How to Use Music to Heal Your Mind and Body with Renée Fleming | 1185 | Dave Asprey

The therapeutic use of music is taste based meaning. It's like what is important to you. And I love the fact that that typically occurs when we're teens and that's the music that we remember in really late in life and that comes back and you know the words. You still know everything. And so a good therapist will say, you know, tell me what your favorite music is and start there.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's episode is. It's a really important one because you probably know I'm a leader in the longevity field. I've written a major book about longevity and I'm planning to live to at least 180. But in the world of biohacking, which encompasses longevity and just anything having to do with human performance and consciousness, some of the practices of biohacking directly lead to longevity. But they're not gene therapy. They're not necessarily even a specific nutritional strategy around fasting to reduce mtor or something like. Like that. It's things like meditation, like, oh, wait, people who meditate live longer, but that's a lot of work. And so what are the elements of this thing called the exposome, which is like the genome, but the exposome is the set of everything in the world you're exposed to, whether you know it or not, throughout your entire life, because that is what programs your body. The definition of bio. I can change the environment around you and inside of you so you have full control of your biology. Well, what if music was a meaningful part of a longevity practice, but no one in the field of longevity is talking about it. Well, it turns out there is someone talking about it in the music, at least, neuroscience field. It's a book called Music and Mind Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. This is a book that just came out in 2024. And I thought, you know, what if we had a conversation about music and longevity with Renee Fleming, who is one of the greatest opera singers to ever live. She's performed in the world's great opera houses and concert halls. She's only won five Grammy awards and. And in 2023, was a Kennedy center honoree and even sang the national anthem at the Super Bowl. So what the heck? Opera and longevity. How could this even be? Renee, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Dave. Great to be here.

What led you to write this book?

Well, you know, I had issues earlier on in my career with somatic pain and stage fright. And, you know, it led Me to continue to read about anything I could find regarding the mind body connection and, and really regarding neuroscience. And I noticed that scientists were studying music and the brain. So I got to meet Dr. Francis Collins in 2015, and I got to. He ran the National Institutes of health for 12 years, and I got to ask him why. And so I had just started at the Kennedy center actually as an advisor, and I said, do you think we could provide a platform for science with the public? Because I think they'd all want to know why too.

What an unusual path. So you have this beautiful voice, but you had terrible stage fright. And in the US at least, fear of speaking or performing in public is the highest fear of all. The people are more afraid of that than death, even. But you chose a career that just put you what felt like death's door when you would go do this. How did that, did you always have this stage fright? Did it develop? Like, how does that even happen?

I can't say I was a natural performer. My parents were both high school vocal music teachers. We were very much a singing family, I think. So I was used to doing it, but I, I, it wasn't in my nature to want to do it. I was more reserved. I was a bookworm. I did a lot of solitary activities. I was also very painfully shy, and so I had to learn a lot. And I, you know, by and large, I, you know, I, I kind of mastered it. I copied people, you know, colleagues who seemed not to have this problem. But a couple of times it really got me. So. And the last time, the really intense period, was in 1999. And since then, I've actually loved performing. I still get painfully nervous sometimes when I'm really under pressure, but I've kind of figured it out. Preparation and just feeling grateful. And also, rather than seeing the audience as judgmental, I feel like I'm sharing something beautiful with the audience. So I'm a conduit. It helped a lot. That particular transfer made all the difference.

Turning a performance into an act of service for me removes any possible degree of stress. And, and I've, I think my largest audience was 15, 000 people at Tony Robbins at an event. And we had an AV issue as I was walking out on stage. And I just remember my, my heart rate didn't even change. I, I was just so happy to be there when I started my career. The first time I spoke, I don't even know what I said because I was so terrified, but apparently it was good. But it took me a long time to even know what I was doing because I was in that state of fear. Maybe for me, it was exposure therapy. But I want to know, because there's so many people listening have stage fright, and you're just this amazing performer who's is, you know, done industry changing things. What does it feel like? Is it like something that you feel in your body? Is it a mean voice in your head? You know, are there, you know, whirling dervishes in the air above you? Like, what is the physical and mental and emotional experience of stage fright?

