The Blindboy Podcast - A Professor of Psychobiology tells me how Art improves our Health

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Daisy Fancourt is a professor at UCL who studies how taking part in arts and creative activities affects our mental and physical health, stress, wellbeing and social connection. Her new book, Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health, explores the growing scientific evidence behind these effects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Halt at the salty Garibaldi, yamowledy ayes. Welcome to the Blind Buy podcast. My tour of England, Scotland and Wales is just around the corner so I want to give it a tiny plug here at the start. My live podcast tour. This is mostly sold out but there are some tickets left. I'm beginning in October, right?

Starting on the 18th. Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford. London is sold out Glasgow is sold out then Gateshead and Nottingham Come to those live podcasts and suggest a guest for me and you'll get tickets for them at

Fane.com. UK forward slash the blindby podcast I've spent the past week working on my play I was above in Dublin at the weekend up at the Abbey Theatre The Abbey are adapting some of my short stories into a play

which will be on it'll be on the Abbey Stage at the end of September the play's name is Animals It's mostly based on short stories from my last collection topography of Hibernica If you want to see that play

It's going to be running for about six weeks from about I think the 23rd of September all the way through October and into the start of November So go to that if that's something you'd be interested in. I'm fucking blown away.

I'm absolutely blown away. I've been working on this play for about two years now. I mean, you know, that's the nature on my fucking job. I could be working away on something, but I don't mention it until I can confirm it's actually fucking happening. Failure is a massive, massive part of being a professional writer. So in the past year, I've had fucking movies that I thought were going to happen. I had a four-part big budget TV series. Just at the very final stages of being commissioned.

Like literally having the contract ready to fucking sign it. And then something crazy happens. And it's like, sorry, we were commissioning this yesterday, but something completely out of our hands has happened and now the money doesn't exist anymore. this is not being commissioned. And that's this job. Consistent, gigantic, crushing failure. Well, it's not crushing failure anymore, it's just regular failure. The skill is to understand when you work in entertainment, writing television. Expect disappointment. Never expect something

to be commissioned. Never expect success. Learn to give a piece of work. You're all to put in the fucking effort while at the same time knowing it's probably not going to get commissioned. You're going to work your hole off on something for six months and it's going to end up in the bin. And when it does end up in the bin, you're not going to feel disappointed because you never allowed yourself to get excited about it in the first place. You're just moving on to the next piece of work and also understanding. It's not a fucking failure. Just because the TV show or the book or the whatever didn't get commissioned,

You still created something in the meantime. You still wrote a script and that will inform a future success. There's no such thing as failure on a long enough time scale. If you simply tried, then you have succeeded. The only actual failure is doing nothing

because you were scared to try, but if you worked on something and it doesn't succeed, it doesn't sell, it doesn't get commissioned, it doesn't matter, you fucking worked on something. You honed some skills, you got to practice, you've informed a future success.

And that's not motivational speak bullshit. It's my actual professional experience. So my Abbey Theatre play, that's something I've been working away on for two solid years. And it was only greenlit, maybe four months ago. And for that one project that's green lit, there's maybe another six

that got thrown in the, been. That's a lot of failure. How am I able to do that because of my patrons. The people who fund this podcast directly on Patreon, because I can earn a living through that, I can financially afford to fail, which is very important. Because before I was able to earn a living through this podcast, let's say 12, 13 years ago, if I had a TV show in the works, which I believed was going to get commissioned, then Then I'm thinking, oh, that's my bills paid for the next six months. Fucking fantastic.

This TV show is going to pay my electricity. I'm going to pay my gas. And then when it gets cancelled at the last fucking minute or doesn't get commissioned, then the failure is existentially devastating. It's food fallen from my mouth failure. The risk of failure is now massive, which then means the fear of failure becomes massive. This is why funding the arts is fucking important. but thank you to my patrons.

I can fail all I fucking want and the worst that happens is I'm mildly disappointed. That's it. But the Abbey Theatre play that has been commissioned, it's going ahead, it's on sale

and I'm fucking blown away. I'm blown away because of the amount of incredibly talented people that are working on this play. Every single person working on this play

is at the top of their game creatively. The director, Dan Colley, is doing an astounding job. The actors are unbelievable. I don't want to give too much away, but it's the national theatre, hiring the best people possible. And because it's the national theatre, it's not really being run on a for-profit model. So everybody's working on this, not necessarily to get bums on seats, for this to be hugely successful. Everyone's working on it to make the best piece of art. So everybody's taking risks and everyone's being weird and being creative and being curious. And I'm loving being able to hand my short stories over to so many brilliant creative people and to have that lovely safe, comforting feeling of,

I trust these people entirely with the work. They're going to bring their unique voices to this and turn it into something beautiful that I wouldn't be a able to do by myself. And I love that. I love the lovely trusting collaborative experience of making a piece of art. Making it, theatre's really unique. It really is. It's an experiential art form. So it's hard to package it and sell it. This play, animals, because of the way that Dan is, is adapting the stories. You have to be there, you have to physically be at it in order to encounter the work. A video recording isn't going to do it justice, reading the script isn't going to do it justice, an audio recording isn't going to do it justice, you have to

be physically present. It's an installation, it's a stained glass window on the other world, and theatre is one of the last pieces of, it's one of the last pieces of work where you can have scarcity. It's very hard to digitally reproduce it and to feed it to the algorithm. You're either there at the theatre or you're not. And if you're not there, the best you can do is describe it to somebody, which is beautiful too. I went to see this thing last night called Animals. What was it about? Well, it's not really what it was about. You just, you have to just go and see it and theatre can do that. So it's lovely to be to be involved in something like that. So I was up at rehearsals and I don't know if you can tell from my voice but I'm I am burnt out

to fuck. I am artistically burnt out to fuck because of the gigantic amounts of social interaction that I was doing with multiple people over a sustained period of time which I love doing. Of course I love doing it. Speaking to creative people of about art and having fun. I really enjoy that. But what I'd like people to understand about artistic people, we don't necessarily avoid social situations because the situations themselves are like painful

or we don't like doing them. We avoid social situations because of the cost of those social situations to our being, our nervous system. So if I do do, two days of quite intense chatting with all those different people and all those faces that I'm reading and the eye contact that I'm making, all that crack, all that socialising stuff, which I love when it's with the right people. I have an internal battery that gets drained and then once that's drained, I lose skills, skills of cop-on, skills of planning, skills of being

an autonomous responsible adult. Executive functioning skills it's called, but I think the way I described it there is a bit better. How do I know this is happening? It's almost immediately after I stop socialising with people. Literally. It's worse when someone calls to my house actually. If a person comes to my house an area where I'm normally unmast and myself, and then I have to do unplanned socialising in my own space, literally the second that person leaves, the second they close the door. I feel like I'm being spun around in circles. The first sign of burnout is autistic burnout.

It's disorientation, disoriented. It's the feeling of the example I always give because it's highly accurate. When you're on holidays and you're in a new city, you know where your hotel is. And on about the second day of walking around the city and back to your hotel, by about the second day you have a little mental map of the immediate area and they're like, I know how to get back to my hotel. And then something happens in the street where you You lose your way and for about 10 seconds you don't know what direction your hotel is in. And suddenly you're in a city you're not familiar with and you're an adult and you have

that little feeling of being lost and confused and disoriented. That's what burnout feels like. So I'll feel like that after I socialise with a lot of people. I'll get that feeling. Then I'll notice it and I'll ground myself and I'll go, okay, burnout now, time to do some meditation, some mindfulness, checking up my body, checking up my environment, breathing, listening, feeling my feet on the floor and just saying to myself, it's okay, your battery is drained, your battery is drained and because of that, other stuff is difficult now.

Let's just focus on one thing at a time. of the important things, wallet, keys, like for years, before I had any fucking diagnosis for years, I was like, why do I lose my wallet? Or leave my phone in a shop. Anytime I meet, I meet someone, anytime I bump into a person and have a chat with him and I'm kind of taken off guard, what the fuck is going on with me that I leave my phone behind? Or do something really, really stupid that I'm going to show. shame myself over. I used to think it was lack of confidence, low self-esteem, that I disliked

myself so much that when I'd meet another person, that encounter would rattle me and confuse me, and then I'd do something silly, like leave my wallet behind or forget my phone. Now I know it's called burnout. The social interaction fried my brain a little bit, drained my fucking battery, and fucked with the remembering my phone part of my brain. First time it ever happened that I really noticed it and frightened me. I was about 10. I can't remember the exact details, but a fucking teacher screamed at me. An adult teacher screamed into my face.

