Tonight, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will face off in the first in-person presidential debate of the 2024 election season. With new rules that set it apart from past debates, all eyes will be on how each candidate performs under the revamped format.

From the earliest days of democracy to the spectacle of modern campaign rallies, politicians have long understood the importance of a compelling performance to persuade audiences and garner support. Tonight, the spotlight will be on how each candidate leverages the timeless elements of political theater to captivate viewers and ultimately sway undecided voters.

“An early-stage debate offers a valuable visual contrast between the two candidates: a showman versus a statesman. Biden, without an audience and with moderators who can mute the mics, I would surmise, gives him an edge over Trump’s showmanship that thrives on an audience, interrupting and using theatrical distractions,” said Christian Grose, an expert on U.S. politics, government and elections.

“On that basis, it’s a moment in time that will have an impact and given low expectations for both candidates, the debate has the chance to really launch one forward.”

The showman versus the statesman

Both candidates have agreed to a new set of rules for tonight’s debate: Microphones will remain muted except when it is their turn to speak, and there will be no studio audience. During the two commercial breaks, candidates will not be allowed to interact with campaign staff.

“This debate is crucial for Biden to counter the narrative of being out of touch and cognitively impaired, especially if Trump appears incoherent on the issues or blatantly lying about his own record. It allows Biden to directly contrast himself with Trump,” said Grose, professor of political science and public policy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and academic director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy at the USC Price School of Public Policy.

LEARN MORE: What to expect from tonight’s presidential debate — Q&A with Christian Grose
During the first Biden-Trump debate of 2024, the spotlight will be on how each candidate leverages the elements of political theater to shape the narrative of their campaign.

Political science research suggests that most voters have already made up their minds and are unlikely to be swayed, he added. However, debates can significantly influence the small number of undecided voters considering third-party candidates.

“The presentation, style and substance can move the undecideds, turn off those on the fence and mobilize core supporters,” Grose said.

Windmills, sharks and motors: The importance of a coherent narrative

Experts say not all presidential debates are decisive, but this one is where everything is at stake. How each candidate crafts and reinforces their narrative will be key.

Robert Shrum, director of the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, cites past elections. For instance, John Kerry won all three debates against George W. Bush in polls during the 2004 presidential election but narrowly lost the election. The upcoming Biden-Trump debate could be as significant as the 1960 televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where Kennedy addressed concerns about his experience and ability to lead as commander-in-chief, Shrum said.

“This year, the Trump campaign has made the mistake of lowering expectations for President Biden. If the president turns in a good performance, it could go a long way toward allaying questions about his age and whether he is up to the job,” he said. “And if Donald Trump repeats what he has been doing at his rallies, talking about windmills, sharks and electric motors, without any coherent narrative tying issues together, he is the one who could emerge as someone who can’t be trusted to sit in the Oval Office.”

Crafting the narrative: The power of humor in storytelling

Developing a narrative is more than just telling your story — it’s a strategic art, experts say.

Oliver Mayer, an expert in contemporary American theater, drama and playwriting, said that a strong narrative blends facts, data and historical events to illuminate the choices that shape individuals from the past to the present. But the personal touch, he said, allows us to step into the moment of decision and gain an even deeper understanding of a person’s character.

“From time immemorial, the best storytelling strategy is an active sense of humor,” said Mayer, a professor of dramatic writing, associate dean of strategic initiatives and associate dean of faculty at the USC School of Dramatic Arts.

“A little self-deprecation keeps a candidate humble, and a well-timed zinger and a wry smile can get under an opponent’s skin better than any statistic,” he said. “The more bombastic the opponent, the more well-timed humor becomes a kind of Kryptonite that zaps their cult of superiority. Rather than returning the jest, they tend to respond with irritability, surliness and eventually, threats.”

USC recently hosted its first Music, Health, and Policy workshop as part of Los Angeles County Arts and Health Week, filling Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall on the University Park Campus.

Event organizer Assal Habibi, an associate professor at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences who explores the intersection between music and the human brain, brought together a wide range of experts on the importance of art and its effect on human development and well-being.