Well, for me, the pain was really the difficult thing because it undermined my belief that I could actually go on stage because it was a type of tension that had a huge effect on my. The muscles around my neck and around the base of my throat. So, you know, I really couldn't sing. And then it would kind of magically lift the minute I walked on stage. And so I knew it was not real. I knew it was something that I had created myself. So that's. That's one thing. I mean, I can tell you that when I'm performing well, which is, you know, most of the time or comfortably, I should say, I'm in the zone. It's a lot of flow state. I'm carried by the music. It's incredibly wonderful. So most of the anxiety, I think, for me, played out in advance of the performance and not during the performance.

Okay, so you got inside your head, or it got inside your head ahead of time and you kind of wrestled with it. And once you made the leap, so to speak, then your voice would turn on, your muscles would relax, and then your voice was the amazing thing that it is.

It was better. I mean, in a. In a bad period, I sort of wished that I could get sick so I wouldn't have to perform. And of course, I never did.

I appreciate that you're so vulnerable and honest about it because so many people do have this. Even people who are on stage a lot. I've had a chance to work with some of them with neurofeedback to train the brain to have a different response. But it's really. It feels like it's a body response, like the body is trying to be safe and like it's so convinced that something bad is going to happen. Like it's the one clenching up and that it's not really me. And some of. Some of my friends I've worked with even went so far as to take drugs like beta blockers that block the adrenaline response so that they're just completely Smooth when they go on stage. But being smooth means you don't have the peaks, you don't have the valleys. But what was that something you ever tried? You ever tried blocking your stress ahead of time?

But you have to also remember that for singers, you know, the anxiety response is your breath gets tight, your throat gets very tight. You know, there, there are. There are physical responses. You're shaking.

I hear you. Wow. What a. What an interesting and interesting experience to have when you're at such an amazing level.

Yeah. Fortunately, it wasn't very often. I mean, it happened. There were two periods, I would say, throughout my career that where it came up. And the last time, it took about eight months for me to kind of get on top of it.

Wow.

But I never stopped. You can't stop performing because then you won't go back for 20 years, which we know lots of famous people who did that.

You just got back on the horse again. You know, they say points, you get bucked. If you don't get back on, you won't do it again. So you had the wisdom to do that. And you talk about somatic pain. What is somatic pain?

Well, you know, I. I don't even know if there's a great definition for what I had. Psychosomatic, they used to call it psychosomatic pain. So it was. It was. It wasn't. It's not. It comes from really your brain trying to undermine what it is you're doing. And it's always from a place of protection.

Yeah.

You know, things that, that sabotage us very often are things that your, your mind, your brain thinks is helping you.

It's just trying to keep you safe. And I mean, let's face it, throughout most of history, if you stood up in front of the tribe and said some stuff they didn't like you, they would have tied you up and fed you to a lion. So I think we have some genetic memory in there. Right. So no wonder it's a little bit scary.

No question.

You met Dr. Francis Collins, who ran the National Institutes of Health. And this is a guy who discovered genes with a lot of diseases and actually led the Human Genome Project, but was also a musician. And you went in and got an mri. What did you find in your mri?

So the FMRI is a machine that measures oxygen, oxygen in the brain and the blood. And they tested me. Singing, speaking and imagining. Singing and imagining. Singing was the most powerful. It affected more parts of my brain by far than speaking or singing, which totally surprised the scientists who were looking at the test results. But it's because ultimately they said, okay, we get it. We think we get it. It's because you're a singer, and for you, singing is second nature, which is true. And imagining singing in the MRI machine, which is loud, took a little more focus and probably effort. So, you know, it was. It was a really interesting experiment. Now, I mean, to really know about that, you might have had to do another one right after it with a non singer, just to see and to compare.

