Latitude Special: Why Festivals Make You Live Longer; Clearing Alzheimer’s Proteins from the Brain;Clouds Made of Rocks and Rubies; Orcas Blow Up Giant Fish

0:28This episode is brought to you by Accenture. We're just back from Suffolk on the east coast of England where we've been at Latitude Festival. And we recorded an epic show there, really, to a live audience. What a weekend. Yeah, it was brilliant. What were your highlights? Self-esteem, absolutely at the height of her powers. Flaming lips from the old days, brilliant. And Holly McNeish, the poet, they're my three highlights. There was... But there were loads. Yeah, including our own show. Including us, oh yeah, let's not forget to plug us. So we were at the Cosmic Shambles Arena and we had fantastic guests.

1:02We had astrophysicist Hannah Wakeford, neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday and musician Steve Pritty. And I'm going to hand over to my past self now at the show to tell you more about today's episode. So today on the agenda, we've got a promising potential new treatment for Alzheimer's. We've got the function of clouds on Earth and also other planets for good measure. The vital news that festivals are good for your brain and ageing. But we're going to start with some breaking news about orcas, sometimes called killer whales. We've reported them on them a lot, haven't we, Ron? Especially the ones smashing up yachts.

1:38Well, yeah, but there has been 700 boats rammed or attacked by orcas in the Straits of Gibraltar since 2020. And the popular, the most popular explanation is that the whales, the dolphins actually, are rising up to take revenge on the 1 % and smash up their yachts. Probably not the most likely explanation, but we do know, for example, that corvids, crows can hold grudges. So I reckon a dolphin. Yeah, many animals can hold grudges and we know that they're certainly, they probably are smart enough to. Yeah. And my favourite illustration of this is that if you look at the log books of whaling in the 19th century, then something really weird happened.

2:21The success rate of the hunts fell by about 50 % after a few years. And that wasn't because they'd killed too many whales. It was because the whales learned tactics to evade the whalers. And what happens was, back in the day, these were sailboats, wind-powered boats. And the whales learned to swim upwind of the whalers' boats. But they told other whales about this. And so overall, whales who had, then when they encountered these boats, they knew to swim upwind because they'd been warned by other whales. So that's an extraordinary bit of communication. Yeah, cetaceans are the brains of the ocean.

3:03So what is the news this week about orcas? So this week, the Gibraltar orcas, apart from smashing up yachts, they feed on bluefin tuna. But in the Gulf of California, orcas there eat sunfish, the largest bony fish in the sea. So these are massive, aren't they, sunfish? We're talking very big indeed. Yeah, absolutely massive. And that's the problem. if you want to eat one they're just too big to get your teeth around even if you're a an orca so what have they been getting yeah so what they do is they basically one of them hangs on to the fin of the sunfish another one takes a run up and smashes into it hard enough to make it explode basically like an underwater pinata smash up the sunfish and it blows up so so do we think they're doing this for sport or for food as well well so it might be fun it actually might be fun to do this to have this activity it's like a firework display and that's what they're saying it could be fun it could be a way for young ones to to learn about what they're allowed to eat what they're not allowed to eat and and so how how coordinated is this because we know from orca they do things like bubble netting they have these really sophisticated techniques for targeting yeah well so yeah so so the matriarch of the group hold like grabs what the sunfish and we're talking um 2 000 kilograms yeah yeah yeah wow so it's quite a struggle and then somehow communicates to the younger ones right here we go come and get it blow it up and do we have a bit of a snoopy situation with lucy holding the the football have they been observed sort of sure that does happen i wouldn't put it past the orca but the other thing i like about this is if you blow up a sunfish they've got this capsule around the body which contains this really rich sort of gelatinous gloop basically full of a lovely microbiome that protects and nurtures the sunfish so when it blows up all this gloop goes into the water and the young ones can swim through it there could be some health benefits for them for that i feel like this is the next wellness trend tell guinneth paltrow anyway um okay let's let's move on to the next subject today this is a story that really made me do a double take when it came in.

