How music acts as medicine for the soul

Henry, an elderly man living in a US nursing home and largely unresponsive to the outside world, receives a pair of headphones to listen to his favourite artist, Cab Calloway .

The neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks, who's involved with the project, describes Henry as "almost unalive", but as soon as the music starts there's a complete transformation. He starts moving and singing along, becoming animated. "The philosopher Kant once called music the 'quickening art' and Henry has been 'quickened' – he's been brought to life," Sacks says in the video.

But the effect doesn't stop once the music is turned off. Though he's normally unable to answer the simplest questions, Henry now starts speaking about his love for music, how it makes him feel, and singing I'll Be Home for Christmas, remembering every single word of the lyrics. It's almost magical.

There's a charity here in the UK that knows all about how music can transform the lives of those who suffer from autism, dementia, and a whole range of mental health problems. The work of the founders of Nordoff Robbins – Paul Nordoff, an American composer and pianist, and Clive Robbins, a special education teacher – began more than half a century ago, as they used music therapy to help isolated and disabled children. In 1980 the charity bearing their names was established in the UK.

Nordoff and Robbins discovered music's power to open up the senses and "reawaken" people with dementia doesn't only come from the familiarity of favourite songs. In a mesmerising video, one of the charity's music therapists starts communicating with a woman whose dementia has lead to the loss of speech, by doing a sort of singing and guitar-playing call-and-response. In another one, Jack, an autistic boy with severe learning difficulties, lights up and starts to communicate not only by singing, but with his whole body.

But music can also have a calming and healing effect on those with mental illnesses. Nordoff Robbins works with Lance, who lives with schizophrenia and says music therapy makes him "feel more human again" and is "a haven from intrusive bad thoughts and depression".

The charity provides music therapy at his local centre for people with mental health problems, where he plays guitar, often supporting other people's songs. "I feel that music is holding my hand through all this," he explains.

The therapists who go into schools, hospitals, care homes and prisons, help people communicate where words have failed, raising their confidence, self-esteem and sense of joy through music, one of the most powerful remedies that can't be bought from pharmaceutical companies. Music is medicine for the soul.

Info from The Guardian

Oliver Sacks discusses changing the brain through meditation and art-therapy

 

Transcript

Question: Is it possible to change the brain with medication?

Oliver Sacks: From what I read, I think that’s all sorts of changes, at least temporary changes may be possible. One can certainly get states of calm and alter the brain rhythms and have states of trance.

Whether they’re permanent changes, I don’t know. But any learning experience changes the brain and nothing more, incidentally, than musical learning, so that the brains of musicians are visibly different and even grossly different from the brains of other people.

 

Question: Are you a proponent of art therapy?

O.S.: Yeah. Very, very strongly.

Most of my own work is with elderly people with neurological problems of one sort or another. And I can see how their lives could be transformed by music and sometimes by poetry and art.

But, say, people with Parkinson’s may be unable to move or speak unless there’s music. People who have Alzheimer’s are confused and lost and agitated or disoriented, can be focused wonderfully sometimes by familiar music, which will give them a link to the past and to their own memories which they can’t access in any other way.

And sometimes people who are aphasic and have lost the power of language can get it back through music.

I don’t have direct experience with young people, but from everything I read, I think that music and other forms of art need to be in a central part of education. This is an essential part of being human.

And although I wouldn’t locate everything in the right hemisphere, we  are not calculating machines. We need the arts as much as we need everything else.

 

Question: Is it possible to enhance your mental abilities by listening to Mozart?

O.S.: Well, this so called "Mozart effect" was described, actually, in a very modest way about 15 years ago and then got taken up by the media and hyped and exaggerated in a way which was rather embarrassing to the original describers.

I think there’s very little to suggest that, although Mozart as background will make any difference, on the other hand, real engagement with music, and especially performing music, or listening attentively, can make a great deal of difference.

And especially early in life.  You’d see this in people, say, who do Suzuki training. And one a year of Suzuki training can not only enhance one's musicality and alter the brain quite visibly, but the effect seems to leak over to some extent into forms of visual thinking and logical thinking, pattern recognition, and so forth.

So, a little musical background is not enough, but real musical engagement, I think, can be very important.

 

Question: Are we living in an over-medicated world? 

O.S.:  [Sigmund] Freud made a point, say, of distinguishing neurotic misery and depression from what he called common unhappiness. If the common unhappiness is what we all feel when we grieve, when we lose people, when things go wrong. 

Prozac has been and can be a life saver for people who are pathologically depressed. Depression is the main cause of suicide, and anti-depressants of all sorts have been very crucial. There are many different sorts, and so Prozac belongs to a particular sort.

But there’s all the difference in the world, having a medication for a pathological state and something which you want to enhance normal living. This becomes a huge issue, whether it’s steroids with athletes or whatever.

