BRAIN-MUSIC SUPER HEALING

"Music is the best"- Frank Zappa

The role of music in promoting advanced brain function is very much underestimated today. Only recently are scientists and the general public beginning to get a glimpse of what is possible, as outlined by this recent press article.- N.S.

Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, by Robert Lee Hotz

MUSIC SHOWS POTENTIAL
TO HEAL DAMAGED BRAINS

Los Angeles- The music that makes the foot tap, the fingers snap and the pulse quicken stirs the brain at its most fundamental levels, suggesting that scientists one day may be able to retune damaged minds by exploiting rhythm, harmony and melody, according to new research.

Exploring the neurobiology of music, researchers discovered direct evidence that music stimulates specific regions of the brain responsible for memory, motor control, timing and language. for the first time, researchers also have located specific areas of mental activity linked to emotional responses to music.

In the long run, music could become a way of emotional disorders or neurological diseases, the researchers said.

"That's our goal," said neuroscientist Anne Blood, who conducted the study at McGill University in Montreal. "You can activate different parts of the brain, depending on what music you listen to. So music can stimulate parts of the brain that are underactive in these disorders. Over time, we could retrain the brain in these disorders."

The newest findings, presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Los Angeles last week, underscore how music- as an almost universal language of mood, emotion and desire- orchestrates a wide variety of neural systems to cast its evocative spell.

"Undeniably, there is a biology of music," said Harvard University Medical School neurobiologist Mark Jude Tramo. "There is no question that there is specialization within the human brain for the processing of music. Music is biologically part of human life, just a music is aesthetically part of human life."

In a series of new studies, researchers found that the brain:

1) Responds directly to harmony. Using a medical PET scanner to monitor changes in neural activity, neuroscientists at McGill discovered that different parts of the brain involved in emotion are activated depending on whether the music is pleasant or dissonant. "Everyone knows music can produce powerful emotional effects. this suggests different emotions are represented in different parts of the brain," said Blood.

2) Interprets written musical notes and scores in a special area on the brain's right side. that region corresponds to an area on the opposite side of the brain known to handle written words and letters.

3) Grows in response to musical training the way a muscle responds to exercise. In a study of classically trained musicians, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston discovered that male musicians have larger brains than men who have not had extensive musical training. (!) The area of the brain called the cerebellum, which contains some 70 percent of the brain's neurons, was about 5 percent larger in expert male musicians. Researchers, however, found no such size increase in the brains of female musicians, but said they may not have studied enough women to be certain.

"Musicians are not just born with these differences," said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, the neurologist who conducted the research. The cerebellum grows as a result of the constant practice of the virtuosos motor skills needed to play an instrument, he said.

Overall, music seems to involve the brain at most every level. Even allowing for cultural differences in musical tastes, the researchers found evidence of music's remarkable power to affect neural activity no matter where they looked in the brain, from primitive regions found in all animals to more recently evolved areas thought to be strictly human [the frontal lobes].

"We find that harmony, melody and rhythm had distinct patterns of brain activity. They involved both the right and left sides of the brain," said Lawrence Parsons at the University of Texas, San Antonio.

The scientist said the new research could help the practice of neurology, including cognitive rehabilitation. As a therapeutic tool, for example, some doctors today already use music to help rehabilitate stroke patients.

Surprisingly, some stroke patients who have lost their ability to speak retain their ability to sing, and that opens an avenue for therapists to retrain their brain's speech centers.

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