Another instance in my life where an adult should probably have been arrested for the way that they treated me. But a grown fucking man, a grown man in his 50s screamed into my. face when I was nine or ten inches from my face as close to punching me as you could but using his voice anyway it rattled me so much it was just at the very end of school like five minutes before the bell it rattled me so much that when I then went to the shop after school I accidentally shoplifted I shoplifted One of those large tubs of Hagenas ice cream. This would have been late 90s in Ireland.

So a large tub of Hagenas ice cream was like a gold bar, a luxury item that you'd never even look at it. But when I was in the shop, I opened the freezer and picked up this big Hagen-Daz thing just to stare at it. And then before I knew it, I was sitting in my dad's car. bawling crying, shaking with this ice cream in my hand, not knowing, A, like how I'd just, like, stolen it from the shop, utterly terrified that I'm now going to jail

because I stole expensive ice cream, and then being terrified that now that I had stolen a large tub of haggendass, that I'm now in the car with my dad with the expensive ice cream. and now he's going to be forced to buy it and it'll be so expensive that we'll be homeless. Now that's ridiculous. It was probably a fiverer even though a fiver was a lot of money

in the late 90s. We're not coming at this from a position of rationality. We're coming at this from the... This is a highly burnt out 10-year-old autistic child here. But it scared the shit out of me because I wasn't a shoplifty type of child. My ma worked in Duns. she would always tell me never fucking steal

when you steal from Duns you steal from a big shop it's always the workers who end up getting in trouble they somehow get into shit so if you think oh it's a big shop your friends are doing it they're stealing if you do that

it's always the workers they end up getting in shit so don't be stealing but when I'd stolen that giant I didn't steal it I picked up a giant tub of fucking Hagandaz got that dizzy, disoriented feeling, and then walked out of the shop and into my dad's car, not knowing that I'm effectively stealing the most expensive ice cream in the shop,

and then I'm overwhelmed with very deep emotions of shame and guilt and all this shit. Because an adult man had just screamed into my face, and it short-circuited my fucking social battery. That's autistic burnout. That's my earliest memory of it. But now as an adult, when that burnout feeling kicks in, I can ground myself, I can meditate, keys, wallet, phone, groceries, write shit down. You know, if I can't hold it in memory, I can write it down on the piece of paper, I've got all these tools.

But I'm like, something's gonna catch me out. Something's gonna catch me fucking out. So the other day, I'd return back from Dublin, And I'm like, right, I'm definitely feeling the burnout. I feel disoriented. Ground yourself. You've a bus to catch. Make sure you're packed.

Don't leave Dublin without anything fucking important. So I had my list. Laptop recording equipment. Phone, keys, credit cards. All the really important stuff. Triple checked. That's in the bag. You know what time your bus is?

You know how to get there, plan the taxi. all sorted. I'd get onto the fucking bus. I'd left my shoes in the hotel. I'd spend so much time thinking about everything else. I forgot my fucking shoes. What's on my feet? It's because it was hot I didn't fucking notice.

So I'm wearing flip flaps and barefoot in flip flaps on the bus. With boat cut jeans and flip flaps. Nothing against anybody who wears flip flaps. Nothing against it. It's just I didn't consent. I don't want to wear flipflops on the fucking bus. I don't want to wear jeans and flipflops.

That's not a choice I want to make. I can't put it off. I can't. Someone else might be able to pull that off, look grand, not me. What does it make me look like? It makes me look autistic. So I'm there on the bus and I'm practicing self-compassion and I'm going, look it's not the worst.

So who fucking cares? You're wearing sandals on the bus. People can see your toes. Who gives a shit? So what? You're going to have to be the strange fella. You're going to be the weird fella for the duration of this bus journey. There was someone smoking heroin at the back of the bus.

You know the Dublin to Limerick fucking bus. So worse things have happened than those buses than someone wearing barefoot sandals and jeans. I was mostly disappointed, just disappointed that I'd gotten everything else, laptop, phones, wallets, keys, the rest of my clothes. I had it nailed. I was really happy that I'd managed to execute those functions and then the shoes got me in the end. But then I said to myself, do you know what? That only happened because it was hot.

If it had been winter, I'd have noticed that my feet were cold and there's no way I would have left the hotel room. In non-consensual flip-flops, there were flip-flops, not sandals, orthopedic flip-flops. I've big, chunky orthopedic flip-flops. flaps because I ended up injuring myself during the pandemic from spending too much time walking around on shit slippers not being able to leave the house and just walking around on shit slippers with no support and they ended up with sciatic nerve problems during the pandemic so I had to get these incredibly ugly chunky orthopedic flip flaps so I'm wearing them on the bus the bus down to Limerick then my phone rings I answer the

phone on the bus and it's nose talk one of the national radio stations, news talk. And they're going, How are you blind by? We noticed that the issue of bard droppings is in the news again in Limerick City. Would you be willing to come on to the radio live and talk about the impact of bird shit in Limerick City? Now here's the thing.

Radio stations. I get phone calls from radio stations maybe once every two weeks. So Ireland is tiny. and the radio stations in Ireland on news talk 2 FM, today FM, whatever, they need to fill their shows. They're on every single day and they need to fill that with content. So if you have any type of profile in Ireland,

they'll ring you up constantly, just going, please, will you just come on to talk about anything? Just for five minutes. We have a topic here and we think it might be relevant to you. Will you come on and talk for five minutes? And I always say no, I'm not doing that. There's no point. people kind of find it annoying. If you're just on the radio all the time

for no reason, people find it annoying there's no point. But anyway, I'm experiencing fucking burnout, executive dysfunction. So the part of my brain that's supposed to go, don't go on news talk, and talk about bird shit. Don't do that. Of course I say,

yeah, no problem, I'll do that. I didn't say, I'm actually on a bus. I'm actually barefoot on a bus to Limerick. I don't think it's a good idea if I go on live fucking radio. when do you want me? 15 minutes Oh great I'm gonna be pulling into

Kildare Village in 15 minutes and I can talk to you I can find a toilet and talk to you about bird shit on national radio live if that suits so the bus pulls in to Kildare Village

which is this really it's not a village it's like a really long outdoors TK Max it's full of outlet stores and I go there and I find a public toilet and I go inside and it's like

Oh shit. Okay, I'm on live radio now talking about bird shit. Good evening to you, Blind Boy. This seems, we keep hearing about problems with seagulls around Dublin, but this is the Limerick version, the Starlings. They are everywhere. Is that right in this part of the city? How are you? Thanks for having me on. They're on this one particular streets, right, Bedford Row,

which we call the Birdshit District. And it's a pedestrianised street that has trees on it. But in the summer months, you get about over a thousand starlings And they come there every first have to go over the Shet and river And they do what's called a murmuration. Oh, yeah. What the fuck am I doing there? What the fuck?

So I did that. I did that in a toilet and killed their village with jeans. Flip Flops. There's nothing wrong with going on news. But there is. The fuck am I doing? I'm not promoting a gig.

I'm not like, there's, what the fuck am I doing on the radio talking about bird shit in Limerick City? Like, I'm aware I'm very passionate about it. I've spoken about it on the podcast. That's a different thing. That's not national radio. Does Tommy Tiernan do that?

Can you think of any other Irish person with a profile who just goes on the phone? fucking radio to talk about a footpath. And then I finished, I get off live radio, get back onto the fucking bus and say to my, what the fuck did I do that for? What you do that for?

Why'd you go on to live radio talking about bird shit? Even though yes, you are passionate about bird shit. Why do you need to tell everyone in the fucking country about it on live radio? And then my phone starts ringing. It's my agent. Pick it up. What the fuck did you do that for? Why are you on the radio?

I told a lot of promoters that you don't go on the radio. to promote gigs and now you're on the radio just talking about barred shit and you're not promoting any gigs so all of the promoters

were like why the fuck did you go on the radio and not mention that you're doing a gig because I didn't mention anything so that there that happened

because of burnout I went on a bus left my shoes in the hotel jeans and flip-flops in the toilet of Kildare Village live on national radio talking about

the politics of barred shit and a fight between the council and the mayor in Newark City and that's the same I'm in the car about my dad after stealing the haggendaz it's the same shit except now as a a man an adult man in his 40s I don't I don't steal haggendaz from the shop I agreed to do live radio and lose the ability to say no I thank you so much for that office But I don't think I'd like to go on live radio and talk about the bird shit situation in Limerick City. It makes me look odd to the general radio listening public and not in a good way. And that...

