According to the Los Angeles Times article The Hope Of Music’s Healing Powers by Melissa Healy, Neuroscientists are looking to uncover the scientific basis for music’s healing powers. They are trying to understand how music can help rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for injured or underperforming brain regions. By doing so, they hope to better identify which patients might respond best to music and what musical techniques might best help them to regain lost or compromised function.
“Music might provide an alternative entry point to the brain, because it can unlock so many different doors into an injured or ill brain”, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a Harvard University neurologist. Pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm and emotion — all components of music — engage different regions of the brain. And many of those same regions are also important in speech, movement and social interaction. If a disease or trauma has disabled a brain region needed for such functions, music can sometimes get in through a back door and coax them out by another route, Schlaug says.
Therapeutic Applications Of Music
- “Melodic intonation therapy” bypasses the stroke damage done to speech centers patients’ left brain hemisphere by recruiting areas of their healthy right hemispheres that were capable of — though not generally used for — word acquisition and speech
- By engaging the network of regions that perceive and anticipate rhythm, music with a steady, predictable beat can be used to cue the brain’s motor regions to initiate walking in patients struggling with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative brain condition that affects the initiation and smooth completion of movement.
- Case studies have long observed that when stutterers sing, their halting speech patterns disappear. Music’s predictable beats may help them initiate speech and continue fluently.
- Intensive music instruction has been found to improve focused hearing skills, and with them, some skills related to reading.
- Music can temporarily unlock memories for Alzheimer’s patients who have lost their grip on nearly every other detail of their daily life and relationships.
- The Mozart Effect increases weight gain of premature infants by slowing their rate of energy expenditure, helping to accelerate their growth.