What does it do to your brain when you're singing? I mean, we know yours, but for. For the general brain out there, maybe someone like me who has zero singing. I've actually taken voice lessons from Roger Love, who's been on the show. I'm still not a singer in the slightest, but I'm a better public speaker and I can read my audiobooks like a badass. But my singing ability is still very limited, we'll put it that way. But I did notice neurological changes just from paying attention to my breath and how I move. And I know that when I'm speaking, if my stomach is moving in, I'll emote better all the stuff that to you is like. Everyone knows that, except we don't. So for me, it was like, whoa, my nervous system is changing just from the way I use my voice. But you went in and you looked at your brain. And what does that imply for those of us who aren't singers but maybe want to have young brains?

Well, what I would say about the experience and that I've learned since then is that music in particular is in every known mapped area of the brain. You know, and the brain is sort of. Francis refers to it as the most complex organism in the universe. And so the fact that music and certain artistic kind of activities are so powerful in us kind of shows that in terms of evolution at least, we have been practicing these things since before speech. I mean, that's the latest thinking that we could vocalize before speech. Neanderthals had the exact same fruit that I do. So, you know, I. I just think it's. I. I don't know that they were differentiating between singing per se, because it wasn't the nature of the experiment. But I know when I sing, first of all, Deepak Chopra said to me, God, you're so lucky you're a singer, because every time you sing, you're stimulating the vagus nerve. And I know that I am also holding my breath for long periods of time, like a swimmer would. It's similar in that respect, which is why we've discovered that singing is fantastic for people who are in some stage of cardiovascular disease because they tend to be sedentary and it's exercise for them. So. And then when you add what we do in on stage and performances with performance practice and, you know, style and multiple languages, it's, it's, it is definitely very good for the brain. It's a rigorous type of activity. Not one, I would say, for classical music. It's not one that many people do. But I've been one of the lucky people.

If you want to stay healthy as you age, you need to keep your muscles strong and ready to move. You might think the answer is to hit the gym harder, but. But there's a hack for this, so you don't even have to add a single rep to be stronger. It's called mito pure by timeline. As you age, your muscles naturally start to shrink and you feel tired and worn out. Studies say that weakened mitochondria make you feel that way. Mitopure by timeline gives your mitochondria a big jump start, which means better muscle strength and endurance even if you don't hit the gym more. I use mitopure and it's a real game changer. Give mitopure a try for two months and you'll feel the difference. At least that's what the studies say. And hey, if you visit timeline.comdave you'll even get a sweet discount. We know that breath work and breath holding and just conscious control of the breath has magical effects on the nervous system. Stephen Porges, who invented polyvagal theory and that came on and recommended. Oh, you should try humming, which is the same as singing. Right. That, that calms your brain in a way that you might not see or even feel right away. But it, it provably works. You're getting those. And we have lots of evidence that speaking more than one language profoundly affects and improves brain function, especially if you learned it earlier in life, because it actually wires your brain differently. So it turns out if you're singing in a language that you maybe don't know, that's even better. So you start getting into that, into that being a polyglot thing. And you speak three languages, Right?

Right. But I've sung in, sung in probably 10 or 11, and many of them I have to learn by rote. So that's, that's a very tedious memorization process when it's a whole opera in Russian.

Wow. I was going to ask how you do that. So you don't actually learn the Russian. You Just learn the shape of all the sounds.

Yes, exactly. And you have to sound like you're an authent speaker, and you also have to memorize what everyone else is saying to you. So needless to say, I. I haven't sung a lot of Russian operas. It's. It takes a huge amount of time. But I speak French. I speak fluent German. I had a Fulbright scholarship and studied in Germany. And I. My Italian was. Was quite good when I was singing there. But I would say French and German are my better languages.

French, German, and obviously English. Well, that is. That is impressive.

But I didn't start very young. I didn't learn any of. Was in my early 20s. It was young enough, thank goodness.

And maybe you just practiced them so well, or maybe you were more neuroplastic because of all your singing. So you learned them and it got baked in.

