The Untapped Potential of Music

By Tyler Johnson

  
Music is a powerful tool for a stronger brain that works at any point in a person's life.


Music interacts with the human brain in a unique way. Across nearly all cultures, music is used as a way to express emotion. The "feelings" part of the brain is almost always activated when music is heard. This is even observed in infants.

At the same time, as any musician will tell you, music is extremely complex. There are many scales, keys, and chords. There is a vast array of rhythmic complexity, from the simple straight time, to the counter-intuitive poly-rhythm. This requires the "logic" portions of the brain.

Having been an avid musician my whole life, I have seen the benefits of music therapy first-hand, both as a preventative and a responsive method. On February 16, 2012 I was a pedestrian that was struck by a car going 30-35 miles per hour on impact. This resulted in a traumatic brain injury, with a fairly grim prognosis. While there were many factors that played a role in my recovery–too many to list here–I can confidently say that my involvement in music played an enormous role in my recovery. I think that we can use music as an effective tool, both for treating ailments, and creating stronger brains.

 

When Was Music First Used as a Therapy?

Following World War Two, music was found to be an effective therapeutic tool for returned soldiers. The United States army directly funded and endorsed research on ways that music could be used to treat the psychiatric maladies that came with war.

Music therapy soon grew as a clinical profession and developed beyond it's role as solely a treatment for veterans. Creative music therapy emerged from a collaboration of Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins in 1958. This approach was developed to assist children that had physical, psychological, and developmental disabilities. Both private and public practices used these techniques worldwide, as training programs were established in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. 

These practices found that music therapy was an extremely promising tool for all sorts of psychological issues, and even was found to be an effective coping tool for non-psychological injuries. Music therapy was a merger of values from the Romantic and Enlightenment eras. Individualism was combined with ongoing human progress.

 

What Does Music Therapy Do?

The strength of music therapy appears to come from the way music helps the brain find novel solutions to the problems it is dealing with. The merger of the creativity of music and it's logical functionality help people overcome difficulties that would otherwise leave them helpless.


Initially, music therapy was simply thought of as one of many forms of consolation by the familiar. It was supposed that, just as a baseball player could be encouraged by the opportunity to play catch with a baseball, or a painter could be revitalized when given a brush, musicians could be strengthened by exposure to familiar music. While the power of familiarity is a true concept, it turns out that the effectiveness of music therapy goes beyond simple familiarity. The effectiveness of music as a therapeutic tool can be traced to the way music activates the brain.



Although much of how the human brain operates is still a mystery to be solved, it is clear that there are distinct neural pathways that are activated during creative and emotional thought processes, and other pathways that are activated during rational and logical thought processes. Remarkably, music is one of the few things that simultaneously activates creative and logical neural pathways.
 
Despite the fact that music therapy is largely thought of as a way to fix a problem that has already occurred, the universal effectiveness of music therapy shows that all people would be greatly benefited in they learned at least the basics of music. The effectiveness of music therapy has clearly shown that music has an abundance of benefits for the human mind, that will occur at any age, or level of health.

How Can This Apply to Me?

Reading a get-well card
About 7 weeks after the accident

Before I was involved in the accident in 2012, I was involved in an extensive variety of musical activities. I played the drums for half-a-dozen musical theater shows, played guitar in a band with some friends, wrote my own music on the keyboard, and sung in multiple choirs. All this music involvement played a significant role in my brain's recovery–particularly the recovery prior to regaining consciousness.
 
 A few months after waking up in the hospital, I was introduced to a therapist who played the guitar. This music therapy was an instrumental (pun intended) factor in my adjustment to my new life. Several times a week, I played my keyboard while the therapist played along on his guitar. After a few weeks, a new friend that I had made in Toronto was willing to write some lyrics to a song we had written, and we played while he sung the song for a small group before I left the hospital.

I don't think everyone has to love music, but I do think that teaching everyone the basics of music, in a similar way to how everyone is taught the basics of writing or mathematics, would have a profound impact on the effectiveness of the education system. From my observation of public education, when finances get tight, art and music are almost always the first thing to lose funding. I think that this omission has a tremendous impact on the students affected. 

Prompted by my own personal experience, I have found countless studies that have observed the effectiveness of music as a form of therapy. Many case studies have found that musicians’ brains are uniquely organized. This has led me to the conclusion some form of music should be taught to every student. Not every person wants to be a mathematician, yet every student is taught basic mathematics. Not every person wants to be a journalist, yet every student is taught basic language arts. Not every person wants to be a professional musician, but that shouldn’t stop us from teaching the basics of music to every student. Music should become an essential part of a well-rounded education provided to everyone.


Image Credits: 
Photo 1: freeimages.com, Designated as Free to Use
Photo 2: Sam Moghadam on Unsplash 
Photo 3: Kimberly Richards on Unsplash
Photo 4: Taken by Cherie Johnson