5:13The story is that inhaling high doses of CO2, carbon dioxide, can clear Alzheimer's proteins from the brain. So Penny, take us through this. Yeah, so this is a fascinating story and not something I've ever heard of before. Our colleague at New Scientist, Carissa Wong, found this for us. And it is this finding that intermittently inhaling doses of carbon dioxide at about the level that we normally breathe it out does seem to remove proteins from the brain that are normally associated with Alzheimer's. And it seems to do this by prompting, boosting in the power of our brain's waste disposal system, which is a really hot and exciting area of research at the moment.

5:55Yeah. Start off, though, telling me how high a dose of CO2 do you have to breathe? Because you don't want... Yeah, so we'll start with a health warning. Don't go home and huff gases that aren't the air. we don't want anyone asphyxiating themselves accidentally we call it high um if you think about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere normally because there is plenty of it and more all the time unfortunately that's normally at the level of about 0.05 percent but when you breathe out your body produces carbon dioxide and respiration so there's more in the air that you breathe out and that's why rooms get stale if you've been in the for too long and at that level it's five percent and that's about a hundred times increase and so that's what they did in this experiment is they used that level of five percent carbon dioxide and they got people to breathe it in it's a very small study only about 12 people but they got people to breathe in these sort of doses of five percent that's the hundred times concentration about twice a minute so about 35 seconds apart and the idea with this is that it causes the blood vessels in your brain to dilate temporarily and by making these vessels expand and then they contract again it starts mimicking the the natural motion of the glymphatic system okay so the glymphatic system glymphatic system is so cool um we haven't actually known about it for that long at all it's the brain's waste disposal network it's this um series of vessels that surround the blood vessels in the brain all these channels and we know that it mostly functions when we're asleep so when we're asleep you have certain types of brain wave they spread through the brain and what they do is they cause this pulsing of fluid and waste to drain out of the brain cells and to flow eventually into your neck and drain away we know that those processes are really important for draining the proteins that are involved in things like alzheimer's and so the team behind this were thinking well how can we make this happen more and and they actually managed to mimic it in the day by giving people these gases to breathe wow so this happens at night as well so if you are in a stuffy room you do get this this effect but breathing the high co2 basically turbo charges the cleaning system it sort of um kicks it into gear in the day clever idea yeah really clever as a treatment yeah yeah so this is it's incredibly early stage work needs to be tested and and while they did in this study you see that as they did this treatment there was an increase in these proteins at beta amyloid and tau that are linked to Alzheimer's.

8:31These proteins increased in the blood which was a good sign that they were draining out of the brain and being expelled out in the blood but this kind of study couldn't test whether it actually had any effect on cognitive decline or symptoms or that kind of thing so it's still a quite a long way from the clinic but really quite exciting if it is a technique to try. Is that because we haven't really had a way of getting rid of these tangled masses before? So there's been decades of research trying to get these proteins out of our brains. Lots of sort of attempts that seem to work in mice but didn't translate to humans.

9:06There are certain antibody drugs now that can break these down. They're very expensive and so far the kind of benefits are actually quite small. You're nodding, you know all about this. Yeah, no, I think we're definitely heading in the right direction. But I think a lot of the research now is trying to say, what is the process that's causing those proteins to build up? And I think what's exciting about this carbon dioxide is that maybe that is kind of getting it earlier in the process and actually activating the mechanism. Yes. Yeah. Although, I mean, we still don't really know if these proteins are a cause or a symptom of Alzheimer's, do we?

9:45Exactly. And I think it's really exciting. And I've seen similar studies that have done that by trying to change the brainwaves during sleep and trying to activate the lymphatic system that way. And it's so exciting because it would be a mostly non-pharmacological way of doing things. But I kind of hold on to hope, but with a slight bit of trepidation. I think that's a good way to summarize this. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

10:32The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Brilliant. OK, look, one thing I've been enjoying about the weather today is that there are clouds here, which we haven't really seen many this summer, which is my very clever link to bring in astrophysicist Hannah Wakeford to talk about clouds, not just here, but on other planets as well. But let's start about why are clouds so important? Yeah, I mean, if you look at the Earth, we would be considered a very cloudy planet. So on average, about 72 % of the Earth is cloudy at any one time.

