Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore the practical ways music transforms everyday life – health, happiness, and beyond. We often hear about the four pillars of health: sleep, nutrition, exercise, and social connection. But what if we’ve been missing a fifth one that’s been hiding in plain sight? Today we’re diving into the brand new book from award-winning scientist, Dr. Daisy Fancourt, called “Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives.” In this book, Dr. Fancourt distills the science that has mesmerized her for the past 15 years – scientific evidence for how arts can improve your health, stave off illness and disease, and help you live a longer and fuller life. Dr. Fancourt is Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London, where she heads the Social Biobehavioral Research Group, and she’s the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health. Welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Daisy.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:01:13] Thank you. It’s so lovely to be with you.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:16] I found it so fascinating to hear you describe in the book your own journey to the career path that you ended up on, and eventually writing this book, and that it started when you were struggling to choose between arts and science and school. Can you explain to listeners how you resolve this dilemma?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:01:35] I mean, I essentially resolved it by trying to have my cake and eat it. So I initially.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:40] I think you were able to do that in a way.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:01:43] Well, I initially headed off to university. I went to do a humanities degree, music degree at Oxford, and I worked as a pianist for our radio station, classic FM, and I was convinced I would head into that music world, but I really missed the science alongside that. So a whilst I was doing my degree, I was able to take part in a training programme in hospitals looking at how arts programmes could be delivered. And after I left university I went and worked in our National Health Service in hospitals, designing arts programmes, and then eventually decided that I really wanted to swing right into science. So I went and did brand new degrees and now work as a scientist. But looking at the incredible activity of arts and music engagement.
Mindy Peterson: [00:02:24] Well, and we’re so glad that you did, because we’re benefiting from that. But one thing that you shared in the book is you. You were working. You felt like you had gotten your dream job. You were designing and implementing or performing arts program at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. But you felt this increasing frustration because you felt like what you were doing was seen by a lot of the staff and patients as entertainment, but you were seeing something quite different. Tell us what you were seeing and why you felt this disconnect and this frustration.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:02:56] I really felt this problem because people would talk about the music and the dance and the arts program that we had, in the same breath that they talk about having TV next to people’s beds on hospital wards. It’s like, this isn’t just an entertainment thing. This was actually something where I could see the benefits. I saw children coming into A&E with Burns, who, if they were distracted by arts engagement, didn’t need morphine. And I saw older adults with dementia on the wards who couldn’t remember their loved ones visiting, but would suddenly be singing along to the music that they were hearing. And I could see patients who were having panic attacks prior to surgery with the anxiety of it, who, when you gave them visual arts to look at and calm music, suddenly were happy to go in for their operations. So I could see all these benefits, but I felt like we were lacking the really objective, hard data that would help other people to to value what I think most people were only valuing if they’d actually experienced it themselves.
Mindy Peterson: [00:03:50] And that’s so valuable because there’s so many of us who are involved in the arts and we get it. We experience it. We see it firsthand the way you did. But there’s people who aren’t in that world, and it’s on us to describe and objectify and quantify those benefits and those results for for people who aren’t in that world. So we’re so grateful that you’re you’re doing this. So yeah, thank you for doing that. And and that kind of leads us to why did you write this book? You had some um, well, I’ll let you explain why. Why did you write the book?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:04:26] Well, I’ve been working now as a scientist looking at this for nearly 15 years, and I’m more and more amazed by the evidence that’s coming out. But when I describe what I do to someone on the street or friends, for example, most people have never heard of this evidence base about just how beneficial the arts are to our health. Like maybe they’ve heard of arts therapies. You’re like, well, that’s part of the picture, but it’s not the whole picture. We’re saying that every day engagement, for fun, for pleasure, for leisure has these health benefits too. And I’ve seen over the last few years so many books coming out on other health behaviors. So diet and physical activity and sleep and nature. And I thought it was about time that we had one that was giving that same kind of overview. In summary, for anybody who enjoys reading these popular science books, but this time all about the arts.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:13] Yes. Love that. And you said in the book, my goal is to fundamentally change the way you value and engage with the arts in your daily life.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:05:23] And you’re ambitious, not ambitious at all.