That there is how autistic people get the reputation for being eccentric. That's eccentric behaviour. We caught it there in the wild. That's eccentric behaviour in the wild. It's the things that slip through the cracks. when you're trying to be normal and especially exacerbated by

Barnout. So I actually hadn't intended to speak this long for the introduction. But I have a wonderful a live podcast for you this week. I recorded this in Belfast. About six months ago I think

my guest is Professor Daisy Fancourt. A professor of psychobiology and epidemiology. She's a profoundly accomplished expert in her field. This chance, it really restored a sense of faith that I had in other human beings because Daisy, she led this massive study. During the COVID pandemic, she led a massive study into the impacts on people's mental health and well-being.

and the impacts that the COVID pandemic and lockdown was having on people's mental well-being and emotional health and they collected massive amounts of data across multiple years with this study and one of the things that impacted me greatly post-COVIDemic was I came away from it with a poor opinion of other people

seeing how many very angry anti-vax people came out of nowhere. How many people ignored science, ignored lockdowns, put other people's health at risk, how many people behaved in ways that were really selfish? How many people sent me death threats? Because I thought it was a good idea that we wear masks and wash our hands. I came out of the pandemic. What a much more negative view of humanity than I did going into the fucking pandemic. And that was really sad. And the chat I had with Daisy on this podcast, she's like, no, you're wrong.

I have the data. I led the study. Most people wanted to help other people. Most people wanted to behave in ways that didn't cause pain. distress or injury to other people. Most people wanted to keep other people safe and that's the data. The really negative people they were just the loudest but they weren't the majority they were actually the minority so I allowed social media algorithms mostly social media which fed me very angry distressed reactionary

paranoid people it fed me these things and I wrongly interpreted that as a good representation of society at large. So it's very nice, it's nice to find out that I'm wrong. It's nice to learn that I'm viewing the world through a very negative and pessimistic lens and that it doesn't correlate with facts or data and I can now work on changing how I think and feel. Professor Daisy Fancourt also does research into the impact that art and engaging with the arts can have on our mental health. She released a book this year called ArtCure, The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health, and that was a bestseller.

We also speak about creativity and mental health. So this was a cracker of a chat. It's going to be a long podcast, so that means you can listen to this in installments if you like. It's a cracker of a chat. So here we go, Professor Daisy Fancourt. What is psychobiology first? Psychobiology is looking at the relationship between psychology and biology. So it's saying when we have experiences, emotions, what is that doing to us at a biological level?

Can I ask you a question? So, now this is a really basic one, but I've been hugely interested in mental health literature over the years. and I first started to read about, we'll say emotions, understanding my own emotions and emotional literacy, like 20 years ago. A word that has started creeping in more and more, and I don't fully understand it, is your nervous system.

What used to be, you know, just minding your emotions, has now turned into nervous system. And it kind of linguistically freaks me out a bit because it doesn't found, do you know what I mean? I prefer words. It sounds too sciencey. but like what is our nervous system? Our nervous system is the brain

and also the system of nerves that runs across our whole body so it sends messages back and forth so that our senses, what we experience is communicated back to our brains. So is that if I get a pang of anxiety

and then I feed it in my tummy? Yeah, exactly. So that anxiety psychologically is being translated through your nervous system to your stomach. That's why we have those physical responses to stress and anxiety and emotions.

And has research changed a lot then over the past maybe 20 years where we start to, I don't know, look at these things holistically, that the brain and the body are a lot more connected than we might have given a credit 20 years ago? Exactly. We really used to think of them as quite separate what happens in our brains and our minds and what happens in our body. But now we understand that they are fundamentally interconnected. So if you're feeling well psychologically, that actually translates,

through to things like better immune function even, even a reduced risk of catching colds from people. Whereas if we're physically ill, it can also mean that we start to have more symptoms of stress or depression or anxiety as well. Does it ever strike you that so much of this, 20 years ago to speak that way would have been considered almost kind of airy, fairy, holistic, silly business? Do you know what I mean? And now mainstream science is going, hold on a second, and this is actually what's happening. I think that's what's really cool about science, though, is it changes because we discover new things all the time.

And sometimes it really upends the way we think about the world. You led a study about the impact of the COVID pandemic on people's mental health. And I mean, Jesus, that's something. I mean, we all did the old pandemic, didn't we? Unless there's one prick in the audience. It was like, fuck that on doing what I want. it's a strange thing the old pandemic

because it was global and we don't fucking talk about it like we don't you'd never hear about it like there's even a theory that the last big pandemic the 1980 flu pandemic that it's not present in a lot of literature from the time

because people writing were like we're not going to fucking write about that I mean for those three or four years after COVID, it's like, shut the fuck up about it. It's gone. I don't even want to hear about it. But I know myself, I most definitely, I hate throwing around the word trauma, but I definitely have some little T trauma from that pandemic. I would say it left me in a state of hypervigilance that I don't think I've left this. Waking up every day and like seeing the Italian people in all their bodies piled up

and then become obsessed with numbers every day and seeing how many people have died and the impact of that across a long period of time and the uncertainty after about two months I would just waking up with palpitations as a given and I don't think it's left me

is that a common experience? What were you finding on this study? Well that was actually exactly why we wanted to run the study because in those early days and weeks it was the numbers of cases and deaths that were being reported every day But it's like, well, everybody is being affected by that, even if they're not catching it, which is why we realize we have to run a study looking at what's happening to people's mental health

in this whole experience as well. We need to have numbers on that every day so that we can respond. And actually, one of the big things that came out was when people were seeing those numbers go up in cases and deaths, then actually that was one of the biggest predictors of mental health changes to people's mental health getting worse. And we found that the more people watching the news, the worse that. mental health was getting. So it was this bizarre scenario where we were all glued to our televisions wanting to know what was happening. But that was actually one of the worst things we could have been doing for ourselves. And you had to stay informed as well. And one thing that I found particularly

difficult about it was at one point in my life I used to struggle with, I had agoraphobia when I was like 19 or 20. And I would be afraid of like when I was 19, 20, people, people, in public spaces, I would have safety behaviours where I'd be afraid to touch door handles in case there were germs, all of this type of stuff. And I conquered it and I got over it with CBT and became someone who did not live the life of an agoraphobic anymore. And then when the pandemic hit, it all came back to me as a rational response. It's like, I'm supposed to be afraid to go outside. In the early days, it's like when we all thought you got it off door handles, I'm afraid to touch door handles

and then there was the did you all do the very fun practice of disinfecting your groceries we all had that one on our hands and knees in the hallway while the Tesco delivery gives us some corn flakes and all of a sudden you're putting antibacterial wipes on the corn flakes

that wasn't great for me at all I mean that was nuts wasn't this when were you doing this study Was it like afterwards or during the pandemic? It was during it, live doing it. We were collecting a survey every 20 seconds of the pandemic so that we could see in real time. So we did it as a citizen science experience.

There might even be people in the audience who were part of it. So anybody could sign up and we asked them to do questionnaires about how they were feeling. And then we re-contacted everybody every single week. But everyone was being contacted at slightly different times. So we had this real-time monitoring. And we had 75,000 people. people who did the study for two years giving us those repeated data. And it was phenomenal. It was data that helped us to decide when to release lockdowns, how to design the vaccine rollout.

And it was all from the generosity of people being willing to take part in that study. And how would you feel about, like, another thing that was really tough during that period was everybody was experiencing mental health difficulty, but even to access mental health services now was over a Zoom call. And I know, because I trained to be a therapist a long time ago, the importance of physical presence, the importance of being with a person, empathy, body language, all of this. And now out of a sudden, if you're speaking to a therapist over Zoom,

a huge amount of that is removed. You know, so you're just left with the voice. You're still listening to someone. Like, I want to ask you questions, because I know, like, as a scientist, you're going to be like, data, data, but like personal opinion, would you like to find out how people are right now six years on and what would be your opinion about how people are doing?

Because I think we didn't deal with that at all. I think we just were like pretend it didn't happen and move on. We do have some data showing that, you know, many people sort of have found a way through and they're as fine as people normally are anyway afterwards. But there are still still some people who feel they're really badly affected by what happened because it is, as you call it, a trauma. It's a lot to process and everybody was technically in the same pandemic but people's experiences were very, very different depending on their own life circumstances

and their own personalities and background as well. And the reason I was hesitant to say the word trauma as well is around 2023 when we came out of that lockdown. I remember using that word online and so many, it became a trauma competition. Like some people, I was lucky enough to. not lose someone, you know what I mean, to not lose a person close to me to COVID. And some people took exception to me, say, my use of trauma or that person's, and it was what, I couldn't believe there was that much pain, that someone would be taken offence.

