Music, Consciousness and the Power of Connection
6/6/20261 hr 2 min
How should we understand the relationship among sound, consciousness and a healthy mind? It has to do with the power of connection, not just to other people but the world around us. In this episode of the Hacking Longevity series, Kara talks to Dr. AZA Allsop, an artist and psychiatrist who runs a lab at Yale that studies how music and sound can affect mental well-being and the power of connections we feel with other people. Later, she talks to science journalist Michael Pollan, author of A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. He goes deep on what makes the brain work, and he has some very interesting thoughts on whether machines could become sentient. Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMichael Pollan· Guest0:00
[upbeat music] It's on.
Kara Swisher· Host0:01
[upbeat music] Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. One of the simplest things someone can do to live longer and be healthier is to have connections with other people. This is clear, not just with chatbots, but actual human beings. This is something we talked about a lot in the series I did for CNN, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, and it was the single most important thing people can do, which is interactions with people, with actual people, and the deleterious effects of things like chatbots, which are frictionless and sycophantic. They are not good for your health, no matter what people tell you. It is not the way to solve loneliness in any way, unless done in conjunction with being with more human beings, which are the most important thing for everyone's health. The idea of connection has come up again and again in my reporting, as I said, about longevity and aging, and it's the focus of this episode of Hacking Longevity series here on the podcast. Coming up later, we'll talk to one of my favorite science writers, Michael Pollan, about the mysteries of consciousness. He's been writing about this for a long time. We'll discuss what he learned about finding connection not just to others, but to the much wider world when he set out to understand what it even means to be conscious. It's actually a big topic. But we'll start with the connective power of music and its role in longevity. Music and sound,