Well Wednesday 4

We are undergoing a massive shift, the way we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world is changing in a way that we could not have envisaged a few months ago. There is still more to come! Our technologies are going to take such a huge leap forward and change the way we think and view the world.

This particularly applies to fitness and lifestyle. I have now lost over a stone in weight since Christmas, doubled my daily circuit completing it in virtually the same time, I have a south facing balcony and so I cannot remember when I was so brown, long hair going back to my surfing days (already there in my mind). I wonder if the white/blond hair will go dark again this winter! I focus on this as opposed to the stark reality of no income with the same level of overheads. This makes for a total re-assessment of life and I have put my inventing hat on very quickly and firmly.

Music boosts your Immune System
Our favourite music has the ability to lift our spirits and can even evoke happy memories of times, places, or events in our lives that can instantly transform our mood, calm us and move our mind (and therefore our body) into a sense of joy. At the same time, our favourite music can naturally cause a reduction in cortisol (Stress) levels. Joy also triggers hormones that provide a sense of euphoria while suppressing pain. Listening to our favourite music throughout the day, even while engaging in mundane activities such as cleaning house, is one of the best ways to reduce our stress levels and give our immune system a boost.

This simple formula summarises the Music Medicine effect:

Music + Joy = Immune system boost
Stated simply, viruses and other pathogens can be more efficiently eradicated from our body when we move out of fear and into joy.

Now for the way forward: Elad Maor, an interventional cardiologist at Sheba Medical Center, Israel and an Associate Professor at Tel Aviv University. He is also a consultant at Vocalis Health and the lead in a recent study using their voice analysis technology.

“Voice is unique to every individual due to people’s anatomical differences, which makes for a powerful tool when working remotely. There are ongoing clinical studies at Mayo Clinic, as well as at Sheba Medical Centre and in other places around the world looking for additional non-cardiovascular diseases. The signatures are actually mathematical functions that are used to analyse voice data, they used more than 200 voice features that were extracted from 20 second of speech. Based on these features they developed an algorithm that successfully identified high risk patients. Voice is transparent and available in every patient interaction. I believe the future is bright for voice as an additional complimentary clinical tool.” He said.

Apps designed to discern the presence of COVID-19 vocally are underway at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the University of Cambridge in the UK.

I personally spent a week of studying pure mathematics on the frequencies/musical notes of the voice in March and I have now 516 recordings which I have compared to the symptoms and the results on Vitality Screening I did with you. The accuracy is there and I am now understanding this new technology, there is life in the old dog yet !!

I have now created and designed a secure platform for working this with you. The last pieces are going together. The accuracy of the technology is complete. Not only will I be able to advise you nutritionally but also transmit the brain training along with the music. More next week !!

But there is even more good news because the recent research project in which Jim Donovan collaborated with Professor Sungchul Ji, of Rutgers University, along with GreenMedInfo.com and the RoadMusic company, found that ‘old’ red blood cells, (which are beginning to lose their outer membrane integrity), receive a lifespan extension when they are immersed in music for at least 20 minutes.

Interestingly, we found that the best results were obtained with music that contained prominent bass frequencies, which includes most popular music and some classical pieces that feature piano, cello, harp and other instruments with a low register.

While more research is needed to identify the biological mechanism that underpins this effect, our preliminary hypothesis is that the rich low frequencies in music, whether popular or classical, produce pressure pulses that increase the oxygen available to haemoglobin molecules in red blood cells, effectively mimicking the pressure pulses of heartbeats. This mechanical pressure, whether created by a heartbeat or by externally generated pressure pulses from music, causes the haemoglobin molecules to uptake the oxygen dissolved in our blood.

Red blood cells carry oxygen to all systems of the body and are essential to the immune system, so this important connection between music and blood health could prove to be an effective ‘medicine’ of the future.

Another important connection between music and the immune system was reported in a 2019 study by Augusta University, USA. The researchers found that when mice were subjected to low frequency sound vibrations, macrophages in their bloodstream proliferated significantly. Macrophages are the largest type of T-cell that engulf viruses and other types of pathogen. Although this effect has not yet been proven advantageous for humans, it seems likely that our blood will respond in a similar way, particularly since our blood experiments demonstrated the positive effect of low frequencies on red blood cells in human blood. I see this in my live blood analysis.

In summary, there are many ways to calm our nerves and become joyful, but perhaps none carry the universal appeal of listening to music. Our favourite music has the almost magical ability to calm frazzled nerves, transport us in our imagination to special places and times, and banish the blues, while boosting our immune system, helping to vanquish viruses and other pathogens.

In the words of Plato, “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything”.