You didn't have as much trauma as me. I had more trauma than you, and it felt so unprocessed, if you know what I mean, that they had to try and hold on to it, you know? How do you think people are don't know? Well, we know that there are still, you know, high rates of mental health problems. And actually, we know that in general, mental health problems are getting worse in many countries. I think one of the things I found quite interesting during COVID, though, was that people were having to find their own ways to cope, because, you know, it was very hard to access mental health services, for example. But there was something that actually became a really collective response, and we saw it all around the world. We saw people in Italy, like, singing from their

balconies. In the UK, we all started painting rainbows for the NHS. You could stream plays online from national theatres that were releasing things. We were all binge watching Netflix, reading books. Bizarly, the arts became this kind of collective way for people to process things. And I found it quite interesting because there was actually an article in the Singapore Times which asked people to rank what were the jobs that are the most and the least useful during a pandemic. So obviously doctors, cleaners, they came up top. The most useless job was artists, according to the public survey. I remember seeing that and getting very annoyed. But it was bizarre because what would we all have done without the arts from we were in those lockdowns? It was what we were all turning to

to help us brace us and get through that time. I mean, people did a lot of box sets. But we did like, I mean, people rediscovered the Sopranos. It was fantastic. What do you think we're seeing now? Is it an uptick anxiety? Is it an off-tick in depression? We're seeing a range of problems. I think one of the big things that's on a lot of people's minds is youth mental health, because we are seeing that there are increasing rates definitely happening now that are not just attributable to COVID, but actually seem to be a lot more than that. So we're seeing rises in the number of young people who have a probable mental health disorder. And we're also recognising now that it can then be really hard if people have got very

long waiting lists. So it's sort of about, well, how can we help support people where they're not just being told, yes, you need help, but you've got to wait a year before you can even see somebody. And when you're looking at that data, I mean, I'm assuming it's not just one thing. Like, people love to blame phones. Now, phones aren't great, and the amount of news that we get is quite overwhelming. But then you've got climate clats, and then you simply have the fact that it's structurally very difficult to be a teenager right now. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm an elder millennial, so I'm that strange generation where we were told, go to college and you're going to get a job, simple as that. And then the recession hits and you find out that's not true.

And the idea of having a full-time job, full-time contracts, that these things are just gone. And that was my generation. I don't know what the fuck a 14-year-old is thinking about now with their future. But now people are saying AI is going to come in and you don't even know what jobs are going to be here in 10 years. So I'm trying to think of all the different distractions and painful things that are leading. Are we better at diagnosing? Diagnosis is something that is, you know, it gets talked about a lot. And actually, I think it's really important that we can help to diagnose because often people are having experiences and they're not sure what they are.

They're not sure what they mean. And actually diagnosis can help people to find appropriate treatments. But I also think it's really important that we're thinking before diagnosis about the things that can help people to stay well in the first place. what are the things that will build resilience? And one of the challenges that I think we have in education at the moment comes back to what you just said about jobs. I read an article recently that was saying 70% of the jobs that the current young generation are going to do

haven't even been invented yet. And this means that we're trying to work out, well, what are we training young people for? And we often put a lot of pressure onto particular skills we think are important in schools. But actually we know we have problems around resilience and mental health and well-being in young people. And actually some of the things that are really good for that,

like helping young people to engage in arts, music and creativity, things that build imagination and critical thinking and compassion. All of these things are actually really deprioritized, even though they're probably the skills that are going to be the most important. So that's the thing I really want to chat you about, and I wanted to leave this chat more to the second half. But before we break, the research that you're doing, which I find most fascinating is you're looking at the impact of the arts on our mental health, which I think is so fucking valuable. Tell us about that research that you're doing. And no, tell us why. Why did you decide I want to research the impact of art and mental health? I actually started in the arts world.

I come from a family of musicians. Go way out of it. Okay. I worked as a professional pianist initially. Okay. But I got this incredible opportunity to work in hospitals a day a week whilst I was training and it was delivering arts programs and it was the most incredible experience because I saw firsthand these and these amazing effects that the arts were having in hospitals. I remember a little boy who had really bad burns in A&E and then when they brought the theatre group in to perform suddenly he didn't need the morphine anymore and there was a patient with dementia who couldn't remember her relatives but then was singing along word perfect to a song and I was just absolutely amazed by what I saw and I was desperate to understand what was happening.

So I decided to completely retrain in science in order to be able to research this and really be able to explain and articulate why the arts are so valuable to our health. And that again is a phenomenal thing because to say that maybe 40 years ago, 30 years ago, people would just go, that's holistic nonsense. Do you know what I mean? To say all music is healing, music can heal your health, they just go no way. So you're doing the science to go, actually, I think.

And are you bringing them, is it the nervous system? Is that what's happening? I mean, I think I'd say one thing. If you look back in the 1980s, people were still arguing about where the exercise was good for our health. Go away out of us. So it just shows we do change our mind on things. But yes, actually, what's really exciting in the evidence space now is it's not just people saying that they feel better, but we can actually see this physiologically.

We can see in the brains when we, in our brains when we engage in things like music. and it helps us to feel happier. That's because we are activating reward networks in the brain leading to the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine that helps us to feel happy. When we say that we feel relaxed doing something arts-based, it's because we're actually having a reduction in that nervous system activity we spoke about.

We're actually seeing a reduction in our stress hormones like cortisol as well. We actually even have evidence that when we engage in the arts, it affects our immune function, it lowers levels of inflammation in the immune system, which are related to symptoms like depression as well as physical illness. And in fact, we even know now that arts engagement affects the expression of our genes. So people who are regularly engaged in the arts actually have patterns of gene expression

that indicate that they are biologically younger. That's mad. Jesus Christ. That young lad, the young lad who had the burns and didn't need morphine, Did you ever get to the bottom of this? Lots of studies have been looking at this because it's something we actually see quite repeatedly. If people listen to relaxing music

or they're distracted by arts, even like before they've had operations, they actually need fewer analgesics, fewer painkillers after the operation. So part of it is a reduction in stress response. When we're more stressed, then we're more likely to experience those levels of pain. Part of it is distraction as well.

There's only so much cognitive bandwidth we have so any kind of distraction can reduce the symptoms of pain. But also, when we listen to music or art, it actually activate some of the same regions in the brain that are involved in pain, involved in the release of endogenous opioids, so natural opioids within us that actually helped to reduce that pain. So it's this whole combination of psychological and physiological effect that mean that music is actually an art, is actually a really effective pain relief. what do you hope for this research do you hope to bring it to a government to some description and say here's go and invest in the arts it's more than just cool songs i think i kind of hope the same as exercise i think you know we all want to do exercise just because it's you know it can be really fun to go walking or swimming or whatever but actually

it's really important to know about the health benefits because then we'll know like when we're feeling stressed that going for a run is good for us well equally it's important to know that the arts can support all of that as well It's helpful for people to know sometimes that arts could be helping aspects of their health that they don't have medical solutions to, like aspects of mental health as well. It can even help to know that arts could be a good substitute. Studies actually show that music is more effective than anti-anxiety medications at helping to reduce anxiety before surgeries with none of the side effects.

I mean, the thing is, you're saying this stuff now, and you're supported by data, but you're also saying stuff that, like, we all know and feel that, you know, that's the beauty of it is, you know, I always say when I was 18, 19, and I was experiencing pretty difficult mental health issues, mainly, like, panic attacks when you don't know what they are, are pretty bad, like panic attacks are no crack anyway, but when at least you can go, that's an anxiety attack. But when you're getting panic attacks and it's just like, it's a Wednesday and I feel like I'm dying. You know what I mean? Like, Because that's the worst.

It's like this thing happens to me out and over where I think I'm in the middle of dying. And then you go to a therapist and it's like, oh, that's just a panic attack. And labeling that alone. But I'd gotten to a point where, oh, Jesus, I say, I wasn't far from suicidal thoughts. I was that way.

And David Bowie's music definitely saved me, without a doubt, because it gave me meaning and purpose. and when I was listening to Bowie, especially it was the days before the internet so I used to have to save up for the CDs and I'd wait for the next album and wait to save up to 25 quid.