• Listen to the Lightbulb Moments by USC podcast interview with Assal Habibi.

“The workshop aims to bring people together to foster collaboration and combine our efforts to advance the field of music science,” Habibi said. “Our goal is to go beyond generating scientific results and research and to drive meaningful changes in both education and health policy.”

Speakers included LA Opera soprano Renée Fleming, Dean Jason King of the USC Thornton School of Music, and Shrikanth “Shri” Narayanan, University Professor and vice president for presidential initiatives at USC.

Music’s impact on the brain

Research has shown music’s impact on childhood development and ability to address elderly cognitive decline. One USC study showed that music education can boost cognitive development and emotional well-being among K-12 students. Among older people, the use of music can help patients suffering from dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease recall memories.

The importance of art in schools, especially in relation to the passing of California Proposition 28, was top of mind for many attendees of the event. Approved by voters in 2022, Proposition 28 mandated an increase in funding for arts and music education in K-12 public schools.

Exploring the overlap between music and health

“I’m aiming to bring more conversation on health into the curriculum, and ideally aiming to develop some programs around music, health and sciences,” King said.

“This workshop brought together people who are looking at not only the science of music, but also how it can help in the healing of humans,” Narayanan said. “As a researcher and member of the USC community, I’ve been working at the interface between the mind, body, and music and society. And my work has always been at the nexus of what it means to be human and how it shapes their experiences, especially incorporating computational and engineering methodologies.”

“Visual art, therapy, theater, dance — all of these aspects of who we are as human beings creatively — belong in schools,” Fleming said.

It’s early June and graduate student Jonathan Tam, on an afternoon break, is sitting on a red marble bench outside the USC Fisher Museum of Art. The bench is engraved with a 1947 quote from American novelist, journalist and screenwriter Alvah Bessie: “Either the First Amendment is binding upon Congress and all legislative bodies of our government, or it means nothing at all.”

It is one of 10 benches carved with quotes that are at the heart of Blacklist, an outdoor museum installation by artist Jenny Holzer. It preserves the memory and the words of the Hollywood Ten — a group of producers, directors and screenwriters, including Bessie, who refused to answer questions about possible communist affiliations when called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. They insisted on exercising their First Amendment rights and as a result, spent time in prison for contempt of Congress and were blacklisted for years by Hollywood studios.

“I just stumbled upon this, but I’ve read all of the messages that were engraved on the benches and the steps,” says Tam, a USC Viterbi School of Engineering student earning a master’s degree in cyber security engineering. “It paints a picture of the fear at the time. You can see all these voices that were silenced right here in the U.S., and mainly in Hollywood.”

An FBI report heightens fears

The U.S. government’s campaign targeting people in the film industry and accusing them of being communist activists further escalated 75 years ago this week. It was on June 8, 1949, that the FBI released a report publicly naming such well-known film stars as Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson as communist activists.

“It led to people losing their careers,” says Steven J. Ross, a Distinguished Professor of History at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “You had someone like Edward G. Robinson, who was never a communist. But he was an ardent anti-fascist, one of the things that got you blacklisted or greylisted. A whole bunch of people who never joined the Communist Party were active in anti-fascist events in which communists participated.”

People who were greylisted, as Robinson was, were no longer hired by Hollywood’s major studios but could find work at minor studios. Ross says a chill was felt throughout Hollywood due to the lists in the 1940s and ’50s, with even the biggest stars realizing they could lose their careers and be unable to support their families.

“If people are faced with losing their livelihoods because they speak out, a lot of people are just going to keep quiet,” says Ross, an author whose books include 2011’s Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics. “People really shut their mouths from 1947 until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Only after his election did Hollywood stars who were center-left start talking politically again.”

Remembering those silenced

In the late 1990s, faculty members of the film writing program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts formed the First Amendment/Blacklist Project committee to address the fact that many future filmmakers knew very little about this dark period in U.S. history that destroyed the careers of so many creative people.

