Music: A Personal Love, and a Clinically Recognized Healer

         I cannot remember a time in my life when I did not love music. I’ve been told that I was singing before I could talk. When I was a kid, my parents played endless cassettes and CDs in the car, showed me musicals from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and gave me a love of music that would last a lifetime. With a nurse for a mother and my love of music, I have considered professions in both music and health care - seemingly unrelated things - until I discovered music therapy. Music is entertaining, calming, and fascinating to many of us, but music is also a very established and acclaimed helper and healer for those suffering from addictions, brain damage, and many other afflictions that affect normal brain function. Music therapy is difficult to describe, but the American Music Therapy Association defines music therapy as "the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program" (musictherapy.org). In other words, therapists use music to improve the brain functions and health of someone suffering with a mental or physical illness.

I was originally introduced to the practice of music therapy and inspired by the recovery story of congresswoman Gabrielle “Gabby” Giffords. In January of 2011, Giffords was shot just above her left eye, and received surgery in order to stay alive. Surgeons were forced to remove the parts of her brain that were damaged by the bullet. Fortunately, Gabby survived, but her brain function was poorly affected. Giffords suffered from aphasia, the inability to speak, due to the damage to language pathways in her brain (abcnews.go.com); language and speech were controlled by the part of her brain that was removed. Movement in her right side was also difficult, as the right side of the body is controlled by the left side of the brain. In just over two years, Giffords’ condition has improved miraculously due to music therapy. She has regained the ability to talk, comprehend, and walk, with much more ease than her doctors predicted in such a short amount of time. Giffords’ journey through music therapy is told in an article from ABC news: her therapist, Meagan Morrow, would sing songs to her, and “’it took a few days, but she started to give me a thumbs-up,’ said Morrow. ‘Then she would start opening her mouth giving a little hum. Then it would turn into words over the weeks.’ And through ditties like ‘Happy Birthday,’ ‘American Pie’ and her favorite, ‘Brown Eyed Girl,’ Giffords slowly paved the back road to language” (abcnews.go.com). Giffords’ story of recovery is truly inspirational, and inspired me to learn more about music therapy and its healing capabilities. But how does music really work to heal specific parts of the brain?

The use of music therapy is designed by how deeply music affects the human brain. Music is a human creation shared in every culture in the world. According to leading music psychologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, in his book Musicophilia, “music is part of being human, and there is no human culture in which it is not highly developed and esteemed.” It is true that most of us recognize and appreciate music, but it also greatly affects our brains. Our brains react to sights, tastes, and sounds. Psychologists have studied the human brain to see how it reacts to music, and the emotional and physiological results are amazing; “nothing activates the brain so extensively as music,” said Sacks. Music influences no specific part of the brain, in fact, looking at an MRI scan of someone thinking about or listening to music, brain activity can be seen in all parts of the brain. Other aspects of human life (language, speech, writing, sight, movement, etc.) are focused in specific parts of the brain. Music therapy helps people who have lost the ability to use these specific parts of their brains through injury or illness, by reworking those certain parts through music.

I’ve been learned about all the technical elements of music by being in choirs, musicals, and even playing instruments. However, the heart of music is therapeutic: not only is music a healer in times of sadness and loneliness, but the way it affects our brains has the potential of making miracles happen to those who thought using certain parts of their brain again would be impossible. In the coming weeks, I hope to further define music therapy, tell more music therapy success stories, show you experts in the field, what music therapy “sessions” are like, and more music history and its effect on the human brain.