Music as Medicine
I’m pretty sure that every musician knows, on some level, that music is one of the most healing things we can have in our lives. I can’t count the number of times, going back more than six decades, that I found a safe refuge for myself by picking up one of my instruments and making some noise. To this day I try to never be more than a few feet from a guitar.
But I don’t think a lot of us realize how extensively the healing power of music has been studied by people in white lab coats who stick electrodes on your head and hook you to machines that beep and whir. Amy Biancolli, writing in the psychiatric Web magazine “Mad in America,” says that this is exactly the case.
In fact, the idea is far from a new one. Biancoli points out that the Greek philosopher Plato said, “Music is the medicine of the soul.” Bringing things closer to our time, she also quotes David Byrne of the Talking Heads; “Music can get us through difficult patches in our lives by changing not only how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about everything outside ourselves. It’s powerful stuff.”
Biancoli points out that participating in music constitutes the ”…gray-matter equivalent of a full-body workout.” She quotes the book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, by Oliver Sacks; “Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer or a mathematician – but they would recognize the brain of a professional musician without moment’s hesitation.”
You can read Biancoli’s entire article here.
Since the very beginning of Lost Voices, we’ve seen constant evidence that our process triggers profound healing in the kids. We’ve been blessed to be present when their faces transform with wonder and excitement as we help them guide their deepest feelings into this musical form that can be so strange to them.
Reading this article, it was nice to see that the medical world sees it too.