The committee unanimously chose well-known contemporary artist Holzer — known for her presentation of words and ideas in public spaces — to create a work of art in a public setting focused on the government’s blacklisting campaign. The result in 1999 was a secluded garden in front of the Fisher Museum of Art, located in a quiet section of USC’s University Park Campus along Exposition Boulevard.

“[Holzer] made her name with these very bold, visible quotes that are meant to get you to think,“ says Stephanie Kowalick, Fisher Museum of Art’s director of collections, compliance and exhibitions. “Just from an aesthetic perspective, I think she’s done a beautiful job of highlighting the different viewpoints and how important free speech is, period. It also just really honors the people who lost their livelihood to the blacklist.”

Including Bessie, the individuals who made up the Hollywood Ten and are represented in the Blacklist garden are Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. In addition to the names and quotes on the granite benches, five paths lead to the installation’s central garden made up of red and gray slabs, with quotes from others offering alternative perspectives on freedom of speech and ideas.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas summed up the atmosphere of the blacklist era and its impact on freedom of speech in his engraved 1952 quote: “Fear has mounted — fear of losing one’s job. Fear of being investigated. Fear of being pilloried. This fear has stereotyped our thinking, narrowed the range of free public discussion and driven many thoughtful people to despair.”

Still a timely message

Kowalick hopes that the 75th anniversary of the FBI list’s publication will serve as motivation for people to visit the Blacklist garden, which is open to everyone, anytime, and is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

“We live in turbulent times right now,” she says. “If you are fearful or concerned or think that history doesn’t repeat itself, this is the exact thing that you need to go see and familiarize yourself with. History is cyclical, and we should be learning from it all the time.”

Although the garden is located in a part of campus that is not well-trafficked, it is a quiet, open space for reflection. That’s why Tam, who works as a webmaster at the USC School of Architecture, often finds himself returning to the spot for his afternoon breaks.

“Someone can eat their lunch here and not even really know what’s there,” says Tam, who served six years in the U.S. Navy before returning to school. “This is a pretty quiet but also powerful place.”

Go put on one of your all-time favorite songs, one that you’ve been listening to your whole life. What thoughts go through your head? Memories of home? The first time you saw the love of your life?

Nostalgic music — music that we tie strongly to a point in our lives — can evoke deep emotions across the age span. The root of this phenomenon has remained a mystery, but studies have shown that music can generate strong emotional responses — both to calm and invigorate.

A team of USC scientists is getting closer to understanding what happens in your brain when you hear a favorite song — and the results might have profound effects on those struggling with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“Listening to nostalgic music not only elicits the traditional memory networks of the brain, but it also involves the reward, narrative and self-processing systems of the brain,” says USC researcher Assal Habibi, who directs the USC Dornsife Center for Music, Brain and Society. “These are the mechanisms in the brain by which we think you can listen to 10 seconds of nostalgic music, and it can take you back to something vivid, like your high school prom. We could then use that music as a way of really helping individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.”

Music, movement and learning

Understanding how music affects cognition and the brain as an organ are the twin interests underlying Habibi’s work. An associate research professor of psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Habibi uses various tools, including neuroimaging and psychometric testing, to measure what environmental factors such as music do to our brains.

As founder of the center, Habibi sought to bring together experts from USC Dornsife, the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the USC Thornton School of Music and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering to study music and the impact it has on our emotions, movement and learning. Founded in 2023, the center is currently pursuing three lines of research.

One project explores how learning how to play a musical instrument helps foster better cognitive and language skills in the developing child’s brain. The research, done in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s youth orchestra program and Heart of Los Angeles and funded by the L.A. Philharmonic and GROW at Annenberg Foundation, has also led to new insights into the connection between music and emotional regulation.

But it’s the project on triggering emotions that gets at the heart of why music resonates with us so strongly.

“Our hope is that by understanding how music evokes nostalgia and autobiographical memory in healthy younger and older adults, we’ll be able to apply these findings to older adults with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias,” Habibi says.

Unveiling lost memories

To investigate how nostalgic music could assist people in recalling memories, Habibi and doctoral candidate Sarah Hennessy tapped experts in machine learning, MRI and psychology to pinpoint what happens in the brain when music unveils a lost memory. To grade how well a participant could recall a memory, the researchers assigned a value to its “vividness,” Habibi says. She describes it as a formula psychologists use to measure how “detailed your perception and sensation of experience are in your description.”