11:12So even though I've always kind of joked I like to study clouds because I'm British, it's actually everywhere. We have clouds all over the place. Because you're an Earthling. Yeah, exactly. So we're always kind of characterized as Britain is a cloudy place. No, a majority of our planet is a cloudy place. And what that's doing is regulating the amount of sunlight that is coming into our planet and the amount of heat that is leaving our planet. So the clouds play this twofold kind of role where they are very reflective. So they're acting like a mirror and they're reflecting a lot of that sunlight coming down into our planet.

11:49But they're also really good at absorbing and then emitting infrared radiation. And that is just heat. So the Earth is giving us heat at all times. That goes up to the atmosphere. Those clouds are what are, they're made of water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. That is a greenhouse gas. It's incredibly good at absorbing and then emitting infrared radiation. So on average, they have this cooling effect and this warming effect. So we've got this kind of dual role that they play on the climate. Super complex, isn't it? and also there's a big worry that as we increase the temperature of the planet we're going to start destroying clouds which perform this vital function as you say and the other thing that clouds are really critical for is this thing called climate sensitivity which is how much warming you can add to an atmosphere how much extra co2 you can add and how much warming you will get as a result and we don't really know and that that climate sensitivity is the measure of Can you take us through that a bit?

12:54Yes, so climate sensitivity is actually a description of about 100 or so different things that if we change them by a small amount, they can have knock-on effects to other things. And when we're thinking about the cloud formation and we think about global warming, you can actually need to fold into that what is known as the ice albedo effect, where the heating up of our planet causes more ice to melt. Ice is more reflective than water and more reflective than clouds. So you heat up the planet by reflecting less. You form more clouds, which then reflect more light, but they heat up the planet by emitting infrared radiation.

13:31So it's this really complex cycle of things that need to play into each other for us to understand it. So the very small parts per million amounts of CO2 increases that we're seeing have this really dramatic effect. It's this tiny little thing in our climate which can change a humongous number of things across the entire planet. And that's something that we're studying in loads of different avenues because it's not just the effect of, OK, the heating is going to cause the melting of the ice caps, which changes all this radiation balance in the atmosphere. But it also has the effect on what we've been seeing.

14:09We've been having this massive heat bubble that we were under. Right now, we're very humid and we've got clouds because that heat bubble has actually moved over Europe. So now the pressure's over there. We're getting winds from the south, which is full of moist air because it's coming over the water. So it's full of this moisture, which is making it feel even hotter here. So we've got this kind of really combined effect of things across our planet, which cause local changes that become very extreme because of that. So the climate is wonderful, but it is incredibly sensitive. Taking us away from our very hot planet.

14:45Clouds are also studied on exoplanets now, planets outside of our solar system. How can we measure those and know what they're made of? Yeah, so I study exoplanets, these planets that are tens, hundreds, thousands of light years away. And what we're doing is we're looking at those planets as they pass in front of their star. So we're looking at this distant star, and we're measuring the amount of the light that the star is giving out. And as that planet passes in front of the star, it's going to block out a physical amount of that starlight, which we can measure in a change in that starlight of about 1%.

15:19So it's a really tiny change in the amount of starlight that we're seeing. But what we can do is whilst that planet is in front of the star, some of the starlight is shining through the edges of the atmosphere. So imagine a sunset where the starlight is shining right through the edge of the atmosphere. Imprinted on that starlight is the information about what it's passed through, so what that atmosphere is made of. And just like all of the gases in our atmosphere, cloud solid particles will interact with light in a different way, so we can work out how big are the particles making up the cloud, where in the atmosphere are they, what's their altitude in the atmosphere, and actually what they're made of as well.

16:00It's amazing that we can do that from so far away. So what have you found? What are they made of? So you said that we go move from our very hot planet out to the universe of these worlds out there. But actually, we're going to somewhere even hotter. It is relatively cool still, isn't it, our planet? It just feels uncomfortable. Yeah, our planet is a relatively cool planet. It's kind of hard to find a relatively cool planet. Some of the planets that I look at are thousands of degrees in temperature. So this is the equivalent of kind of sitting underneath a rocket when it's taking off in terms of the temperature that we've got in the atmosphere of one of these planets.

