Why listening to your favourite tunes is as good as a painkiller, explains DR MICHAEL MOSLEY

Music has the power to stimulate our hearts, but now studies are increasingly showing that music can also have a surprisingly strong influence on our well-being.

The latest finding concerns pain relief. Listening to your favorite songs has been found to be a great way to reduce pain. I decided to put this discovery to the test recently during another visit to my dentist for a troublesome tooth.

After letting my dentist know why, I put on my headphones and listened to some of my favorite music (U2 and The Prodigy, if you’re interested) while he drilled away.

Did it make a difference? Emphatically, yes. The procedure was surprisingly painless until I had to pay the bill.

The research that inspired this particular self-experiment was published last month in the journal Frontiers by researchers at McGill University’s Pain Center in Montreal, Canada. They started off gently enough by asking 63 volunteers to choose from “their favorite music of all time.” ‘.

They then asked the volunteers to listen to their chosen music, or to music that the researchers had chosen for them, or to wear headphones that muffled any sound.

While this was happening, the researchers briefly placed a device such as a heated rod, called a thermal probe, on their forearms. This is actually quite painful, like pressing a hot cup of coffee against your skin, but it is unlikely to cause serious damage.

The researchers found that the study participants who listened to their favorite music felt the least pain – and the reduction was the equivalent of taking a powerful over-the-counter painkiller. The effect was especially pronounced among volunteers who reported getting “chills” while listening to favorite songs.

This echoes an earlier review, published in the Lancet in 2015, in which researchers examined the results of 72 studies involving almost 7,000 patients who were exposed to music before, during or after surgery and compared their response to control groups who did not listen to music . .

The researchers from Brunel University and Queen Mary University of London found that patients who listened to music felt significantly less anxious after surgery and required much less pain medication.

Although the impact was greatest in those who listened to their favorite songs before surgery, it also worked after surgery and most surprisingly, some people still experienced less pain after surgery even when the music was only played during surgery played. Which suggests that even though they were unconscious, something was getting through.

It’s not clear why music has this effect, although one theory is that it triggers the release of endocannabinoids, cannabis-like substances that our bodies naturally produce.

A few years ago I took part in an experiment at the University of Nottingham where a group of us measured the levels of endocannabinoids in our blood before and after singing in a choir, or after a 30-minute workout on an exercise bike.

Although both activities led to an increase in endocannabinoids, the effect was doubled during singing (blood levels shot up by 42 percent). The researchers concluded that singing can be a great natural way to improve mood. I haven’t seen any research showing that just listening to music has a similar effect, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

Given that music is a simple, cheap and enjoyable intervention, and that one in three older adults in the UK suffer from chronic pain, it would be fantastic if more research were done into ways to enhance its analgesic effects. strengthen.

And it’s not just about pain. While researching the benefits of listening to music for my podcast series Just One Thing (available on BBC Sounds), I came across a wide range of reasons why you might want to spend more time listening to your favorite songs.

For starters, it’s good for the heart. Listening to music helps reduce stress (and as we know, stress is bad news for heart health) and also has an effect on your blood vessels.

In a small but fascinating 2005 study, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the US asked ten volunteers to listen to 30 minutes of music they found joyful, music that made them anxious, or a relaxation tape.

You won’t be surprised to hear that when the volunteers listened to ‘upbeat’ music, their blood vessels dilated by an average of 26 percent and the effect lasted for several hours.

When your blood vessels are more dilated, this not only improves blood flow to your tissues but also lowers your blood pressure. Listening to the relaxation tape made no difference, while listening to music that made the volunteers anxious constricted their blood vessels by six percent.

So put on those headphones and find your favorite groove.

Will 3D printing cure hair loss?

Many people suffering from hair loss are, understandably, desperate for action. If you have typical male pattern baldness, you can try the drug finasteride; women can opt for minoxidil.

These medications are not for everyone, they can be expensive and they only work as long as you continue to take them.

Hair transplants are another, albeit much more expensive option. Here you have strips of skin containing hair follicles, removed from one part of your scalp and sutured into another part – or you can have hairs transplanted one follicle at a time.

This takes time and does not always last. And what happens when you no longer have hair follicles?

Now researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US have announced that they have been able to produce 3D printed hair follicles on human skin tissue grown in the laboratory. Initially, the intention is to use them for drug testing, but in the future they could help people who want a new head of hair.

What the Mastermind chair teaches us about stress

One way to tell if someone is stressed is to see how fast they blink, according to an intriguing new study from the University of Arizona, which looked at the blink rate of participants in TV’s Mastermind.

I have been asked several times to take part in Celebrity Mastermind, but I have always said no, mainly because I have a terrible fear of panicking in the famous black chair and getting a very low score.

But it is precisely because of the stress of De Leerstoel that the researchers decided this would be a great way to test certain ideas about stress. They analyzed 25 episodes, carefully measuring the blink rates of 100 participants, from the moment they sat in the chair to the moment they left.

Normally we blink about 20 times a minute, but when we’re stressed this shoots up: the participants’ pace almost doubled, to the point where they were about to respond when they almost stopped blinking completely. The main reason we blink is to lubricate our eyeballs. But some researchers think it is also an unconscious way to communicate with others.

Research has shown that when we are chatting, we blink at the end of a sentence and when we think the other person has finished talking.

So a rapid blink can simply be a way of saying to the world, “I’m stressed, get me out of here.”

Thanks to the Danish neuroscientist Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, we know that our brain contains a drainage system that removes waste products while we sleep. This ‘glymphatic system’ may explain why lack of sleep increases the risk of dementia. Now her team has shown that this system may also play a role in recovery after severe head injuries, which can lead to a build-up of fluid that causes further damage. In mice, they discovered that high blood pressure medications can switch on the system, causing excess fluid to be drained. This could be a game-changer for head injuries, stroke and even early dementia.