Music as Medicine
Posted: Fri Oct 18, 2013 5:39 pm
Ah—music as medicine... while I’d known through experience about the power of music to change moods, it wasn’t till I was lying on the acupuncturist’s table and he was playing some sitar music that it really ‘came home’ as they say, to me. Suddenly as the music quickened my body seemed to wake up (I was still pretty stunned, truly ‘disheartened’, by diagnosis at that point)- ah—he said ‘music as medicine’.
Obviously there are countless different sorts of music and people respond in many different ways. The benefits of music therapy are well documented, and I particularly like the story of the little autistic boy who discovered he could tie his shoelaces if someone sang to him while he did it. Neuroscience is now making this new area plainer (though it has been known and used by ancient civilizations for thousands of years)- musical rhythms can re-pattern the brain, the nervous and the endocrine glands. Some would say that this corresponds to a re-energizing of the chakras. But you don’t have to make that link or go down that particular avenue to appreciate what music can do. It taps into less accessible parts of ourselves- the composer Stravinsky talked of music’s profound meaning ‘its essential aim is to promote a communion, a union of man with his fellow man and with the Supreme Being’.
Music, the mind and the body are intimately connected: listening or performing music causes increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortexes of the brain. Charles Limb, a neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine,, studied the brains of jazz musicians and saw ‘the perfect storm of neural activation patterns by which people were uninhibited in themselves, expressed through music’. His research is now being used to explore helping people who have had traumatic experiences—cancer diagnosis and its consequences are certainly in this group.
As I found that day on the acupuncturist’s table, it’s a physical experience, you ‘feel with your body’—that’s why people go to live concerts even in this era of every sort of downloadable device for you to stream music from all over the place. We love to see the musicians move, and we may move with them, either in our minds or literally with our bodies. The neurologist Oliver Sachs said that ‘the therapeutic power of music is very remarkable’. I just want to quote one more sentence here from the psychoanalytically informed art teacher Anton Ehrenzweig: ‘music is a symbolic language of the unconscious mind whose symbolism we may never be able to fathom’.
I find Indian music to be extremely helpful and am putting a link here to the flute player Hari Prasad Charudasia — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwBxqWEG7cY
also dancing to music is wonderful too and here’s a link to David Bowie’s Lets Dance-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxe-iylVQSY
—rock around your living room on your own if need be—it’s powerfully energizing and tells your body to wake up and flow.
And the day after the announcement that Bowie has died,(Jan 2016) here's another link with him and Jagger rocking around the streets-it's wonderful- let's join them--the dancing goes on...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G4jnaznUoQ
You can go onto YouTube and download any sort of music you fancy, and also when two or three are gathered together to make live music, drumming or paper comb or whatever, that’s where you can feel the power of energy to heal the body—and as Stravinsky suggested, link us with something higher than ourselves. I’m hoping people will add to this section so that others can share what they’ve found helpful--
November 2016: here is another link for relaxing music, helps inflammation too...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54PVuvL1H38
science catches up!!! http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuro ... entalfloss causes 65% in overall anxiety - can't be bad for we cansurvivors!!