Mindy Peterson: [00:05:26] Well, in your book covers an extraordinary range of topics. I mean, we could have multiple podcast episodes on each chapter of your book, for sure. I found that so, so fascinating. You say that there really is not a physiological system, that art does not affect. You address the arts impacting our physical, mental and emotional health, including things like cognitive reserve, cardio, Cardiometabolic, respiratory and immune function. Talk to us just a little bit about the scope that you do have in the book. And then given how expansive it was, if there was just one area of research that really just stopped you in your tracks or was most impactful for you.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:06:08] I tried to cover everything in this book. So mind, brain, body and behavior is how I’ve structured the book. Thinking about the role that the arts have, whether you are dealing with illness or whether you’re healthy, but you’re looking to optimize your health, prevent the risk of illness and liver with higher levels of well-being or happiness. I think in terms of the evidence that I found the most exciting, it’s for me, it’s the biological evidence, because it’s some of the most objective kinds of data we can look at. Um, and it can tell us about these mechanistic pathways that explain the health benefits that we can often see or perceive ourselves, and some of the work that’s coming out at the moment, which might my team, my lab at UCL are leading on as well, is looking at how arts engagement is related to our pace of biological aging. So actually showing that people who engage more in the arts, it actually affects them at a biological level, to the point that they biologically age slower than people who are not engaged in the arts. And this this is what we see for other health behaviors. Like we know that this is what happens with physical activity. But we’re seeing it for the arts as well. And I think that’s so exciting. And putting it on that, that footing, that kind of pedestal. That’s why I talk about this missing fifth pillar of health here, because I think we really need to be talking about the arts, just like we talk about those other behaviors like exercise.
Mindy Peterson: [00:07:26] Absolutely. I’ll say that one of the areas that most impacted me as I was reading your book was where you were talking about the impact of the arts on newborns in the unit. And you have very personal experience here because of your daughter, Daphne, spending time in that unit and just your personal experience of how she responded to music and the arts talk to. And maybe one reason this was so impactful to me was, number one, your personal experience with it. But second, this is an area I have not covered yet on the podcast and I would love to, but can you just give just a brief overview of what you experienced with your daughter with that topic?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:08:10] This was a really a really poignant moment for me. My younger daughter was premature and just five. When she was five days old, she contracted meningitis. So we had every parent’s worst nightmare in intensive care with her. Um, but there was a body of literature that I remembered reading like ten years before, which had spoken about the value that music had in neonatal intensive care units as a way of reducing distress amongst infants, helping to calm them so that they would be able to feed better. They wouldn’t lose as much weight, um, and then they would even be able to to leave hospital sooner. And I remember that, you know, we I couldn’t even touch her when she was in intensive care and I was panicked about her losing that sense of that sense of someone being there for her. But it was it was near Christmas time. So I sang Christmas songs to her all the time, and I actually saw, I could see on her monitors these improvements in her oxygen saturation, reductions in her heart rate. And it was it was pretty incredible sitting there and watching it, because it was always a literature I’d been slightly in awe of when I’d read it, because of how powerful music seemed to be in that setting, but I could actually see it visibly in front of me. And I think this is one of these examples where it’s such a simple thing for parents to know about, for hospitals to know about encouraging people not just to talk to their babies, but actually to sing to them, because that can actually be a thing that can be so valuable in that environment for the babies and also for the mothers.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:31] Mhm. Yes. So touching to hear that story and to read even more about it. Describe for listeners just a little bit about how you measure some of these things. Like you mentioned, you were able to see Daphne, your daughter’s measurements change on the screen with her heart rate and things like that as you sing to her. And you describe in quite a bit of detail in the book about some of the different scientific methods that you use to measure the impact of the arts on on people as you’re doing your research. And I found that really as a non-scientist, I found that really interesting to hear about how you do that. Things like measuring saliva before, during and after a concert. So explain to listeners just kind of briefly some of the different ways that you do measure these outcomes.