I was not experiencing pain when I was listening to that music and it gave me that little bit of meaning to push through, you know? And no matter how dark I was feeling, that music fucking saved my life. And it's one of those things where when I speak about it,

like I said, it feels too holistic. But now you're not, you're going, no, not at all. That was working for me as a form of mental health treatment. Yes. And actually, when we listen to something like music, sometimes it's happy music and that just sort of lifts our mood and it gives us those dopamine releases. But other times, it can be sad music, it can be music that gives you that authentic emotional connection and makes you feel understood and validated and gives you a way to release those emotions and process them. Like all of this, I've always wondered, out of all the arts, when it comes to me, you know,

music, so many songs are written about heartache and love. Do you know what I mean? Compared to, like, not all books are like that, not all paintings are like that, but within music, heartache and love is very much overrepresented as a team. And people listen to certain things when their hearts are broken. You know, what's the album? Blood on the tracks by Bob Dylan is considered like one of the great breakup albums. If someone is going through a difficult breakup, they're told to listen to this certain, you know what I mean? And that is, is that a catarist or is that what that is? It is. And actually, there's something that it's actually known as the tragedy paradox, the idea that in our own lives,

we often want to minimize sort of suffering, but actually we're often drawn to it in the music that we listen to and the art that we engage in. And it's actually because our brains crave those experiences to help to understand those really difficult emotions. But when you're listening to a song or you're reading a story or watching a film, you know that it's art, which means it gives you a bit of a distance, which means your brain can contemplate those emotions, can feel them, can practice managing them. You've got that little bit of space, and it means that you're honing what's called the predictive coding of capacity. Yeah, it's actually a healthy event to be able to navigate.

Your rations. Yeah. What do you think heavy metal does? Because I wonder about that heavy metal is on it. It's, oh, it's so, like, I love heavy metal, but it's a strange. one in that most music, I find it tends to be about being in your 20s. A lot of artists can't make it beyond their 20s. Their music is so focused. That's why, just my personal opinion, right? But I think if there was a Martian David Attenborough and they were looking at art, they would call music or mating ritual. Do you know, I always say dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire. But metal isn't that. Metlers, you can have a heavy metal band and they're in their

70s and that's absolutely fine. It's better actually. I feel heavy metal gets a bit of a bad rap as well because heavy metalists people sometimes think it makes people angrier. There have even been, no, but actually you're right, the studies show it doesn't. Actually people when they listen to heavy metal so long as they don't hate it, if you hate it, makes you angry. They used it as torture in Guantanamo Bay. Yeah. But if you're, if you like it and you're listening to it, people actually end up feeling happier and more peaceful afterwards.

And they actually did some experiments to try and work out like, what is this about? They actually did a really cool experiment with hot sauce. So they, well, they had to think of a way of testing aggression in a safe and ethical way. So they asked volunteers to spike another volunteer's drink with hot sauce. Okay. And they, so generally people just put a little bit in. And then they played them some heavy metal music. But just with sort of mutual lyrics,

they actually put in the same amount as the non-heavy metal group. And then they put in heavy metal music with really violent lyrics. And they went nuts on that hot source. But the point was, it wasn't about the music. It was about the lyrics. If we have any kind of violent speak or whatever, then that does make people be more angry and aggressive. But it's nothing to do with how heavy or metally the music is.

Really? And are we rehearsing any emotions with heavy metal, do you think? Well, it's the same kind of process, you know, taking emotions that are sort of visceral and angry, but it's actually helping you process and experience those. As long as the lyrics aren't very violent, then actually it has that same cathartic process that means that you do feel generally happier and more peaceful afterwards. There's a band called Cannibal Carps and, like, they're very, very have you Michael and they have a... So they, their lyrics are... I wouldn't even describe them.

Just the most violent lyrics you could think of, but they're growled and bark so you can never understand them. So it's like that part that they understand. You'd never understand it. You'd have to read it and go, what, that's what this song is about all along. My God. I'm going to give you a break for a small little pint and a piss.

And you can go in peace for about 15 minutes and then we'll come back out, all right? Douglass. Let's just have a little quick Ocarina pause now. Before we get back into the second half and speak about art and the impact that art can have in our mental health. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patrion.com forward slash the blind by podcast. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living.

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That was the Ocarina pause. That was some adverts. UK tour starting off, October 18th. These gigs are very close. Some of them are sold out. Tickets are low for the rest. Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol. Guildford, London, sold out.

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This is almost sold out as well But I'm in Australia in fucking April I'm just trying to find the dates here Can't fucking find them Hold on Brisbane and Part They're already sold out Okay

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But you can give it a crack if you want. Back to the chat with the magnificent Professor Daisy Fancourt. Check out her book Art Cure. There is Daisy's book. who gave me the gift of the large whistle whistle backstage?

Thank you so much for that. Is that a base whistle? Wow. Is it a Protestant whistle? Is it? Fantastic. I'm going to get out my questions. I don't want to say we've lost touch with art.

What I would say is that art and our experience of it has very much been absorbed into capitalism. Art has become something that you purchase and consume. And, like, I think we've lost a sense of making art in a community just for the crack and there's no such thing as being good or bad at it. You're simply doing it for the sake of doing. One of the most annoying parts of being a little child is when you're in school and everybody

plays with crayons and then you get to about four. or five and you're put into the camp of you're good at crayons and you're not and the not people just stop and then you have all these adults who do not create art at all because they're not good at it and you don't have to be good at art you you do art for the sake of art because it's a human thing are do you think art is uniquely human there are other species that do things that like singing, that make sounds like singing. Some of them actually do it for recreation rather than just for communication, but I'm pretty sure

that our arts. Who, who's that? Who does that? I have to admit, this is going beyond my expertise. Is it a bird? I've heard it about birds. I think, is it Gibbons apes as well? They sing to each other. I want to hear a given singing. Oh my God. So they make noises for aesthetic pleasure.

That is what I've heard, but like I said, I'm much more focused on humans, so this is really true. I am an expert in nothing, so I'm happy to sit up here and talk out of my arse. Have you ever seen a bower bird, no? No. They're a very fancy bird that, oh, they build magnificent nests. But I don't know is that art, because I don't think the bower bird is sitting back going,

look at my wonderful nest. It's more of an instinctual thing. Whereas, I mean, have you ever gotten to the bottom of what art is? like what purpose like why do we do us it is a really interesting question that because actually when you look back across human history right from the first examples that we have of art

they seem to have been involved in things to do with health and with healing we think that things like singing may have at least partly evolved as a way of supporting group cohesion so we used to bond through grooming in groups but as our brains got bigger and our social groups got bigger that took too much time so we needed to other ways So singing became a much more efficient way of bonding and communicating in groups.

And even now, there are studies that show that if you get together with a whole bunch of strangers and you all sing together, or if you get together and you chat or you exercise in the gym, the ones who sing bond faster with one another. It's called the icebreaker effect. Well, a football chance. I mean, that's what it is. I just, I want all the football lads now to start picking tics out of each other's heads. So we at one point our early ancestors were picking ticks like monkeys

and then that turned into singing? And gradually then evolved into language as a way of communicating and bonding as well. They think that singing happened before speaking? That's what some of the theories are now, that singing may have actually been introduced about 200,000 years before we started speaking. And what then about visual art? Well, some of the earliest expressions that we have of very, visual arts, a cave painting, which often are found alongside early bone flutes and early instruments.

