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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.