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:10:18] Yeah. Measurement of arts in relation to health is really becoming a bit of a Disneyland for scientists. We’ve got everything from asking people to complete questionnaires or interviewing them through to doing brain imaging, gathering blood and saliva samples, measuring the conductivity of their skin, which can tell us about their arousal levels. Being able to look at physiological measurements like heart rate, like blood pressure, um, and also being able to even look at the expression of people’s genes through their blood samples. See how their DNA is being expressed. So there are so many different tools that we now have available. One of the ones I work on the most is actually big data cohort data, where thousands of people are tracked every couple of years for their entire lives, looking at what happens to their health, their behaviors. And I work with these massive cohort studies from all around the world that have actually, bizarrely integrated questions on the arts so we can look at how arts engagement relates to people’s later risk of developing all kinds of health problems. And so I think that’s what’s really exciting overall about this field is we’re not just looking at one type of study. We’re now able to triangulate the findings from so many different kinds of scientific methods and different studies, which is what’s really increasing the rigor of that overall picture of the evidence now.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:34] Are so fascinating. It does seem like I am hearing about more and more, just kind of like this explosion of research on the impact of the arts, but specifically music, probably just because that’s the the specific discipline of the arts that I’m tuned into. That’s the focus of this podcast. And it seems like one catalyzing factor in that is the availability of functional MRIs and how it’s this less invasive way to measure the impact of the arts and music on people. Is that true? And if so, are there other ways of measuring this impact that have also developed more recently that’s helping and aiding in this scientific research?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:12:16] Absolutely. And actually, one of the things I find most exciting is the more ambulatory measures. So the things where we’ve not got to be lying in a tube or in an artificial lab environment, but we’re actually going around our day to day lives. So we’re capturing the impact that the arts are having in their real context. Um, and I think things like even smartwatches now are giving us so much of an opportunity to look in that natural setting. When you don’t, you sort of forget you’re being observed. You’re just living your normal life, but then being able to track the impact that the arts are having.
Mindy Peterson: [00:12:47] Well, that probably gives a much more accurate result.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:12:50] Definitely a much more honest and realistic one about implementation in the real world, because we can we can artificially control environments in laboratories. But you know, we all know it’s very different if you’re lying in an MRI tube listening to Taylor Swift versus watching her in an arena doing a live performance. So it’s really important to capture how what the impact of that real life setting actually is on us.
Mindy Peterson: [00:13:12] Oh, fascinating. Well, I could talk for probably five minutes just listing all of the different applications of music that you cover in your book, which I won’t do, but you, I’ll just mention a few. You talk about arts for increased well-being, happiness, mental health, brain health, cognitive development, language development, cognitive reserve, memory and dementia. Coping in dementia movement. Physical performance. Neuroplasticity, motivation, stress and pain relief, surgery outcomes, longevity. And then we already mentioned things like respiratory system function, immune. So if any of those are remotely interesting to listeners, you’ll definitely want to grab this book. And I guess I didn’t look at the index myself, but I’m sure you’ll you have an index in there where people can.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:14:03] Have a wonderful index. We had a very thorough person who was creating that index. So whatever your kind of arts engagement, music or otherwise, and whatever health condition you’re interested in, I bet it’s in there somewhere.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:15] Yes. I’m sure. Another topic that you cover in your book, and I’m so glad you do, is this question of, so why aren’t we doing more arts? If the arts has this kind of a benefit? In fact, you talk about if this benefit was available in a drug, if a drug had the same catalogue of benefits as the arts would be telling everyone about, it would be fighting to get our hands on it would be paying whatever price it costs. But in reality, there are relatively few adults engaging intentionally with the arts on a daily basis. So why is this? Where did we go wrong?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:14:51] Yeah, we actually did a recent study where we looked at a representative time use survey of US adults, and it said they asked people, did you engage in the arts at all yesterday for how many minutes? 95% of US adults said zero minutes. So this I think this is a real problem. And I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I don’t believe that it’s people don’t enjoy the arts because we’re all very willing to do other behaviors that we really don’t enjoy for our health, whether that’s a huge amount of exercise or eating broad beans and broccoli. So I don’t think it’s that I think it’s actually that many people are unaware of what the health benefits are. So when we get into our busy lives, I think if we start to get stressed or we’ve got too much on, I think arts engagement can feel like this luxury, this thing that actually we should be dropping because it’s not essential in our lives at this busy time, and that’s really the absolute opposite of the way we should be thinking about it, because actually it is essential. It’s the arts that can help us to weather the stress of these difficult moments in life and support us through illness. And I also think we have to call out, you know, the rampant inequalities that unfortunately do exist in access to the arts. And we see time and time again, Arts funding is one of the first things that often gets cut. Um, and we can see that often in more deprived communities, we can have fewer opportunities for arts engagements. Um, and we particularly see challenges often in where those arts are valued enough to include within the school curriculum as well. So I think we’ve kind of got these personal, but also these societal barriers that we need to really overcome.