The narrative around extending life has been overtaken by a weird cabal of billionaire techbros, who appear to treat it like a video game where the goal is to get 100% completion, rather than to try, as much as possible, to enjoy the experience and process of ageing. Some of their suggestions are truly bizarre – including bedsheets that wick away static electricity, some kind of vitamin-rich green gruel, and most oddly of all a ring you wear on your member at night to assess nocturnal swellings (there’s also the possibility of electrode therapy to the aforementioned chap). While the tech bros have come up with all sorts of unpleasant (and expensive) ways that they think will extend their lives, there are much simpler solutions to increase the length of time for which you are healthy (sometimes called healthspan). Unlike the sci-fi gambles of the billionaires, these will not make you feel like you are enduring your life just for the sake of hoping to extend it in some weird longevity contest.
In terms of improving your healthspan it’s hard to escape the big four – don’t smoke, don’t drink, eat well and do exercise. There are other ways, and not in the form of the sort of snake oil that might tempt a web entrepreneur with a giant pile of cash – but pure and simply, through music. As we all know, music nourishes the soul, but it seems it might also extend our lives, in ways that we do not fully understand (yet).
I am a research scientist who has just spent a year reflecting on why we die, a journey chronicled in my new book Live Forever? A Curious Scientist’s Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death. My odyssey was triggered by the discovery that the lighter hairs on my head were not, as I had been telling myself, blonde – but were in fact grey. This and the gradual descent into long-sightedness led me to explore how the organs in our bodies work, how they go wrong, the advances medicine has made to put them right and suggestions on how we might be able to resist the effects of ageing.
I went to some lengths, even undertaking self-experimentation to explore the anti-ageing rhetoric. It’s probably not such a big spoiler to say that, no, we can’t avoid ageing and that, yes, death is inevitable. In my attempts to stave off ageing, I tried cold-water swimming, extreme calorie restriction and spiking my microbiome with fibre. Sadly, unless you want to find yourself cold, hungry and flatulent, I can’t really recommend any of them.
It was all a bit disheartening, but then I came across a piece of research by the US surgeon general that showed that social isolation is a huge health risk factor – worse for you than smoking 15 cigarettes a day – and everything clicked into place. There are a whole range of activities that extend and enrich your life, and prominent among them is music and dancing. Much of their value comes from social interactions, but there is a sliding scale of the benefits when you combine social, physical and mental elements – listening to music at home with a friend is good, attending a gig with friends is better, playing in a band is best. Similar goes for dancing – watching Strictly with family is good, going to a disco better, taking ballroom lessons with your partner, best. Choirs have benefits through social interaction, but also using lung muscles. Music has other benefits, lowering blood pressure in people with hypertension and reducing the risk of dementia. Music provides connection to other people, both within and between generations. Listening to songs my teenage son has ‘discovered’ and then suggesting other bands within the same genre is joyful. We can now discuss the best tracks on Nevermind and whether or not it is ok to carry on listening to artists after they have been cancelled.
Why we need the social interactions music provides is a little unclear. The interconnectivity of human health means biological, psychological and behavioural processes all contribute to disease, and social isolation influences all of these aspects. It’s a truism to explain the impact of isolation by stating that humans are ‘social animals’; but most animals are social, even some bacteria. Humans, however, need social co-operation to survive, and this has almost certainly been an important part of our evolution. The need for company is hard-wired, recent research demonstrating that craving for social contact fires the substantia nigra, the region of the brain associated with hunger. Isolation elevates levels of a stress hormone called cortisol. The stress of loneliness even has a delayed action, with loneliness the day before translating to more cortisol the following morning – essentially, FOMO has physical consequences as elevated cortisol in response to loneliness causes the same negative impacts as sustained stress of other types. The inverse has been observed: happiness lowers cortisol. Isolation also impacts the psychology and behaviours of the lonely person – when stressed and alone, you might conceivably turn to drinking and smoking, possibly to replace the dopamine hit of company.
Author of Music, Mental Health, and Immunity, Dr Lavinia Rebecchini of King’s College London, is one of the experts trying to dissect the scientific mechanism underpinning the protective value of music. One of the most intriguing findings is the interplay between stress, cortisol and the immune system. Cortisol has a wide range of functions (we use the word pleiotropic to make it sound more sciencey); one of which is to dampen the immune system. Music, by reducing stress, can reduce cortisol and therefore boost the immune response. This has measurable effects – one way the immune system fights infection is by producing a substance called immunoglobulin A (or IgA); this is a protein called an antibody that can bind and kill bacteria. A study by Dawn Kuhn found that playing music and singing has been shown to increase levels of this protective IgA protein. The style of the music can also have an effect – this might jar with some Quietus readers, but research by AJ Blood and others found that the brain wave patterns after listening to dissonant music mirror those seen in unpleasant emotional state].
One of the advantages of getting older (and more specifically my children getting older) is that I can now return to going to gigs. This seems to have coincided with many of the bands I didn’t get to see as a teenager reforming and replaying. So, join me, get out there and dance – and whilst the cost of gig tickets may put this treatment in the same bracket as some of the more outré suggestions by the techbros, at least you will have fun – and perhaps add a few moments to your time on this mortal coil.
Live Forever? A Curious Scientist’s Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death by Professor John Tregoning is out now, for more information go here