16:37And at those temperatures, your clouds can't be made of water vapor like we have here on Earth, you know, nice suspended droplets of liquid in the atmosphere. Instead, what our clouds are actually made of are rocks. So they're made of sand. They're made of molten iron. They're made of my favourite, the corundums, which is an aluminium oxide that makes up rubies and sapphires. So we've got these very different environments because of this temperature that we're looking at for these worlds. So why don't they fall down, these rocks? Clouds made of rocks. Because, you know, in Interstellar, when they fly to the planet, when they find Matt Damon.

17:19Do you remember the bit? They bump onto clouds, frozen ammonia clouds. And they, I mean, probably not realistic, but it's a solid cloud. And that's what you're talking about. Why don't they fall down? We are talking about solid clouds. Unfortunately, Interstellar was not realistic in the fact that you would bump into them because that is a solid kind of clump of clouds that have made themselves into one single thing. Instead, what we're talking about is small nanoscale droplets that are suspended in the gas. So a cloud is actually classified as small droplets that are suspended in your gas that you've got.

17:53So if you've got a solid object, to keep it up there, you have to have a wind which is strong enough to hold it against the pull of gravity. So that wasn't the case on that stellar planet. But what we've got in these planetary atmospheres is not only this really strong wind that is lofting these clouds up, but we've got a horizontal wind driving them around at thousands of miles per hour. And we end up with actually not a water cycle like we have here on Earth where you evaporate your clouds. and then when it cools, it condenses. We have a quartz cycle in the atmosphere. So we have the heating up of quartz crystals in the atmosphere.

18:31They evaporate into their silicon and oxygen. And then when it passes back around the planet into a cooler area or condense again, when it grows big enough, it will drop through the atmosphere because gravity wins. Gravity needs to win over the uplift of your wind that you've got holding it in the air. And that's the same here. When our droplets in the atmosphere, in our clouds, get too big, gravity wins, it rains on us. I love how the surface of the planet, there's no border. It fades into the atmosphere. That's something, I love that idea. Yeah, so we end up where we've got this kind of raining crystals of gems.

19:12Just a bit hot. It's just not, it's not a very nice place to go. And remember I was saying they've got thousands of miles per hour winds whipping around. So you've got these shards of literally glass flying at you at thousands of miles per hour. You're going to be shredded to pieces. OK, fine. Yeah. Nice idea, but... With these amazing clouds, what determines what clouds you've got? So is it because we're a watery planet, we have watery clouds. If you're a quartz-y planet, you've got quartz-y clouds. I mean, this is one of the things that scientists do all the time. The thing that we need to work out is what is the first order effect?

19:47What is the thing that is going to cause something the most? And in this case, it's temperature. So the temperature of your planet will first order dictate what your clouds are made of. And we can see that in our solar system. If we look at Mars, we've got clouds of CO2, ice crystals because it's much colder. Jupiter, we've got those ammonia clouds because it's colder again. What about Venus? You might be coming to this because that's super hot, isn't it? Yes. On the surface at least. Venus is super hot, so it doesn't have clouds of water. And actually in the 70s, as new as the 70s, we thought it did have clouds of water.

20:20And it wasn't until we did polarization measurements, so this is looking at a specific orientation of light that's coming from the planet itself, we found out that clouds on Venus are made of sulfuric acid. So the temperature is really what dictates what your clouds are made of. So at these very high temperatures of over 1 ,000 degrees, we're talking about things made of magnesium silicates, which is the common sand that we have on our beaches and what makes up 60 % of the crust and mantle of the Earth. So it's a very common substance that we're expecting to see, and it's out there in the atmospheres of these other planets.

20:57So would that be the same here? If it suddenly was a thousand degrees here, would we have clouds of silica here as well? So we have a surface, and our surface is actually contributing a huge amount to the clouds. You might have seen it already, you might feel it on your skin. the dust actually that we're blowing up here, that would be called an aerosol. It's forming kind of clouds in the atmosphere right now, and it's clinging to your skin. On the earth, those materials go up, and they actually act as seeds for water to condense onto, so it makes it wetter, because it's much easier for a gas to condense onto something that is solid that exists.