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:16] Definitely. Well, you do such a great job of addressing those in the book and talking about how as a society, we do. Going back to your early frustration right out of college, we do tend to look at the arts as entertainment and nothing more. And they can be entertaining for sure, but they also are so much more. And throughout the history of humankind, the arts have been part of life and part of humanity and part of community.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:16:46] Part of medicine. Actually, every single medical tradition, every early medical tradition spoke about the arts in their early writings.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:52] Ah, yeah. And we’ve become fairly siloed in viewing it strictly as entertainment and from a business perspective, looking at it from a sense of how much money can you make if you go into this field, rather than thinking of this as a humanity and a health and just a much broader application to our, our human journey and our human lives. So I love how you address that. You also really talk about the importance of getting our kids involved in the arts, whether it’s in school or in our homes, and how so many teachers are leaving that field and that ripples out into the rest of a child’s life if they’re not being exposed to the arts in school, in childhood, whether it’s in school or in the home. They’re much less likely to engage in the arts. Exactly. And reap the benefits of the arts as they become an adult. And then that is generational. They’re less likely to do those activities with their own children. You talk in the book, we’re treating the arts as though they’re not essential. When everything that you have shown in the book shows the opposite. I love also toward the end of the book where you say, how do we fix this? Oh, yes. You have ten very practical steps. And talking of practical, I want to point out too, that throughout the book, at the end of each chapter, you have this daily dose section where you give very applicable, very practical tips on how to apply the content of that chapter, how to apply the science that’s presented in a very practical way. So I love that. It really.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:18:26] We’re all busy. We kind of just want to know what we should be doing, don’t we?
Mindy Peterson: [00:18:29] Exactly. Well, and for those like me who are not scientists. We appreciate the science, but also appreciate that practical. What do I do about it? How do I apply this to my daily life? That how do we fix that section? Toward the end of the book, you have those ten practical steps. Uh, give us like a, a taste test, sticking with a food theme, because that’s another thing I enjoy about the book is how you, you use this allegory of of the arts and comparing it to ingredients of food. And that’s kind of a constant theme in the book, which makes it easier to understand, but give us a little taste test of like maybe your top 3 or 4 of these ten practical steps of how we fix this situation.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:19:10] Sure. So I think my main thing is to think about integrating arts into our lives in the same way we think about integrating healthy diets. So we have sort of typical rules that we’ll try and follow in our lives, like, you know, get your five vegetables a day. I think we need to have a similar one for the arts. And this can be personal, whether you wish that you did 15 minutes of arts every day, or whether it’s that you take an art class once a week, whatever that amount is like, have that kind of dose that you sort of set as your own personal guide. Just like with food, it’s really important to get diversity of lots of different plants in your diet. It’s equally important to get diversity of arts experiences, because each arts experience brings different kinds of ingredients, whether that’s social interaction, sensory stimulation, cognitive stimulation, physical activity. And all of these are really important in their own right. So it’s great to have multiple different art forms that you engage with. Also, I say to people, be a mindful chef. So it’s very easy to inhale a meal and not taste it. And it’s very easy just to plug in music on our headphones and then just zone out and not think about it. But I’d say like, take that time. If you want to listen to music, just sit down and just even just have that first track where you actually listen to it before you then just go on with your daily life, because that intentional concentration and proper engagement with the arts is actually when we get the most benefits from them for our own health and wellbeing.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:34] Those are also great, so work out your five a day equivalent and diversity is key. And I did love this one because we are, like you said, hearing this more and more with nutrition like instead of just an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Like yeah, that’s great, but it’s even better if you can diversify your nutrients and mix it up. Expose yourself to new ingredients, new fruits, new vegetables. Each one has different nutrients and different potential. And in the book you kind of talk about that too. Like if you’re looking to improve mobility issue, maybe you have Parkinson’s or or something like that. There’s certain arts that are going to impact you differently.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:21:18] And that ingredient of physical activity, which might mean something like dance, is then the right art form for that. So sometimes you can really map those ingredients onto the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. You?