“Vividness measures the amount of detail that goes into your description of a memory,” Habibi says. “If I just ramble on like, ‘I went to the grocery, then did this and that,’ that’s not really remembering your memory, but just the state of it. But if you have details like remembering that the room was dark, that is a more vivid memory.”

The idea has borne two parallel studies from Habibi and Hennessy.

The first had two groups of people, 30 younger and 30 older, who gave the researchers a playlist of songs that evoked powerful memories and emotions. The researchers then used an algorithm developed by Hennessy and colleagues at Viterbi School of engineering to find songs very similar to the ones on the self-selected playlist to serve as a control.

The participants then entered an MRI scanner to scan their brains as they listened to the nostalgic songs, the control songs, and then completely unfamiliar music. Afterward, the participants were asked to describe memories tied to the nostalgic music and the researchers assigned a vividness score. Hennessy says the neuroimaging results were “amazing.”

“When you hear nostalgic music, there’s activity all over your brain, but most notably in the default mode network, which is normally active when we’re daydreaming,” she says. “It is also active when we’re thinking about our own narrative. We also have activity in some visual areas that normally process what you see in front of you. But all these participants had their eyes closed. So, what might be happening is that participants are is visualizing what was in front of them during the memory the song evoked.”

Enhancing quality of life

In the second study, a separate group of 150 people of color — were played different types of music over 12 weeks. Some weeks, they heard nostalgic music. Other weeks, they listened to familiar music that was not nostalgic. The participants were then asked to describe an autobiographical memory tied to the song or music. Again, the researchers assigned a vividness score to the participants’ responses.

The study’s results, which will form the basis of an upcoming paper, will help reveal whether nostalgic music evokes a more vivid memory. Habibi says understanding why music provokes a response in reward and narrative systems of the brain could be used “as a way of therapeutic interventions for individuals with dementia.”

“This specific pattern of encoding and retrieval of nostalgic music seems to be unique, and the ability of the music to retrieve autobiographical memories is personalized and relative to your story and narrative,” Habibi says. “If nostalgic music can help dementia patients access some memories that are typically not accessible to them, it can enhance the quality of life, even if it’s temporary.

“If a patient is with their children, and they can remember a birthday party associated with a song and details of it, it can bring back the richness and emotional connection of that memory,” she adds.

Connecting to a sense of self

Habibi and Hennessy continue to investigate the mind-music connection. Habibi, with researchers from USC Thornton and the Alzheimer Disease Research Center, recently received a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab grant to investigate the “effects of music engagement on hearing, communication, and psychosocial well-being in individuals with, or at risk for, Alzheimer’s disease, as well as their caregivers.”

Hennessy is scheduled to earn her doctoral degree this May, and presented findings from the MRI study at the NeuroMusic Conference held at McMaster University in Canada in November 2023. The analysis for the study investigating dementia in people of color continues and will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication in the coming months.

Currently, Habibi, Hennessy and doctoral candidate Ellen Herschel are conducting a clinical trial for a music intervention app for individuals experiencing dementia. Habibi says that for many dementia patients, the struggle of not remembering causes a lot of agitation. The app will play music for them that’s not necessarily nostalgic but will help support their emotional regulation when they struggle with not recalling a memory.

Hennessy says the researchers hope that understanding how music evokes nostalgia and autobiographical memory in healthy young and older adults will allow future research to investigate how these findings could be applied to older adults with neurodegenerative diseases. “Investigating the mechanism of how music evokes these powerful emotions and memories in the brain can help us understand how music-evoked memories remain relatively spared in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias,” Hennessy says.

“Nostalgic music allows us to connect to our sense of self,” she adds. “Because this sense of self is often diminished with neurodegenerative disease, the hope is that this type of tailored music intervention might be able to help patients — even if just for the duration of the song — experience a temporary ‘return to self’ by engaging in these self-referential and autobiographical areas in the brain activated by music.”