Music, Consciousness and the Power of Connection

**Kara Swisher** (0:00)
It's on!
Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. One of the simplest things someone can do to live longer and be healthier is to have connections with other people. This is clear, not just with chatbots, but actual human beings. This is something we talked about a lot in the series I did for CNN, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, and it was the single most important thing people can do, which is interactions with people, with actual people, and the deleterious effects of things like chatbots, which are frictionless and sycophantic. They are not good for your health, no matter what people tell you. It is not the way to solve loneliness in any way, unless done in conjunction with being with more human beings, which are the most important thing for everyone's health. The idea of connection has come up again and again in my reporting, as I said, about longevity and aging, and it's the focus of this episode of Hacking Longevity series here on the podcast. Coming up later, we'll talk to one of my favorite science writers, Michael Pollan, about the mysteries of consciousness. He's been writing about this for a long time. We'll discuss what he learned about finding connection, not just to others, but to the much wider world, when he set out to understand what it even means to be conscious. It's actually a big topic. But we'll start with the connective power of music and its role in longevity. Music and sound, really, the science here is super interesting. I'm excited to talk about it with AZA Allsop. He's an artist and psychiatrist who runs a lab at Yale University that studies how sound affects the body and mind. It's something we also did in the series of Scott and I Went to a Sound Bath. It's really interesting. And I'd like to know more about the science behind it, so we're talking to him. He's an MD, has a PhD in neuroscience, and also teaches meditation, yoga, and music. So he knows the science as well as the art, and that's critically important. You like this conversation, so stick around.
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AZA, thank you for coming on on.

**AZA Allsop** (3:01)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you.

**Kara Swisher** (3:03)
This is a lot about health and longevity and things like that, but I wanted to talk to a lot of various people, not just doctors and scientists and experts in that field, but others. And you're a very musical person. I know you play several instruments, you sing. Talk to me about how music fits into your life, maybe even an example of how it fit into your life today if one comes to mind.

**AZA Allsop** (3:22)
Yeah, I mean, music is central to my life.
As an artist, it's how I find myself expression, my creative identity. It's also how I create experiences for people to come together. As a scientist, I view it as a really important way of figuring out how the brain actually works, the principles, and how we can leverage that for health. And then as a clinician, I see its role as being central to how we can deliver treatments to people, particularly in collective environments. So when I talk about the arts and when I talk about music, I talk about it as my own creative practice and identity formation. But I also talk about it as a powerful tool for health and the science that we do.

**Kara Swisher** (4:02)
So talk a little bit about that. There's a long time sound longevity connection. And in my series, I did get into a sound pod. And the science is still not there, although there's lots of studies. And of course, historically, there's been a lot of different ideas of how music fits in with people.

**AZA Allsop** (4:18)
Everyone has that experience of connecting with a powerful piece of music, or the experience of having a grandmother, a parent, who is in dementia and playing a certain music activates a new sort of cognitive and emotional landscape for them that's not activated.