And actually, it looks like those were used partly in things like fertility rituals. There were really carved bone figurines as well. So that's some of this sort of early intertwining of arts and health together. How much of that was part of your research? How much of it was evolutionary psychology? Well, it comes from all different from work. It comes from evolutionary psychology, also from archaeology. Lots of different fields that have kind of.

put the evidence together to be able to sort of try and figure out what the origins of the arts were and why. We used to have a tradition here called Keening and there's no Keeners left. And Keening, if you don't know what Keening is, dey? So Keening very west of Ireland, but if someone died, you would hire a woman who would sing at the funeral. and it was more than just singing though it was yes there was a song but it was an expression of grief for everybody so she was like a conductor

so she was a conductor for everyone's tears but it was deeply spiritual what I ended up finding out was women who were keeners first off they were gifted with it they believed that they were gifted they were cursed by it as such a keening woman could never refuse

so if someone came to her and said this person has died she had to go to that funeral but especially during the likes of the famine where there was lots of people dying they would get burnt out from too much keening but the reason they were terrified of turning it down is if a Keening woman turned a funeral down

when she died she'd turn into a banshee and a banshee was like a woman who would appear at like a ghost that sings and announces someone's death and what I love about it is the relationship that Keening has with the Banshee is it's a turn and response singing

but it goes through time and space so the Banshee sings before someone dies and then the Keening woman sings after the person dies and that ties in them with the Irish idea of the other world because we didn't have heaven or hell we had a I'm gone very much off I'm a tangent there now But

Keening was a thing right And obviously like I said There's a deep mythology with it There was a meaning These people were gifted They weren't just handy at singing The sad thing about Keening is We don't have any recordings of it

There's one, there's one recording Because the Keening woman When they interviewed her She's like Here's that dude with a microphone Will you sing? And she's like, where's the body? And he's like, I don't have a fucking body. I've got a microphone. And she's like, I cannot do this if there's no body here. And if there was a body here, you wouldn't be allowed in with the microphone. So because of that, we don't have a recording of it. But it was, they say that Dolores are earredin from the Cranberries. If you hear the way that she sings and breeds, that that's a little bit like what caning was. But on describing something that's deeply spiritual, it's a form of art because it's singing, but it's served a huge.

huge purpose in the community and it was about the release catarsis of emotion. But this is I think where we've really strayed from what we used to do because everybody used to sing, dance, tell stories as just a part of everyday life and it wasn't seen as this thing that was not with a purpose. As you say, it had these deep meaning within society, these roles that the arts played in our day-to-day lives. But we've really shifted over the last couple of hundred years to the point where now many people actually don't engage. in the arts, we've kind of made it into this commodity, we've made it a luxury that

costs money to do and you feel that you're not good enough. And actually, we're a planet of eight billion artists. But if you ask a person on the street, did you do any arts yesterday? Only one in 20 will say yes. And are you looking at us, are you trying to promote the idea that everybody should be trying to create something for the sake of us? I'm promoting the idea that arts engagement is a health behaviour like exercise, sleep. diets, engaging with nature. It's something that fundamentally impacts on our health and well-being, but it's something that we are just not appreciating or engaging with enough or

valuing in our own lives or in society. Have you spoken to any people in power or given a presentation to them with your research? Actually, I do, and I'm one of the roles I have as I'm director of a World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre focusing on arts and health, because actually there is really increasing policy recognition about the importance of this. And so we're actually starting to see in national governments and internationally an awareness that arts funding and art support,

it's not just a nice thing to have in society, but it actually really has quite big ramifications for health, for health economics, for the cost of things in society, and also for things like social cohesion and quite a lot of related outcomes like that. Down south, we have, the

what's the fucking name of it basic income for artists which means BIA which is the Irish word for food which I like Bia but we have

the just brought it in this year and Ireland is unique where now it's pretty difficult to fucking guess it's difficult but a lot of artists are just being given and they just published the first health economic analyses

showing there's a really clear return on investment and that particular one yeah But I think what drove Ireland was, it was tourism. So I think because they looked at the popularity of the likes of Fountains, D.C. and just seeing how big this is around the world and then seeing a return on then the coolness of Ireland and the soft power that that gives us. Whereas I'd rather it's just, like, does it ever piss you off that you have to, you have to, like, you are seeing evidence that this is good for the human condition. This is good to be a human being. But in order to get it funded, you have to make these economic cases.

Like, this is the same too I find when I speak to climate scientists. Like, the UN did a report there a month ago about water, basically. And it's, so they're showing that right now there's water bankruptcy, they call it. So we're running out of fresh water. But if you look at the whole report, they had to speak about biodiversity as if it was a bank account. water bankruptcy, then they had to say a wetland is a bit like a savings account. And it's all this language because the only people who can do anything about it are people who understand the world in terms of finance.

Are you finding yourself having to do that with this work? Yes, because I think a little bit like with climate as well, it's one thing for governments to start saying, oh yeah, we can see this, but it's another thing for them to actually put the funding in, to actually put the money forwards to support this. So we've recently started trying to do a lot more of that, like giving the kinds of evidence that we know is their language that they want to see. We've just done a work across the whole of the UK looking at working age adults alone, the well-being impact of engaging in the arts. Like, what's that worth to society? Because if people have higher well-being, then they typically

make less use of health services. They're often more productive, so they might work or they might care for people. They might volunteer. What's well-being? How do you define well-being? So well-being has different aspects to it. Part of it is to do with what is called your hedonic well-being. So it's your feelings of happiness day-to-day or how satisfied you are with your life. And then some of it's eudaimonic well-being. So it's to do with where do you feel you've got meaning, purpose, like flourishing in your life. But the governments actually have financial values they attach to different levels of well-being because they know that that well-being affects your behaviours.

So we've said, OK, well, we'll use those values and say when we see these changes, these improvements in people's well-being over time from engaging in the arts, what's that worth? and we now know that for working-age adults alone in the UK, every year the well-being benefits from arts are worth £18.6 billion. Is there any historical point that you were able to go back to use as evidence?

Like, I don't know if you think of the 60s and the huge explosion of bands and music that happened in the 60s. And like even when I was growing up, there was a lot of bands because there was a lot of pubs, and there was a lot of places that if you had a band, you could go and see a bunch of 17-year-olds playing music, that's pretty much gone now. Like those spaces have disappeared.

And... Same with lots of music venues, with libraries. It's really bizarre because actually one of our biggest exports as a country is the creative industries. And we love having famous pop stars and musicians and all of those creative professionals. But there's sometimes a disjointed thinking that actually, in order to have those stars,

you have to invest in arts and schools, arts in higher education, artists and communities, training programs, you have to have all of that there. You've got to have arts and communities. And yet we've been systematically eroding all of that infrastructure over the last decade or so, which means that if we want to maintain that massive export of our creative industries and that soft power as well, as you mentioned, of sort of having these global art superstars, we're not going to be able to do that if we've cut off all the rungs in the ladder that lead up to it. Did you ever look at how the Russian Revolution used a theatre? As I understand that you had the Russian Revolution

and they were trying to create like a communist state. So you have all these people who live in the countryside and it's like, right, okay, we need these people from the countryside suddenly to work in a factory now. So what they used to do was the entire factory would become a play, a theatre. And every single member of the factory has to engage in this giant play

about how great communism is going to be. And I don't know, I think that's class. I just like that idea of, like, how are we going to convince these people to do this thing? Well, everyone's part of this giant play. But what I like about it is, I'm a huge fan of participatory art. Art where, like a lot of art, like I said, it's capitalistic.

It's here is an audience, and then there is an object that a very skilled person has made. and this is a transaction. Whereas with art that's participatory, everybody's kind of stuck in. What's a good example of it? Sight-specific theatre. Do you ever go to a theatre show

and it's like out in the middle of the street and you don't know who's an actor and who's not? And sometimes the audience are even part of it and it's a complete blurring of lines of... And then out of it's like, oh my God, I'm making art, I'm in theatre and I didn't even sign up for this. There's actually a whole movement of it

called Theatre of the Oppressed, which actually started off with a direct called Augusta Bale in Rio de Janeiro. And he did that. He did participatory theatre in public. And he would get members of the public to come out and act out what they thought the problems in society were. And then he'd get other members of the public to try and act out solutions. And he used this as a way of coming up with new ideas.

And his other role was a city councillor. So then he would put forward the ideas as actual policy changes. And it's a method that's travelled all around the world for using the forum of art to engage citizens. to help develop new ideas within society. He even won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think he inspired, did you ever hear of Antanis Maccas? So Antanis Maccas was, I think he was inspired by the theatre, The Oppressed.

He was a mayor of Bogota in Colombia. Now, Bogota, this was the mid-80s, and it would have been at the time of Pablo Escobar. So there was so much crime in Bogota that society was beginning to collapse. it was like judges were getting executed and stuff so law and order was disappearing and what they found was

because there was no sense of law and order people wouldn't even obey stop signs so people were just walking across the road and there was road accidents because no one gave a shit about the walk don't walk so when Tannis Maccas got elected as mayor and he came from a performance art background

and he looked at the theatre of the oppressed and he brought performance art to solving social problems. So how he solved the problem of people getting hit in the street by cars. He replaced traffic lights with mines or mines. Yeah, I know that

different context entirely. He replaced traffic lights with mimes. Mines with the white faces and this shit. But he replaced traffic lights with mimes. So when people were jaywalking, a

mime would come out and then do an impression of you and then everyone laughs. just stop completely, you know? So he brought out of these different ways of use an art to solve the problems, you know? And it's actually really effective because one of the things we know about ourselves as humans is we really hate being told what to do. So actually we often know that kind of didactic approaches of telling someone, giving someone advice, often backfire. But because in art, we know it's sort of this make-belief world that we're engaging with. We actually tend to suspend our disbelief and that actually means that we engage much better with the messages that we're told.

