New Potential Healing Powers of Music
Rene tipped me off to this book that was published last year. Here’s a summary from NPR:
Science all but confirms that humans are hard-wired to respond to music. Studies also suggest that someday music may even help patients heal from Parkinson’s disease or a stroke.
In The Power of Music, Elena Mannes explores how music affects different groups of people and how it could play a role in health care.
Mannes tracked the human relationship with music over the course of a life span. She tells NPR’s Neal Conan that studies show that infants prefer “consonant intervals, the smooth-sounding ones that sound nice to our Western ears in a chord, as opposed to a jarring combination of notes.”
In fact, Mannes says the cries of babies just a few weeks old were found to contain some of the basic intervals common to Western music.
She also says scientists have found that music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function. That’s why she sees so much potential in music’s power to change the brain and affect the way it works.
Read more here. Click on the cover image of the book to be taken to Amazon.
As a person with a Parkinsonian movement disorder, I happily report that music was the only thing that let me use the predictive aspects of music to gain some fluidity of movement and of some measure of relief (HA! music joke). Now I use cannabis to manage the movements but music therapy plays a huge role in my day-to-day life.
Check out this clip. Music revived/sparked a lifeless old man in a nursing home.
http://www.wimp.com/reactionmusic/