21:32So on the earth, if we heated it up, what would happen is the surface would first become molten, but we'd have lost our atmosphere. So we'd be too hot for our size, our gravitational pool, to hold on to our atmosphere anymore. So we wouldn't have any atmosphere to suspend those particles, and we would become what is known as a lava planet. And we've discovered these lava planets, and one lava planet in particular, 55 Cancri e, we've actually detected these silicate clouds in the atmosphere because what's happening on this world is it's being heated so much by its star, it's incredibly close to its star, so it's all lava, it's spurting up these fountains of lava which get captured in the hydrogen atmosphere that it's got left, because it's slightly larger than the earth, it can hold on some of that atmosphere, and then it's transported around the planet where it cools down and then drops back to the surface, so you end up with this disproportionate amount of material around, and then you need subsurface recycling to get that magma back out again.

22:33So we've got these really strange places just next door in our galaxy of these amazing different cloud. Well we did a story last week on this exoplanet, I think it's only 50 light years away, but the cool thing about it was it's a rocky planet and it has an atmosphere and I think that was it was the first time that they've detected an atmosphere on a rocky planet. Oh and it was in the Goldilocks zone as well, that was The other good thing about it, so it was in this zone, the perfect, not too hot, not too cold region next to its star. Do you have a favourite exoplanet? I do have a favourite exoplanet.

23:07Every exoplaneteer, is what we call ourselves, has a favourite planet. And you also have one that you hate so very much as well. Tell us. Because it's ones that you've worked on become your babies. They're yours. I've worked on this data and I know everything there is to know about this planet. And then there are some planets where the data is so miserable and so horrible to work with, you never want to touch that planet ever again. Are you going to name and shame them? They're just a string of letters. They're just a string of letters. I will say that WASP-33b is a nightmare and I won't go anywhere near it.

23:42But WASP-17b, that's my baby. Okay. We look forward to hearing more about it in the future. Absolutely. So now's the story of vital, important personal relevance today. And that's how festivals protect the brain and keep us young. And we've got Catherine Loveday. You're a neuropsychologist. Tell us, how do we know this? How can this be true? So there have been a few studies over the last few years, big studies. And it's really important with humans that we have big studies with lots of numbers that have shown that leisure activities and hobbies seem to reduce the chance of dementia. but just a couple of months ago a really fantastic study came out from Daisy Fancourt at UCL and they had three and a half thousand people who were taking part in the UK longitudinal household study and what's good about that is that they've collected lots of data in advance and they specifically focused on cultural activities so they looked at whether people took part in playing music or singing or dancing or painting, whether they attended events such as festivals and concerts, but also whether they went to kind of exhibitions and things like that.

24:59And the exciting thing was that they found a really clear association between people's engagement with cultural activities and these biomarkers of age that are called epigenetic clocks. What I think is really exciting and important about this is that for so long these things are seen even in school curricula they're seen as very kind of almost trivial you know things that you can do if there's time but actually I think this is good solid scientific evidence that it's actually really good for the brain. It sort of reminds me of spending time in nature, spending time in an art gallery makes you feel great, so does dancing to music.

25:40For a long time we've taken it for granted and now we're understanding that all of these things do actually have an effect on our health. Yeah exactly and I think we've known for quite a while that they have an effect on the health but I think the exciting bit here is this these biomarkers of age these epigenetic clocks and what this study did that was so good is that there are a number of these things and they are they look at the instructions within the cell the DNA and they look at whether that how those instructions have been changed and by looking at that they can have a sense of not just how well the brain is right now and how old the brain is right now but how likely that person is to develop some condition later in life and also the pace of aging which is it's a bit like you know the wear and tear on a car and looking at how quickly you're wearing out the tires and the important thing is that that pace of aging and the kind of prediction for people getting say cardiovascular disease or dementia seemed to be really clearly associated with people's engagement in cultural activities and arts and music and so on?

26:44It's exciting to think that you can potentially lower your epigenetic age because there's nothing you can do about your chronological age but these markers in your cells that kind of track your rate of aging we know that we live in I've had colleagues describe it as an ageogenic environment a bit like an obesogenic environment a lot of what we do now a lot of what we eat seems to accelerate our aging but to think that engaging with the arts can slow that down. So you mentioned a car. You might have a young car that you've driven all over the place, driven it all across potholes and you've wrecked it.