And actually because they're often emotional experiences through art as well, because emotions actually activate parts of the brain that are involved in memory as well. So we actually tend to remember the messages better as well. And there are some incredible examples of this that have been used around the world, actually coming back to pandemics as well. So during Ebola, one of the big challenges was how could they build trust amongst local people, people in West Africa who didn't trust healthcare professionals who were telling them, like, you've got to wash your hands and keep a distance and things. And those messages were really backfiring, but then they engaged artists, and they got

hip-hop artists to write songs and do no-touching dances, and they have murals and storytellers and radio plays, and they used art to engage local people in creating the artwork and also communicating the messages. And that campaign, although, was credited with changing the behaviours of 1.4, million people during the Ebola epidemic. The thing is, right, that's wonderful. And we're thinking art can also be used quite negatively. Because sometimes, so if I look at America right now, and you're seeing that theater,

I think they're borrowing from the language of professional wrestling, but professional wrestling is art. It's art where the, it's like circus. These people are really, really skilled athletes, but they're actors. and this is also theatre. And we're seeing this now with America, the use of theatre effectively art language to control people. The big one being Charlie Kirk's remembrance there

with the WWE stuff behind Erica Kirk. You know what I mean? She's coming to Belfast. Did you know that? What is it going to be called? Turn and point? You know that's just funded by billionaires to make neoliberalism seem okay, you know, that that's what that is.

I'm serious. And then the other thing is, Charlie Kirk, before he died, he founded an organization called Falcark with Jerry Falwell Jr. And do you know what the literal mission statement? Like, you can see it on the website. It doesn't exist anymore.

They founded an organization to fight the idea that Jesus was socialist. That this was, it was popping up online. People would say, well Jesus was a socialist, he threw the moneylenders out of the temple. So then Charlie Kirk goes, Can't have that. So they set up an organisation to show

why Jesus would actually be a horrible capitalist. So that's how you're inviting into your city, so I hope everyone shows up there and says, fuck off. But you know what? I knew that shit was coming. I fucking knew it. As soon as my weirdest and earliest experiences of fucking Velfast

is doing gigs years ago. walking around the street, shit-faced at two in the morning, and then a very, very friendly 20-year-old coming up to me with a cup of tea. Do you know about them? They're Christians. And I'm like, I'd love a lift home. Fucking hell, you're all sound up here. Tea.

And then I get into their fucking car, and I'm just like, something's off here. There's a bang of Mormon off them, but they're not Mormons. What are they? So that happened to me twice, and they tried to fucking... me into the word of the Lord. And it's just, it was such a unique, strange thing, and I didn't know what they were.

I just did, like, fuck me. So I knew you were going to get a dose of that. I'm going to put the microphone out to the audience, right? And you can ask questions about anything in the whole world. I believe there's 16 microphones out there. Oh, six, sorry. Someone corrected me at the side there. Six microphones.

Still a lot, though. Can you turn up the house lights slightly? Oh, you glamorous bastards. Fucking loads of them, isn't there? I made sure I had a scientist as a guest tonight because coming back to Belfast, it's become very obvious to me that I have quite a lot of middle-class Protestants

in the audience. Who I've learned are the easiest people in the world to offend. Hello. How are you? What's the crack? Hi, I'm Bruce. Blind Boy, you spoke about the pandemic, and how a lot of people didn't lose someone and I sort of feel that myself. But there's still that kind of feeling of grief from that period.

And I'm just posing my question to Daisy. Is there a concept within mental health research for collective or ambiguous grief after something like the pandemic? And how can we as a society in 2026 kind of navigate those feelings post-pondemic? Because you're losing, that's a one. Wonderful question. Grief isn't just losing a person. Grief there can be, I last three years of my life.

I mean, people who were 18, you emerge from it and all of a sudden you're 21, like people last some seriously important. I was grand. I was in my mid-30s, nothing going on. But like, some people got the pandemic during some important times in their life and they'll never get that back and they miss it.

Yes, and actually one of the things that we heard a lot of early in the pandemic was this kind of belief that people, wouldn't follow the rules about distancing and things that they wouldn't do things in the greater good. But actually it was completely unfounded because something we know about ourselves as humans is actually when we are in moments of crisis, we actually really do tend to bond together. And I think a lot of people actually felt quite a lot of solidarity that everyone was going through the same pandemic, even in different circumstances. But there was a sense of pulling together. There were mutual aid groups. There were people looking out for one another.

I think part of the issue actually happened that over time, we started to get more dissent. People had disagreements about the way that things should go, how we should control it, what the rules should be. And I think that fragmentation actually also caused a lot of problems because suddenly people felt they weren't part of the collective anymore. They were on their own. And that actually increased feelings of isolation and loneliness for many people. Because, do you know, a big fucking grief that I have since that pandemic is, my opinion of people changed unfortunately I had a much more optimistic view of my fellow humans

and when I saw just people flat out denying that it was happening or retreating into conspiracy beliefs are just some of the angriest people that I still get abuse from online are COVID people Like these many years on, I'll get really, really angry.

You told people to get the vaccine. You told people to wear masks. And they're still furious. And I was left with a grief there. It made me go, fuck it, you can't trust people. You think that everyone's going to band together. But then it's like we were in this situation and it's like, you can't, you can't rely upon them.

It's an optimistic. I know, I'm sorry. Dark stuff. I think it's important to recognize that actually, often you get loud voices from a few people, but that doesn't necessarily, and only we're actually representing the collective views on things. And something I actually found really heartening

as we were tracking through COVID compliance rates with the rules. Sure, listen, you're the one with the data. Yeah, I should be listening to you and your data, and that's someone's father who just sends me 10 messages a day. But that was the problem is that what got amplified, like, in news and things were the tales of when people were breaking rules and things. But actually, that was a tiny, tiny percentage of people. And in fact, what we did see generally was that that collective engagement in the behaviours that people knew would support everybody else.

So I can chill out. I have a skewed negative view and you're saying the data is not showing this blind way. We did see to start to see it fragment more when there were more and more stories of particularly high profile people breaking rules. Because then, of course, that does then give the message, well, hang on, if they're not following it, do we have to follow it? So one of the big kind of recommendations in public health is when you have situations like that, that it has to be really clear that everyone engages in this and that kind of recognition that we are all doing it to support one another. Wow. Any other questions?

Oshar, I'll let you pick. Because I can't ready say anything. Go on there, Oshar, yeah? Good one there. Did you think that going for more artistic research, you find that instead of logic-based, science-best research from your field, you were more funded or less funded because you were going after the arts? Oh, that's a goody. It's a really good question that.

Actually, a lot of the funding that we go for when we're looking at arts is the same funding that's available for all other kinds of research. You're kind of competing against all the other types of research out there and other kinds of behaviours or interventions. But I think that's really good because it means that you have to be designing studies that have got the same level of rigour in order to be able to compete and win that funding. And actually, what's definitely happened in this field over the last decade is a Initially, funders would give sort of small amounts of money because this was much more kind of controversially.

Would it work? Was it worth investing? Was it too risky? But now we're seeing funding very large-scale clinical trials of things like large global studies as well. And that's really exciting because it means that the evidence base is getting bigger and stronger, like week by week at the moment now. I mean, I can't imagine it not being hugely popular. I mean, everyone likes to hear that the arts like, well, they don't do they. I mean, do you ever wonder why are sports so massive and why are arts not? Like, why can't I turn on the news and hear about an artist? Why do I have to hear about a footballer? I think there are a couple of things here. One of them is to do with, you know, there are some very big organisations that can be behind sports,

which can definitely helm, because when you've got that sort of lobbying power and things. But I think another thing here is about this sort of shift in perception. So I mentioned that, you know, a few decades ago, there was controversy about the health benefits of exercise, but we've really seen that shift. And we've seen that happen for lots of other things too. I talk in the book about seatbelts in cars.

No one used to wear seatbelts. Everyone thought it was a ridiculous idea. And then there was this change in public perception. And suddenly there was this awareness that the evidence was there, that there was the public appetite for it. And suddenly everyone wore a seatbelt. And I could call it as seatbelt moments

because we see that consistently for lots of health behaviors, behaviors that influence our health. And I actually do think we're heading towards that for the arts now. Like a lot more people are now aware that the arts have these benefits. There's discussions about their value in society. We're seeing schemes like the universal income for artists. And I think things like that are promising steps that suggest that maybe 10 years from now. We'll look back and say, well, of course arts are fundamental to our health.

