People are once again excited about how music can help us heal. Recent studies show that music can improve our feelings and help our brains work better. Because of this, doctors are now using music therapy more alongside regular mental health treatments to help people feel better.
As reported by The Conversation, such a musical intervention has already been shown to help people with cancer and chronic pain and depression. The debilitating consequences of the stress such as elevated blood pressure and the muscle tension which can also be alleviated through the power of music.
Music’s Therapeutic Effects
First, I have been a music lover myself as well as a scientist, so I think that music occupies quite a unique position amongst all the other arts in the way it interferes with people. Of special importance is its ability to call autobiographical memories – which are usually rather subjective and emotionally charged recollections of the past experiences.
One can remember the time when one or another melody evokes specific memories and with such memories, various feelings and moods in one’s soul.
But improvement in recall can also happen in dementia patients, and the change that the music therapy brings can be a gate opener to flood of memories – from childhood reconstructing the smells and tastes of the mother’s kitchen, lying on a sofa in a summer evening with the family or the vibrations and mood of the festival.
Music and Memory
A fine example is a recent video that is usually attributed to the Mexican charity called Asociación Música para Despertar, which supposed to be performed by Spanish Cuban Ballerina Martha González Saldaña though some people are not so sure that she is the performer of this dance.
In this video, the Tchaikovsky’s music of Swan Lake seems to awaken prior experiences and maybe an implicit motor plan since the lady, who was once a prima ballerina, is prompted to rehearse some of the dancing motions that performed in her youth on the camera. In using these recent neuroscience findings, located in our laboratory at Northumbria University, the goal will be identifying how this relationship between music, the brain and mental health is even more complex.
Real-Life Examples and Future Research
Technology like the high-density EEG is now allows us to record how the different areas in the brain communicate with each other as a person listens to music, a song or a symphony, in real time. These regions are activated by the varying aspects of music including its emotions, melodies, lyrics, and rhythms.