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It’s well known that learning to play an instrument can offer benefits beyond just musical ability. Indeed, research shows it’s a great activity for the brain – it can enhance our fine motor skills,language acquisition, speech, and memory – and it can even help to keep our brains younger.

After years of working with musicians and witnessing how they persist in musical training despite the pain caused by performing thousands of repetitive movements, I started wondering: if musical training can reshape the brain in so many ways, can it also change the way musicians feel pain, too? This is the question that my colleagues and I set out to answer in our new study.

Scientists already know that pain activates several reactions in our bodies and brains, changing our attention and thoughts, as well as our way of moving and behaving. If you touch a hot pan, for example, pain makes you pull back your hand before you get seriously burned.

Pain also changes our brain activity. Indeed, pain usually reduces activity in the motor cortex, the area of the brain that controls muscles, which helps stop you from overusing an injured body part.

These reactions help to prevent further harm when you’re injured. In this way, pain is a protective signal that helps us in the short term. But if pain continues for a longer time and your brain keeps sending these “don’t move” signals for too long, things can go wrong.

For example, if you sprain your ankle and stop using it for weeks, it can reduce your mobility and disrupt the brain activity in regions related to pain control. And this can increase your suffering and pain levels in the long term.

Research has also found that persistent pain can shrink what’s known as our brain’s “body map” – this is where our brain sends commands for which muscles to move and when – and this shrinking is linked with worse pain.

But while it’s clear that some people experience more pain when their brain maps shrink, not everyone is affected the same way. Some people can better handle pain, and their brains are less sensitive to it. Scientists still don’t fully understand why this happens.

Musicians and pain

In our study, we wanted to look at whether musical training and all the brain changes it creates could influence how musicians feel and deal with pain. To do this, we deliberately induced hand pain over several days in both musicians and non-musicians to see if there was any difference in how they responded to the pain.

To safely mimic muscle pain, we used a compound called nerve growth factor. It’s a protein that normally keeps nerves healthy, but when injected into hand muscles, it makes them ache for several days, especially if you’re moving your hand. But it’s safe, temporary, and doesn’t cause any damage.

Then we used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to measure brain activity. TMS sends tiny magnetic pulses into the brain. And we used these signals to create a map of how the brain controls the hand, which we did for each person who took part in the study.

We built these hand maps before the pain injection, and then measured them again two days later and eight days later, to see if pain changed how the brain was working.

A striking difference

When we compared the brains of the musicians and the non-musicians, the differences were striking. Even before we induced pain, the musicians showed a more finely tuned hand map in the brain, and the more hours they had spent practising, the more refined this map was found to be.

After pain was induced, the musicians reported experiencing less discomfort overall. And while the hand map in non-musicians’ brains shrank after just two days of pain, the maps in musicians’ brains remained unchanged – amazingly, the more hours they had trained, the less pain they felt.

This was a small study of just 40 people, but the results clearly showed that the musicians’ brains responded differently to pain. Their training seems to have given them a kind of buffer against the usual negative effects, both in how much pain they felt and in how their brain’s motor areas reacted.

Of course, this doesn’t mean music is a cure for chronic pain. But it does show us that long-term training and experience can shape how we perceive pain. This is exciting because it might help us understand why some people are more resilient to pain than others, along with how we can design new treatments for those living with pain.

Our team is now conducting further research on pain to determine if musical training may also protect us from altered attention and cognition during chronic pain. And off the back of this, we hope to be able to design new therapies that “retrain” the brain in people who suffer from persistent pain.

For me, this is the most exciting part: the idea that as a musician, what I learn and practise every day doesn’t just make me better at a skill, but that it can literally rewire my brain in ways that change how I experience the world, even something as fundamental as pain.

This article was commissioned by Videnskab.dk as part of a partnership collaboration with The Conversation. You can read the Danish version of this article, here.

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Almost everyone who has a garden knows what a nuisance slugs can be. They are also one of the most destructive crop pests in the UK. Studies show that yields of many major crops, such as wheat, are severely reduced by their feeding.

But recent research into slug movements may help farmers with their slug prevention strategies

A 2014 report from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board estimated that slugs would cost the industry up to £100 million per year in the UK alone, in the absence of effective control. And contamination makes produce undesirable to consumers – nobody wants to find a slug in their lettuce.