How did we ever not appreciate that before? And what would be fun as well is, like if you're to bring art back to being something truly participatory. For certain people to get past the idea that it doesn't matter whether you're good or bad at this thing you're doing it for the sake of doing it. And to be comfortable with being cringe and being bad and being terrible,

you have to do that if you want to make any type of art. You can't just be brilliant and perfect. You've got to fail, you know what I mean? I could see that as it been a very enjoyable thing to do to remove the shame and stigma. And to remind people, we every single one of us played at crayons in school we all played with cranes and played with plasticine

that's what we did and then something happened where we cut off into groups of being good and being bad you know I mean adult colouring books that was a big thing in the past few years something about adult colouring books made certain people feel safe enough to try art like some people are terrified like really like I'm an artist so it's grand

but there's certain people who they would nearly be embarrassed at the idea of I'm going to try and sing or I'm going to try and play an instrument or try and do some drawing and I always say to these people throw it in the bin, do the drawing and then throw it in the bin afterwards

and fail and fail and fuck it up and get really comfortable with failing. There's a really lovely apparently trend happening on TikTok of young people who are getting into things like well they're calling them granny hobbies but they're things like crochet and knitting and crafts.

things that involve the same kind of hand motions as being on a phone, but deliberately in an attempt to get off screens and do something that's more meaningful and that recognition, it doesn't matter if it goes wrong, but it's something that can be a lot more enjoyable and valuable to engage in for those minutes. Did you ever look at any of that type of crack, as in something like crocheting and whether it is almost like meditation? Actually, when people are engaging in arts and crafts, it is actually a mindful activity.

It involves the same regions of the brain, in mindfulness. And you're also much more likely to get into a flow state. So that feeling of complete absorption to the point you forget about everything else that's going on around you. And that's a really valuable state because it really redirects our attention. We typically spend about 47% of our waking hours mind wandering. But when we're engaged in that flow in that moment, then that that's really, really good for attention restoration for our brain. What's the benefit of flow to our nervous systems? Well, often if we're, we're stressed, we've got a lot going on, we'll find that our brains are kind of scattergunning

across lots of thoughts and that can be quite malproductive. Some people sort of describe it as feeling a bit sort of brain fog or not knowing how to see through it. But if we can focus ourselves onto one activity, really get into the zone of it, then that actually helps to refocus our attention, reduce our stress response. And there was a brilliant study where they looked at hundreds of people and got them to rate their sort of flow states across all the activities they were doing over a couple of weeks. And they tracked over 200 different activities people were doing. And the one that came out, number one, was arts and crafts for promoting flow. People were more in a flow state when they

were doing arts and crafts compared to when they were having sex. I've never achieved flow during sex. I'd do it when I'm writing a short story. I don't think I'd like flow in the middle of sex. I'd start, I'd just get ideas and pull out. Need to write it down. Any other questions? Usher, I'm going to let Usher choose at your own discretion. Hello, Mr. Boat Club. Hello, sir. What's the crack? So we're living in a very politically divided sort of like society. And recently with the unfortunate murder of René Good, we saw there were a lot of people who've retreated into a narrative despite what they could see with their eyes.

what are the psychological sort of motivations for someone to sort of like deny to retreat into a narrative and what are the best ways to try and sort of combat that? Are you talking about people who are becoming entrenched in some, we'll say, far right type of beliefs? Yes indeed. Okay. I actually think this is one of those situations

that we could be using art more because I mentioned earlier about it. It can be really difficult sometimes to engage and if people feel they're being told what to do or told what to think. But when there's art, there is that suspension of disbelief. There is that sense that you're entering into an imaginary world where it is separate from you from your own thoughts. And that can be a sort of safer space to play out conversations,

play out scenarios. And there have been some really interesting examples of how this has been done in different groups as a way of just trying to broaden people's views on things. There was an amazing project, actually, quite a different context, but there's an amazing one that was done in America with, they were trying to support adolescents living in Los Angeles who were from the teen X backgrounds

where they had very high pregnancy rates amongst the adolescents. And they thought, well, we don't want to tell people what to do. But what if we wrote a drama, a TV drama, that was all about the romantic lives of teenagers, but we played out a lot more scenarios through it. So they could play out different choices people would make around sex, around pregnancy.

And they would also help to signpost people, to resources. They would have ways people could engage with the characters through blogs and vlogs and all this. And they actually found it was an incredibly effective tool, actually helping to support young people in being aware of options and being able to think about their own viewpoints differently. And it actually started changing behaviours in terms of things like use of contraceptives amongst adolescents, not because they were being told, you need to change your behaviour, you need to think differently, but because they were just giving them this new, like, broadened way of thinking about options that just made them

realised there were more choices, more ways of thinking open to them. When you were doing the COVID research, did you do anything around people who became very entrenched in conspiracy beliefs? Because I think it's fair to say, in terms of our lived experience, COVID was the moment when, like, you really started to lose friends to beliefs. I mean, a lot of people have got, unfortunately, a family member or a friend, and they just became hugely anti-vax or there was a pipeline that led to quite fascist beliefs and it's very common for people to say

my brother can't come to dinner anymore because he's so entrenched did he look at that and like why did so much that happen at COVID specifically or again am I imagining it? Because people were scared and actually for a lot of people

this wasn't bad motivations people were worried they were hearing things they were legitimately scared about things and that can translate into people doing what they think is going to be best. But it's very hard with the information nowadays to always be aware of what is the information that's factually correct, where's information sources coming from. And I think sometimes you sort of end up with more polarized views because people go into binary camps of like, well, you're right and you're wrong.

This is the right belief or the wrong belief. And that's not a productive way of doing it because that makes it feel like people have chosen aside for the wrong reason as supposed to it often coming from exactly the same place of wanting to protect and support those people around them. And just regarding your original question, something I've started doing recently, when it comes to people I know who are expressing some pretty harmful opinions, I'm very cautious about calling anyone far right anymore, unless they're flat out, I'm a big far right Nazi, then they're getting called far right. But when it's like your aunt or your uncle or your brother, and they're saying some shit, and you disagree with it. what I found useful is I notice you're repeating some far right talking points that's so much more effective than your far right

because then they become more entrenched and can take ownership of the label or identify with it but some of the things you're saying sound to me like far right disinformation I found that really helpful it's a good one to put into practice I'm going to take one last question do you know up there usher

there's someone with the hand beside you there Oh, are we there now? There we're all. You sound like a priest. Guan? Hello, good evening. No, I've long held an interest in the relationship between, sorry, I'm hearing myself twice, the non-conscious mind and the conscious mind.

You're talking there about losing faith in your fellow man. And even if you know that that's just a small minority, it doesn't feel that way. And now I can go about my life knowing a truth, but executing it emotionally can be difficult. Have you ever investigated the relationship between that logical part of you and the part of you that ultimately acts out? I get what is saying there yet.

When I was saying there about, you know, I lost faith in humanity and then you're going, well, the data would suggest otherwise it's going to take a good bit of effort for me to listen to your data and bring that onto a positive mindset because the person who's sending you debt threats is, I'm just going to listen to them more.

It is an unfortunate thing we actually pay a lot more attention to negative than to positive feedback and things. I hate that about myself. What's that about? I really dislike that about being human. Yeah, it's not just you, it's everybody, unfortunately. And it's a really difficult thing to contend with. But actually, it's one of the things

often in psychological therapies people are working out is how to integrate the sort of conscious and unconscious materials. But it's something also that the arts do, and that's something that I think is so special about the arts. they actually organically do when we engage with them. A lot of the processes that we often want to then train ourselves to do in psychological therapies when we're thinking about our mental health. They help us to process and think about unconscious material.

They help to relax us. They help us to be mindful. They help us to understand and process and regulate our emotions. But they do so in something that's not medical. They do through something that's so enjoyable and can be so life-affirming and meaningful. And I think that's what's really just so special about the art. That was the best set of questions I've ever Every one of them was a banger

Professor Daisy Fancourt, thank you so much Her book is our cure What a wonderful night, dog bless Belfast I love an old Belfast gig I hope you enjoyed that I'll catch you next week In the meantime Rub a dog

Wink at a swan, join your fleck to a worm. Dog bless.