27:19It's only a year old. It's knackered. But you can reverse the ageing somewhat by changing the tyres, giving it an MOT or a service. Or looking after it in the first place. Is that what we're talking about with reversing epigenetic ageing? because that like tell us a bit more or is it slowing the rate of epigenetics and i think that's at the moment all we've got is this association so it it will take longer studies to look at whether it's actually altering it or changing it but i think one of the important things to point out about this work is that it does take into account the obvious things like people's socioeconomic status their income their age obviously all sorts of factors about their life but also things like whether they drink a lot, whether they smoke, what their BMI is, whether they have a disability.

28:07And even when you take all of that into consideration, you see this relationship. And I think it means that everybody here for the festival is you are doing your brain a lot of good by being here and going and listening to the music and engaging with all of these things. I have a question which is has there been a lot as part of that work do we know to what extent actively engaging with music in other words um you know being a musician being a musician for example yes yes okay well being a musician but there's also like I want to talk a bit more about that because I think there's this idea that using the word music as a verb right to music and and that's something that I'm very passionate about when I talk about in my podcast a lot is getting people to actively engage their ears so I think there's often a conflation between playing an instrument and being musical if you like now those two things are obviously you know playing an instrument you do have to be musical but you can be musical without playing an instrument because when I practice trumpet a lot of that is physical it's just physical repetition it's just physically training my lips training my breathing etc but a lot of the musical work that I do I don't need a trumpet at all and so the thing that I'm really passionate about and I try and do in a lot of my work and particularly with my podcasts and things is is to try to do that bit you know but for people because I would encourage anyone to play an instrument or sing or whatever it's a wonderful thing to do and you get huge satisfaction out of it and of course there's a lot of science behind the the great advantages to that but also I think we can do a lot of that work without needing to pick up an instrument without needing to train your voice as well yeah and that research the research showed that either of those things were good for you so whether you were actually performing and taking part in music or whether you were just engaging with it and going to concerts and things and I think what you're talking about is this kind of middle ground where you may be engaging very much with the music despite not necessarily playing an instrument and there's some very interesting work that shows that the brains of different musicians look different so you can see a violinist's brain which will look different from a pianist's brain and interestingly you can look at conductors who might not be playing at all and are precisely doing what you're saying analyzing using their ears and again you see different parts of the brain have developed so in the same way that our bodies will grow strong in different areas depending on what we're doing you see the same thing in the brain so if you are spending a lot of time focused on auditory signals then it will be good for your musical awareness but it will also mean that maybe you you communicate better or you pick up the nuances in people's voices differently or you have a stronger social connection i find that fascinating about different instruments affect the brain differently because if you have a violin or a piano obviously makes different sounds but you're still you know using your fingers and your coordination and you're still producing music but well i suppose every musical instrument is using a different combination of skills and different networks so you're recruiting different networks and and from neuroplasticity what happens is if you're recruiting those networks then you're developing stronger connections and growing that physically growing that part of the brain but this study that you've been talking about it wasn't about musicians and stuff it was just about everyday people who don't necessarily have that are still benefiting from you don't have to go out and learn or you don't have to be able to sing just enjoying it and being part of it is is helpful yeah absolutely so it was cultural they they didn't really drill down into you know the type of musical engagement but they they showed that overall this cultural engagement was very strong and I think it's really important to look at the mechanisms by which that might happen because it's not magic there are things happening and part of that is social connection and if people are listening if everyone goes and listens to the same music tonight there's quite a lot of research to show that those people will have sort of synchronized brain activity and that they will have a stronger sense of connection with those people around them in fact you've only got to send some music to somebody else to listen to and if they listen to you at the same time you both feel like you enjoy the music more so that social connection has a real physiological effect on the body, the cognitive stimulation.

