Art Cure summary

Becoming a mother is supposed to be joyful. And often it is. But for many women, the hormonal upheaval that follows childbirth – in particular, the dramatic crash in oestrogen and progesterone – can trigger something far darker. Postpartum depression affects roughly one in five new mothers, who may experience persistent low mood, exhaustion, difficulty bonding with their baby, and in severe cases, an inability to function at all.

Music is said to be good for the soul. But researchers at London's Royal College of Music wondered if it might be specifically restorative for the souls of women deep in postpartum depression. They divided mothers with PPD into three groups: a control group, a social group that met regularly without any artistic activity, and a singing group that learned and performed songs with their babies and wrote original songs about motherhood. The social group showed a slow improvement in their symptoms, potentially experiencing the benefits of sustained social interaction. The singing group showed a dramatic 35% reduction in symptoms over ten weeks. Adding an element of artistic practice to the sessions had significant health benefits.

There's a video that went viral a few days ago. It shows Henry Dryer, a 94-year-old dementia patient, hunched over in his wheelchair, unresponsive to the world around him. Before dementia had set in, Henry had loved jazz, especially Cab Calloway. In the video, someone places a pair of headphones playing Calloway's music over his ears. What happens next is extraordinary. Henry's eyes open wide, and he begins singing along to the music. This moving video raises a question that science has been working hard to answer: why does music reach parts of the brain that dementia leaves untouched?

To find the answer, we have to go right back to the beginning. Babies in the womb start hearing by weeks 18 to 20 of pregnancy. Loud music produces an accelerated fetal heart rate and increased motor activity – essentially, dancing before birth. A musical sensibility is hardwired into us, appearing before birth and, in Henry's case, persisting after other faculties have failed.

In the 1970s, the legendary conductor (and avid amateur pilot) Herbert von Karajan agreed to be wired up with sensors, then put through two tests. First, he flew his Learjet and performed three dangerous touch-and-go landing manoeuvres, during which his heart rate peaked at 115 beats per minute. Then he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic through a Beethoven overture. This time, his heart rate averaged 115, peaking at 150. The overture was turbulent, stormy music – and though Karajan was in no real danger, it impacted his stress response even more dramatically than a near-miss landing. The Beethoven overture took command of the bodily functions that governed how Karajan experienced and survived physical stress.

So, let’s take a closer look at those systems. The autonomic nervous system, which regulates stress, has two modes. The sympathetic branch triggers fight-or-flight, flooding the body with adrenaline. The parasympathetic branch promotes rest and calm once danger has passed. When these systems can’t keep stress in check, there are serious health consequences, like elevated blood pressure, impaired immunity, disrupted sleep, and accelerated cellular aging. Music provoked Karajan’s stress response. But it can also have the opposite effect.

When East Los High launched on Hulu in 2013, it looked like a racy telenovela. It certainly hit all the tropes: love triangles, pregnancy, and high-school drama. But the show was actually a transmedia edutainment programme aimed at young Latinx Americans. East Los High embedded health messages in entertainment narratives across digital platforms to promote sexual and reproductive health among its viewership. The need was urgent: at the time one in three Latina adolescents in the US became pregnant before age 20. That was one and a half times the national average. What’s more, only about half of sexually active Latinx teens reported using a condom during their last sexual encounter. 

Dry public health messages didn’t get through. The melodrama of East Los High did. Planned Parenthood reported that during season one, 22% of total visitors to their website came through the East Los High website. And the results went beyond driving website traffic.

Science is, naturally enough, interested in the question of how humans can live longer, healthier, and better lives. To that end, there are huge quantities of data around the topic of human aging. And buried in that data is a remarkable finding: lifelong engagement with the arts, quite simply, makes your life longer.

In a landmark study tracking nearly 7,000 adults aged fifty and over for fourteen years, frequent cultural attenders were almost a third less likely to die during the follow-up period than those who never engaged. Those who attended even infrequently, just once or twice a year, still had a 14% lower mortality risk. After rigorously accounting for wealth, physical health, cognitive ability, social engagement, mental health, and a long list of other factors that independently predict survival, a 20% lower risk of death remained.