Making a living by growing food is already difficult because of labour shortages and rising costs, climate change and other challenges. The slug problem has been in the spotlight for a long time, but development of affordable and reliable solutions has proven to be difficult.

Good pesticides are available, but several aspects of slug behaviour means they can be hit and miss. For example, most pesticides target only slugs that are active on or very close to the surface. However, a large proportion of the slug population can be found at different depths in the soil. This is because they move up and down the soil depending on the weather, soil characteristics and several other factors.

During harsh weather they can become less active, remaining deeper in the soil or hiding themselves in concealed or hard-to-reach places under stones or in dense vegetation such as tussocky grass. This gives a false impression they have disappeared, but they can re-emerge fast and in large numbers once the weather improves.

Some of the chemical pesticides (such as metaldehyde) that work well on slugs are banned under UK legislation due to concerns about their damaging effect on the environment, in particular on rivers and lakes. Biological products, for example some nematodes, seem to work well but farmers consider them too expensive to be commercially viable. Nematodes are microscopic creatures also known as roundworms and some species can infect and kill molluscs such as slugs. They are a good option for gardeners, however, who normally need to apply a lot less because they have a smaller space to protect.

Tracking slug groups

One possible solution to the problem lies in studies showing that the distribution of slugs over an arable field is uneven. Previous studies of slugs in major crops including wheat and oilseed rape, as well as cover crops and fields left fallow, noticed large numbers of slugs tend to congregate together in patches interspersed with areas where slug numbers are sparse. Indeed our 2020 paper showed this was true in all the arable fields we studied.

Spatial distributions of animals in their natural environment are rarely uniform. You might expect animals to congregate in areas with a higher density of food. But in many cases animals form “patches” even in environments where features like food are evenly spread out. Researchers are unsure why this is.

If we can predict where those patches with the high density of the slugs will occur, farmers could concentrate pesticides and nematodes in those areas, which would be a lot more affordable and better for the environment. A separate 2020 study that two of us (Keith and Natalia) worked on found this could help farmers reduce pesticide use by about 50%.

However, this would only be feasible if the location of patches of high slug density doesn’t change much. Until recently information about slug patch formation and stability was scarce. Our 2022 study, however, reported stable slug patches formed in all the crops that we investigated. And these patches always formed in the same places throughout the growing season.

As part of a previous research project we put radio-tags on slugs to track their movements in the field. That paper found slugs exhibited collective behaviour which means they move differently when they move in a group. The changes are subtle. Their average speed and basic zigzagging of their movement paths doesn’t change much. Although, looking in detail, they make steeper turns when they “zig” and “zag” and individual slugs develop a slight bias in their direction of turn. They also tend to rest more when they’re together.

We used the data from the radio-tags to make a digital model of the slug populations we studied. This allowed us to look into factors that would be difficult or even impossible to investigate in the field.

Whether you like slugs or loathe them, we need to understand them if we want to help farmers grow our food in the future.

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The recent “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London shows how easy it is for the radical right to mobilise a mass protest by repackaging a perennial issue as a moral panic. It did so by fusing together fears of migration and crime with a rising distrust in government.

There were calls for “remigration”, mass deportation and even the dissolution of parliament as well as violent clashes with police. There was also a level of confusion among some of the thousands of people who attended as to whether they were protesting for freedom of speech or lending their voices to a racist cause.

Although the scale of the demonstration was surprising to many, far-right activism has a long history in the UK.

In the contemporary era, it dates back to the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. But it was the increase in immigration in the 1950s – the Windrush era – that saw a new generation of far-right activists emerge.

In the years that followed, Britain’s far right switched its focus from antisemitism to opposing migration from the country’s colonies and former colonies. This was captured best, perhaps, in the infamous “rivers of blood” speech delivered by Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1968.

By the 1980s, the British National Party (BNP) emerged, growing to make considerable electoral headway in the 1990s and 2000s before its base ultimately crumbled due to its toxic image.

In its wake, the far-right morphed into street protest movements like the English Defence League (EDL) and the Football Lads Alliance. Extremist “direct action” groups like Combat-18, a neo-Nazi group that grew out of the BNP in the 1990s, would also be replaced by National Action and the Patriotic Alternative.