32:32There's also evidence that engaging in music and other artistic activities and physical activity can boost BDNF, which is the thing that drives plasticity and encourages our brain to grow. So there are very sort of clear mechanisms by which these activities can change the biology of our body and our brain. I think that's really fascinating. I wonder if what we used to do back in the day of making mixtapes, where you're thinking about someone else and you're sharing even though you might not be listening to music at the same time you've got a kind of shared experience there which I think is really can be really powerful absolutely and then you end up making shared memories and those shared memories become something that allow you to feel connected and bonded with somebody as well there's also this lesser known emotion of karma muta have you heard of this it's this feeling of kind of warm fuzziness and slight kind of spiritual joy that can come over you when you're for example experiencing a gig and you're all feeling the same thing and and that that has a whole host of benefits as well so music helps us tap into that and and also you see huge surges of dopamine and changes in opiates so it's really really um music specifically is very very good at helping manage pain because and again very clear biological mechanisms for that i mean i just just coming back to the idea of um of the mixtapes and things i mean i wonder how that's changed because obviously people are arguably listening to more music than ever before and headphones and you know on the public transport or wherever in their cars you know but it's I wonder if firstly that's a kind of a personalized thing isn't it you might be listening to a playlist which has been curated by an AI these days but and you maybe have a slightly less personal engagement with that for that reason you know there might be might be music that you like or in a style that you like but you have because it hasn't been sort of selected you don't have that social bond is that and I think this is going to really be important to track over time because in our research now we do find that people's favorite music and the music that's most important to them often reminds them of a car journey that they went on with their family when they were younger or a mixtape that they were given or some point in history and I think people do still very much share music but it the nature of that has changed and the curating of that has has to some extent changed and and I think we're only going to know in about 10-15 years how that impacts on people's connection and memories with that music at a later point in their life.

34:58I'm all for bringing back mixtapes. A friend of mine who used to make me actual mixtapes back in the day then shifted to making DVD, burning DVDs and he still sends me them. I can't even play them anymore so I've just got them piling up. But he's getting a benefit just from making them. I love how subversive it feels now if you play something off grid and no big tech company knows you heard it yeah yeah that's why we should do more of it yeah have I got time to just mention about the EDM yeah yeah there's a lovely study that was done earlier well a few months ago which looked specifically at women in their 40s going out clubbing and listening to EDM now that is a very specific study but I think what's really important about that is they show very very clear benefits in these women who took part in the study greater social connection um feeling of escapism and it really benefited both mental and physical well-being but there was an interesting little catch which was that they were often feeling a little bit like there was some prejudice against them when they entered these spaces and that they were somehow too old to be doing this and i think it's really important to get this message across that you're definitely not too old in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, whatever it might be, to engage in these different musical activities and particularly ones that are nostalgic and take you back to your youth.

36:24I've had something interesting this week that I think it might be quite well known that the songs that really stay with you are the ones that come from the time in your life when you're forming your personal narrative, so like car journeys as a kid but also falling in love but apparently we also have a bump that correlates with our parents generation and their favorite tunes because they're the ones that they played us when we were little so love the idea that there's this rippling effect that goes back generations cascading reminiscence bump it's called yeah and it is really it i mean it's so obvious and has come out in all my data actually i just want to ask steve about raving in a minute but um talking about older women raving and just because I do have a particular interest in this what about older men do we get benefits out of it as well I'm sure you do it's just that this particular scientist decided to focus on women and this is the problem with psychological studies is that you have to define your group and in the same way that you have to define your planet you have to define your group and then you can go and look at the other planets and the other groups so maybe they'll do another so I can't claim a benefit not yet clubbing but but probably there's a lot of chat about women in their 40s being some of the most stressed people on earth so I wonder if that's why it was the study creeps well I mean actually I think so you're asking about my experience of raving so I I never went raving as a teenager or in my 20s it wasn't just wasn't my scene I was getting into jazz and that's what I was getting into playing a lot but my partner was quite into raving when she was in her 20s and late teens and she's got kind of back into it in her 40s and so yeah I've been been along a couple of times and it is amazing with a few weeks ago I went with her and I've I've I've discovered music that I didn't ever think I liked.

38:01And I think it's actually very revealing for me. Something, again, I do a lot in my work in the podcast and things is where I do this thing called the genre tombola, where there's a randomly chosen genre that I examine. And getting into techno and EDM, I've suddenly unlocked all these different things that I'm now really obsessed by. And I went a couple of weeks ago to the DJ Annie Mack, did a gig in London, DJ gig. And it was amazing. It was almost entirely women in their 40s, I would say. And it was really fascinating to be there in this room. And it was one of the friendliest, you know, most, it's such a great atmosphere in there.