Mindy Peterson: [00:21:28] Yes, absolutely. And then be a mindful chef. And I think just reading through this book will help people to be aware of areas they maybe are already utilizing the arts, and they’re just so used to using it unconsciously in a certain way that they’re not aware of. Oh, this is the arts that I’m using. Mhm. Like I just think about how playing background music while I’m eating a meal with my grown kids who are visiting right now, uh, can change the whole mood and change the vibe and the conversation. It can make things more lighthearted and fun and just more of a celebratory situation. And we’re not necessarily being mindful in the sense of we’re all paying attention to the song that’s playing at this moment, and the lyrics and the the pitch and the melody and the heart. You know, it’s not being mindful in that way, but just being aware of, oh, you know, I turned this music on for a reason, and it’s accomplishing its purpose. And just being aware of that, I think, can help change our attitude toward the arts.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:22:33] And for many people, they often do that unconsciously with emotion regulation like stress. If people are feeling stressed, they’ll sometimes I notice myself doing it. If I’m going home after work and I’m feeling a bit highly strung from it, I’ll always put on quite poppy music. And then I’ve sort of now I’ve become more aware that that’s what I’m doing. I’m like, oh, I’m actually using that then as a way of de-stressing, as kind of a cathartic process to let out that pent up energy. But now I’ve recognised that I can be more intentional about it. I can think, you know what? I’m feeling stressed. This is what I know is going to help me on my commute home, so I can deliberately then use music in that way to help me rebalance my emotions.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:08] Absolutely. A couple of my favourites from this list of ten one was avoid the Upfs ultra processed foods, which are screen time?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:23:19] I’m afraid so, yeah. Yes, and they can be useful.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:23] Like if people have Of accessibility issues. You know, screens can be great and virtual experiences can be great, but.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:23:31] Exactly.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:32] Yeah. As you say, use them strategically. Yeah.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:23:35] Don’t make them. You tend to get these stronger benefits if you’re engaging in real life, where that’s taking part in a real choir versus a virtual choir, we actually directly compared them. Um, or whether that’s going to going to the theatre or live music as opposed to going to the cinema. So there are still some benefits, but it’s much better to get that real life exposure whenever we can.
Mindy Peterson: [00:23:55] Yeah, yeah, the virtual can sort of dilute the effect or the benefit to some extent. And we get the full raw benefit and the full dose by engaging with the arts i.r.l in real life instead of virtually. So I really liked that one. And then another one that I loved was identify your chicken soup. And you say, when we’re ill, we all have food we believe will get us better again, homemade chicken soup or a vitamin packed smoothie. And so then you talk about the equivalent of find out what works best for you when you’re like you mentioned being if you have a stressful day at work, what you do on the way home, or if you’re feeling anxious or if you’re just tired or whatever it is, find out what your chicken soup is, what your smoothie is. That’s going to be helpful in that moment for that situation.
Daisy Fancourt: [00:24:44] Exactly.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:45] One quote that I want to read from the book, as we’re kind of wrapping up our conversation here, is you say in the book, remember that the very act of reading this book for pleasure is an engagement in the arts. So by doing so, you will at the very least be doing your health some good. So I want to leave listeners with that. Your book is available now. I’ll definitely have links in the show notes to where readers can get their hands on that and order that. Daisy, as you know, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical ending, a coda. And we’re switching this up in 2026. The coda, the musical ending is for guests to share a musical tool that you wish more people knew about. So this could be a book, a blog, an app, a therapeutic tool, or anything that enables you to enhance your life with music. In addition to your book, which I want all readers to get, do you have a musical tool that you can tell us about today?
Daisy Fancourt: [00:25:43] Yeah, a practice I’ve recently got into which I’m loving is in the evenings. If I’ve got a quieter evening turning on the radio where they’ve got one of these live concerts playing. So there’s something about it being a live concert rather than just music that’s being played off records where I feel like I’m part of it. I feel like I’ve had a much more enriching musical experience from hearing that orchestra or that band, and knowing that they are doing this right now, 100 miles from me, maybe, but feeling I’m part of that audience and hearing the claps, hearing the conversation happening between the pieces. And I’m really loving it. So that’s my my top tip for anybody else who might have a spare evening and would like to remotely take part in the joys of a concert.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai