Happy holidays! This time of year has always been my favorite, and I hope you’re enjoying it, too. The comfort of being nestled in a blanket, drinking hot chocolate, and being with family brings back fond memories of previous years. Of course, in Texas, winter days can reach as high as 70 degrees and sunny, so I definitely cherish the days when it actually feels like winter. Speaking of relaxing with a blanket, I usually do this with a book in my hands or, more often these days, reading from my laptop. Today, I came across an interesting article on NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/22/790553867/how-music-therapy-could-help-people-with-dementia In this short interview with Nancy Gustafson, Gustafson reveals the inspiring way her mother regained some verbal communications and memories. Her mother went from answering yes or no to questions and not recognizing Gustafson to communicating with all of her children and recognizing a place she loves. This drastic improvement was due to a simple solution: music therapy. Gustafson first realized the effects of music therapy after singing Christmas carols to her mother. Even after a short 15 minutes of singing, Gustafson noted that her mother made remarks that she would have said “30 years ago, 40 years before”, when her mother didn’t have Alzheimer’s. Every time I read about the power of music, it astonishes me how much it truly helps patients suffering from memory loss to regain some of the life they had before. I hope this story can motivate more caregivers and patients to refuse to believe that nothing can be done after memory is lost because even if the memory and personality of a patient seems lost, there is still hope that they can be unleashed again through music. Wow, it's crazy how fast the year has flown by. Thank you for supporting my blog this year, and I can't wait for what the new year holds!
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Welcome back! I’ve recently been interested in MRIs. Not because I’m injured or anything, but because of how it can make a picture of your brain structure. I think it would be so interesting to see what my brain looks like and compare it to others. In chapter 7 of Musicophilia, Sacks mentions a Harvard paper published in 1995 showing that the corpus callosum (band connecting the two brain hemispheres) is “enlarged in professional musicians”, and the planum temporale (in the auditory cortex) is enlarged in musicians with absolute pitch. A question of these enlargements was whether they were due to innate predisposition or musical training. Nevertheless, it’s evident that music is brain-altering! Playing an instrument involves many parts of the brain: the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and various areas of the cerebral cortex all show increased activity. Even just minutes of practice can show changes in the motor cortex. Below I have included a few interesting pictures/video of MRIs of musicians versus non-musicians, so you can see for yourself! Here is the link to a music video that I found pretty cool because it shows the creation of an MRI while the artist, Sivu, is singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_964dqQxQwY Video of taking fMRIs of Jennifer Koh, a professional violinist, to study the effects of reading, listening, and imagining music on the brain: https://today.duke.edu/2016/03/koh Brain while listening to music: Comparison of brain images: |
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