If Prozac can produce a bland, nonchalant state, the question is whether such a state is a good one or whether it’s morally responsible. I think one needs to have all one’s emotional sympathies and sensitivities and vulnerabilities out there. 

It sometimes seems as if childhood itself is being, it becomes the diagnosis, becomes a disease. Hundreds of thousands of children, I think, are probably improperly diagnosed as hyper-active or as having attention disorder of one sort or another, and are put on the amphetamines or Ritalin.

And I think there do exist genuine forms of attention hyper-activity disorder which, which may need medication. But I think, these are pretty rare. And I suspect that 9 out of 10 kids who were diagnosed as having this do not have any such syndrome, but are reacting to situations at school or it’s a normal stage of development.

Kids are impulsive. This is the nature of youth. It’s one of the wonders of youth. It’s one of the things one needs to keep all through life.

I think there are real dangers of over medicating children and of us all over medicating ourselves. And it may not stop with over medicating. Because sooner or later, we’d be able to have our genes altered or to have computer chips put in our brain. And the whole business of “an enhanced existence” as opposed to a natural one, is going to come up.

 

 

Alive Inside

Alzheimer’s and dementia are a reality for an increasing and often unseen population. Though well intentioned, many nursing homes are not equipped to fully meet the needs of these residents. We are left with several questions without any real or comforting answers: How do I want to age? What can we do for our loved ones? Can we do better?

Alive Inside investigates these questions and the power music has to awaken deeply locked memories. The film follows Dan Cohen, a social worker, who decides on a whim to bring iPods to a nursing home. To his and the staff’s surprise many residents suffering from memory loss seem to “awaken” when they are able to listen to music from their past. With great excitement, Dan turns to renowned neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, and we follow them both as we investigate the mysterious way music functions inside our brains and our lives.

Besides telling a moving story, it is our hope that this film will encourage widespread adoption of personalized music programs in nursing homes and outpatient therapy in homes. We hope that our film will inspire and educate the millions of people burdened by diseases that affect memory, and create a grassroots demand for this kind of low cost treatment, which could help not only patients but also caregivers across the globe. Like many films that concentrate on a simple story but echo into larger stories, we feel this film raises questions about how we as a society care for the elderly and afflicted.

Alive Inside focuses on one man’s journey, but it raises many deep questions about what it means to still be Alive Inside. It questions when we stop being human, and what it takes to re-start a life that has faded away. It asks questions about how we see our elderly, and how we are going to treat an epidemic of these degenerative diseases.

Info from Alive Inside

Nursing home patient reacts to music

In this amazing video an unresponsive nursing home patient reacts to hearing music that he loved from his era. Previously hunched over, his eyes widen, his whole being "quickens". He recalls who he is and how his favorite songs were sung.

The nursing home music program hopes to transform the lives of residents — especially those experiencing dementia — by giving them their favorite music. 

The clip below is part of a documentary called Alive Inside, which follows social worker Dan Cohen as he creates personalized playlists for people in elder care facilities, hoping to reconnect them with the music they love, reports NPR News.

Cohen says the YouTube video of Henry is a great example of the link between music and memory. Cohen says his goal is "to make access to personalized music the standard of care at nursing facilities."

Alive Inside screens April 18, 20 and 21 at the Rubin Museum in New York City.

Text adapted from GoodNewsNetwork

The music never stopped, o filme

Cerca de um ano e meio após ter descoberto "The music never stopped" - sobre o qual fiz um post aqui - finalmente tive a oportunidade de ver o filme. Aproveito para fazer uma breve descrição em português, já que no outro post escrevi em inglês.

Baseado num caso real estudado por Dr. Oliver Sacks (retratado no seu livro "The last Hippie"), o filme retrata a história de Gabriel Sawyer, um músico que perde a capacidade de guardar novas memórias devido a um tumor cerebral. 

O pai de Gabriel esforça-se por lutar contra o tumor cerebral do filho, o que o leva a procurar uma musicoterapeuta com o objectivo de utilizar a música como elemento conector entre o filho e a realidade. A profissional de musicoterapia descobre que a música rock que Gabriel escutava na sua juventude o ajuda a  recuperar algumas das capacidades cognitivas que os médicos consideraram irreversivelmente perdidas.

Apesar da distância física e emocional entre pai e filho nos últimos 20 anos, a dedicação do pai permite fortalecer a relação outrora esquecida, renunciando à suas próprias crenças para abraçar as peculiaridades e divergências do filho.

Saliento o ênfase que o filme deposita na musicoterapia, abordando especificamente a importância da música numa situação neurológica delicada. No caso do Gabriel (o qual recordo que apresenta uma base verídica), a música permitiu a estimulação de circuitos cerebrais, a recuperação de memórias e a reaprendizagem de funções cognitivas que, de outro modo, teriam sido negligenciadas, esquecidas, abandonadas.  Imperdível.