can vary the routine. They can have a conversation with other people around them. They can interact with the rest of the band. So you kind of go into this almost flow meditative sort of state? Yes, and that's the word that psychologist use that is one of flow. So that feeling of being unconscious and not aware of what you're doing and that can become in relaxing. And so does the, I guess the beneficials effects of the drumming wear out if you're in the flow and I guess just going with it? Is it the act of learning the new skill that's therapeutic? Like is that part of your research? So there are two aspects to it. So learning a new skill is beneficial in itself because you're creating new pathways within the brain. So it's what we call brain plasticity or neuroplasticity that you might have heard of. And that can happen. It was often thought that it only happened up to a particular age within youth, but you can teach an old dog new tricks. There is benefits then for people and it's been used within rehabilitation for people with brain difficulties. But the learned skills that you have, they're relaxing because they are so automatic. So that's why you see some people with fidget spinners or tapping out a technique because it's a simple thing that they've learned over time and therefore it's relaxing for them. And what is the outreach work that you're doing with children in relation to your research? Yes, so what we find is that when we've gone in to do a research project, it often has a finite cutoff point usually due to funding. And when that comes to an end, what we do is we tend to leave the kits that have been provided for us as part of that research with the school and the teachers have often seen the benefits. So they then looked to resource paying for the drum instructor to continue on with that. So we've got a number of different schools across England. So in Liverpool, Bedfordshire, West Sussex, Gloucester, Forest of Dean that we're working with. That sounds brilliant. And it sounds like I should get my four year old drum kit or maybe not actually. I don't think I want to listen to her drumming at home. Well, the benefit is that people often associate drumming with the acoustic set. That's the noise that you hear is the noise that you get. Whereas the drum kits that we use are electronics. They come with a pair of headphones. So your daughter would hear the music and all you would hear is tapping on the rubber pads of the kit. I think I could probably cope with that. Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's been really fascinating.