These violent fringe groups were banned but others have replaced them and grown in influence. They include the cultural nationalist movement coalescing around former EDL leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known popularly as “Tommy Robinson” – the man behind the Unite the Kingdom rally in London.

Extremism expert Chris Allen has noted how the re-emergence of radical right protest activism had its medium-term origins in the 2016 Brexit referendum. This relates to how some pro-Leave politicians promoted issues that had “a clear resonance with the traditional and contemporary radical-right” – such as border security and sovereignty.

Rightwing extremist activity ranged from the murder of Jo Cox MP a week prior to the Brexit referendum to street agitation whipped up by other fringe far-right groups, like Britain First. According to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, these groups attempted to “dominate the narrative on key political and social issues, including immigration, Brexit and Islam”.

The anxiety around immigration had already found its way into mainstream political discourse on the doorsteps during the 2015 general election. Narrative tropes about “taking back control of our borders” became part of everyday political rhetoric. In the aftermath of the election of that year, prime minister David Cameron made cracking down on immigration a priority.

As antagonism towards the EU began to recede in the years after the Brexit referendum, the fear of irregular immigration came much more to the fore. So too did a rise in racism and race-related hate crimes.

Many of these hate crimes happened in the wake of Islamist terror attacks in 2017, though the arrival of the COVID pandemic superseded fears surrounding terrorism. And as the UK re-emerged from COVID lockdowns, little consideration was given by the British state to the growing security challenge posed by irregular immigration.

It was in this context that a tipping point was reached. In July 2024, after the murder of three children in Southport, radical-right social media influencers and other bad actors stirred up riots across 27 towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland. Thousands of people were radicalised by the language of a moral panic, played out in the new domain of social media.

Illegal immigration as a form of moral panic

Sociologist Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” in his important 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. He described how a “condition, episode, person or group…emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” and is then presented in a stereotyped fashion by the media.

Perhaps the most famous of these moral panics came in the immediate aftermath of a huge 1964 brawl in the seaside town of Clacton between mods and rockers, two rival youth counter-cultures. Cohen’s argument was that the reaction ended up being wildly disproportionate to the severity of the original incident. Local authorities in towns and cities as far away as Belfast were forced to issue statements reassuring the public they did not have a “hooligan problem”.

In 2002, Cohen demonstrated how the same phenomenon was being playing out in relation to immigration. He remarked that the once morally untouchable category of political refugee was becoming “deconstructed”. In Cohen’s opinion, British governments were starting from a broad consensus that “we must keep out as many refugee-type foreigners as possible” and that “these people always lie to get themselves accepted”. To be accepted, they must be “eligible” and “credible”.

It was in the ensuing decades, one could argue, that moral panics centring on the triumvirate of migration, crime and security began to emerge in Germany, Italy and the UK.

The British tabloid media led this new moral panic, greatly aided by two intersecting and overlapping empirical realities: the rising tide of concern over increasing immigration in the UK – and Europe more broadly – and the repackaging of ethnically competitive politics as a new form of everyday reality. In the far-right worldview, politics is about the zero-sum nature of power relations between different ethnic groups.

Old tropes, new moral panics

What we are now seeing is a new politicisation of a long-running issue. Humanitarian responses to asylum seekers have been replaced with the trappings of a moral panic about irregular immigration.

Moral panics do not, as Cohen reminds us, necessarily reflect the reality of the situation, only the anxiety of those who spread it. That does not mean there are no serious concerns underpinning these issues, only that they have been magnified and, importantly, amplified by the far-right’s sophisticated embrace of new technology. This situation is, at its core, a crisis in confidence between a section of the population and the government.

As we move towards towards the next UK election, further disillusionment is more likely to manifest itself in increased electoral support for parties like Reform UK and Advance UK, particularly if they continue to play to hardline supporters. In a recent YouGov survey, 44% of those surveyed said Reform’s immigration policy, which includes mass deportation was about right or not tough enough.

While radical-right demonstrations promoting the totemic policy of “remigration” remain largely peaceful, there is a danger that the mainstreaming of such extremist rhetoric will only serve as a driver towards radicalisation for a new generation of far-right extremists.

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