Well, that's an interesting thought. I mean, music is a language, and certainly when I started in Germany, I. Did you develop an ear? If you're a musician from a young age, you definitely have an ear for language. I think that's probably true, but it's terrific. I mean, this is why I love the studies from Asal Habibi, who's at usc, about childhood development playing an instrument. And she's just starting to do a whole series of studies on singing.

That's interesting. I think singing might be more important than learning piano or a string instrument. Maybe not, if you want to be good at math. Are you good at math, then?

No, I don't think so. I mean, there's no question that learning music and learning to read music and kind of, especially the kind of music that I have been involved with my whole career, which is complex, is. Is mathematical, but it's simple math.

My grandmother had an advanced degree in nuclear engineering, believe it or not, would play on the piano. Her love was mathematics. And she would always play the piano really, really well until very late in life when she finally got some Alzheimer's and, you know, in her late 90s and recently passed. But it was. It was amazing because the relationship between math and at least math and piano and those things, I think it helped her be better at math and she thought the same thing.

That makes sense to me.

It does?

Oh, definitely. Yeah.

And you mentioned some stuff in your book around. There's studies around dementia and Parkinson's and PTSD and Alzheimer's and things that say, like music does that. Does listening to music help or is it playing music that makes a difference for a younger brain?

So listening to Music creates endorphins in the brain and even activates the natural opioids that exist in the brain. So it's very helpful. It can reduce anxiety. Even just kind of, you know, 45 minutes or half an hour can reduce anxiety by 25%. So. But actively engaging with music is certainly beneficial for children, I would say, especially for children. And what I would say about, and why I'm so interested about this study is because if you're learning to play an instrument, there's a whole translation process that takes place where you're looking at the page which is the music and you're translating that into your body and your hands. And so that is a little bit more mathematical than what we do. On the other hand, singers, we're wrestling with foreign languages and still the same musical components and we are translating it into the body. But it's not as difficult. The amount of practice that instrumentalists have to have to play in an orchestra, for instance, it has to start when they're very young. And it's many, many hours where singers can come on the scene in their teens and be incredibly successful discovery. Only discover then that they have a voice. I was lucky. I had ton of music training as a, as a young child, so, you know, so it was easier for me. But yet an interesting question. I mean, I do think I would recommend all of it, frankly for people who have an affinity or who just like it. But I wouldn't say that there is, I would say there it's all beneficial.

Well, certainly we know that it can delay dementia, maybe be gone on longevity and brain function. I talked about that to a certain point. Okay, like getting senile. Cognitive dementia is a big thing. So if, you know, singing to yourself while you do the dishes is going to fix that. It seems like a very low cost longevity strategy, but a lot of people feel silly singing to themselves, especially around others, me included.

One of the interesting things is that music memory is the last memory to go in most people. It is. You know, I saw this was my husband's aunt who didn't know anyone. She didn't open her eyes, she couldn't speak. But if you prompted her with three pitches, she would sing one of five different songs. Perfectly perfect pitches, perfect words. And so they're trying to. Science is trying to figure out why this is. Is it muscle memory? Is it, is it perhaps that, that this musical memory lives deep in the brain where it hasn't been, you know, affected by the disease yet. So it's. But it's quite interesting.

Do you think that your somatic pain, that when it would pop up, that it came from being pushed when you were very young on all this musical training, was this like an old response or was this like a primal response?

I think I had. I sort of was uncomfortable with being judged. This notion that I was kind of, you know, again, on. When you're on stage, you're being judged. You. It's built into the word performance. You have to perform, meaning that that yardstick is there and you will be judged. You know, you could see it now with all these television shows, the judges holding up their cards. So that's not a comfortable place to be for a lot of people. And it wasn't for me either. So that's why I had to kind of change the narrative and change the experience for myself. And I'm so glad I did because I absolutely love performing. I'm touring right now. A beautiful piece with National Geographic that's about climate. And it's. They created 30 minutes of films for me to sing to. And it's such a gift, and people love it. And you're sharing a message at the same time.

What's your next city?

I'm going to Aspen, actually, in a couple of days, because I also am at the music festival there in the summer, a month.

Oh, neat. I was there two weeks ago. I like Aspen.

It's beautiful. Yeah.

If you travel a lot. I've had the honor of working with a good number of professional musicians who are dealing with the stress of being on the road, the stress of flights, circadian disruption, staying up late at night, all the things that happen on bright lights that mess with your sleep. What do you do to keep your body and your voice healthy when you travel?

Well, I find denial really useful. You know, I don't think about jet lag. I don't think about fatigue. I don't think about being on the plane. You know, people complain about the mri, and I say, just, if you've ever flown economy, it's basically the same thing. Well, it's a small seat. Make yourself at home. And so I definitely, in fact, I would say most of my colleagues who've been successful at some point early in their careers, you can't get sick, you don't get paid if you don't perform. You can't be too neurotic, because, again, then you're. You become like a burden to the companies that you're performing with. So we sort of develop a kind of strength and certainly an immune strength. So I. I just. I think I'VE only canceled a couple things in my whole career.

Wow. So you really just, you, you just kind of put yourself in a. This is not really happening. I'm just going to do it seems to work really well. I, I do honor my circadian biology with, you know, the color of lights of buses and timing of food. But I don't worry about jet lag and I don't experience it anywhere on the planet anymore unless I do the few things that I know jack up my system. But it's been a huge gift to go from being kind of disabled when I would land in Heathrow from SFO or something, to just be able to land and just be myself. So you, you mastered that. I think maybe practice. So your body just learns is part of it too.

Well, and I, I will say with one caveat, and that is that even if I'm game, my voice does not necessarily comply. You know, when I go to Japan, for instance, or, you know, anywhere in the Far east, frankly, it takes me a few days for, for the voice to kind of respond because that, that dehydration, that dryness, all of that, but also the different time. So that's where I would say that my will and desire to just keep going doesn't quite work out.

I've definitely had the same issue since my standards are much lower than your standards for voice. But still, if I'm on stage, it matters. Beclomethasone inhalers are my friend. This is a little steroid that affects just your lungs and your vocal cords. And so if I'm reading one of my audiobooks, I'll get the whole thing done in three days. But it's eight hours at day of being able to maintain this voice. I can only do that when I use steroids on my vocal cords. You ever, you ever do that?

No, I, I want to. I'm going to start taking notes, actually. You seem to have a lot more of this sort of current solutions. And so, yeah, I, I, I only read my first chapter, my introduction, and I thought, well, I'm glad I'm not doing more than that because I don't speak well. My speaking voice is just terrible.

It was, it's very challenging to read a book, to be honest. And I suspect that the same part of you that was critical of your singing voice might also be critical of your, of your voice voice, because you sound fine to me, but, well, I get tired.

I can't go to loud restaurants. I just can't.

I think that's a sign of, of intelligence.

To be honest there, I'll take it.

If you've been listening to the human upgrade for even a little while, you know that alcohol isn't good for you. Also, if you're like 99% of people out there, you probably do drink on occasion because it's a social experience and it tastes good and let's face it, it feels good. So what do you do about it? Well, the thing I'm most excited about is a product called Zbiotics, because Zbiotics makes a genetically engineered probiotic drink. And you have this before you have alcohol, and for the next 24 hours, it helps to protect you from the toxic breakdown of alcohol. And it's genetically engineered, but it's not the kind of genetically engineered crop stuff we're dealing with. It's actually an edited bacteria that can't reproduce. And what it does is it just breaks alcohol down into something that's not toxic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking, because you know how those PhDs are. Here's why it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct called aldehyde in your gut. It's that product, not dehydration, that's making you feel like crap the next day. Zebiotics produces an enzyme that breaks that toxic byproduct down. All you have to do is remember to make Zebiotics your first drink of the night, and then you'll feel so much better.