As Victor Fabry napped in his
hospital bed, a quiet symphony filled his room. The steady pulse of
a cardiac monitor marked the progress of his mending heart. Over
that beat, the swaying strains of a Brazilian guitarist pumped
nearly nonstop from a CD player on the shelf.
For nine days after his surgery at
the Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute in Morristown, N.J., Fabry
soaked up that tranquil, wordless strumming. And while he praised
his surgeon, he raved about the musical score that accompanied his
recovery.
His heart literally fell in rhythm
with guitarist Tomaz Lima. The music became his
medicine.
Doctors are increasingly studying —
and employing — the physiological dance music does with the body’s
neurons and blood-carrying cells.
“We’re in the infancy,” said Dr. Ali
Rezai, director of the Center for Neurological Restoration at
Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. During a surgery called deep brain
stimulation — performed while patients with Parkinson’s disease are
awake — Rezai and his team play classical compositions and measure
the brain’s response to those notes. “We know music can calm,
influence creativity, can energize. That’s great. But music’s role
in recovering from disease is being ever more
appreciated.”
Using music to help the ill has been
employed for thousands of years, even though modern medicine is
just starting to understand how it works, said Dr. Claudius Conrad,
a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School and, himself,
a gifted pianist. He is set to launch the first study of music’s
impact on the sleep cycles of acute-care patients.
“Research has already shown that if
you play a piece — like Mozart — at a certain slow beat, the
listener will adapt their heart beat to the beat of the
music.”
From musical notes to hormone
stimulation
The anatomical route musical notes take through the body is indeed
a busy highway celebrated in many songs, from head to heart. Based
on interviews with neurologists and cardiologists, the journey from
an instrument string to your heart strings goes something like
this:
Sound waves travel through the air
into the ears and buzz the eardrums and bones in the middle ears.
To decode the vibration, your brain transforms that mechanical
energy into electrical energy, sending the signal to its cerebral
cortex — a hub for thought, perception and memory. Within that
control tower, the auditory cortex forwards the message on to brain
centers that direct emotion, arousal, anxiety, pleasure and
creativity. And there’s another stop upstairs: that electrical cue
hits the hypothalamus which controls heart rate and respiration,
plus your stomach and skin nerves, explaining why a melody may give
you butterflies or goose bumps. Of course, all this communication
happens far faster than a single drum beat.
Before jetting through the blood
stream, the signals are converted again — to hormones. At the
University of Munich, Conrad was able to show that critically ill
patients required fewer sedative drugs when they listened to one
hour of Mozart piano sonatas. As expected, the patients’ blood
pressures and heart rates eased with the music.
But what surprised Conrad is that the
patients also showed a 50 percent spike in pituitary growth
hormone, which is known to stimulate healing. Today, at
Massachusetts General Hospital, Conrad asks his patients (or their
families) in the surgical intensive care unit what music they’d
like to hear; if neither is can provide an answer, he often plays
Mozart.
Healing dose of Lady
Gaga?
Classical is a common pick among doctors and therapists who use
melody as a healing tool. The vibrations of stringed instruments in
particular are said to mesh with the energy of the heart, small
intestine, pericardium, thyroid and adrenal glands, according to a
soon-to-be-published study by researchers at Gagnon Cardiovascular
Institute in New Jersey. But what about rock or hip hop? Country or
house? Does the body react as positively to Lady GaGa as it does
Bach? Do you heal faster with Beethoven or a dose of Miley
Cyrus?
“I recommend listening to joyful
music as part of an overall prescription for maintaining good heart
health,” said Dr. Michael Miller, director of the center for
preventive cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical
Center.
Joyful? “Music that brings out a
natural high in order to maximize endorphin release,” explained
Miller, whose research (presented last November to the American
Heart Association) showed that hearing your favorite song can cause
tissue in your blood vessels to dilate, increasing blood
flow.
Miller examined 10 healthy,
non-smoking volunteers before and after they grooved to tunes of
their choice and measured a 26 percent jump in the diameter of
their upper arm blood vessels. (Conversely, after wincing through
music they hated, the volunteers’ blood vessels narrowed by six
percent.)
Prescription for helping brain injuries
heal?
At Cleveland Clinic, Rezai and other
neurosurgeons collaborate with The Cleveland Orchestra to compose
classical pieces to play for patients during brain operations.
Rezai then gauges how individual neurons fire when the head hears
those foreign chords and cadences, and he compares that reaction to
how the neurons behave when familiar songs fill the operating room.
Hair-sized sensors placed in the brain translate those signals to
an amplifier. Study results are expected in three to six
months.
The firing of a neuron “may sound
like static to some, but it’s music to my ears,” said Rezai.
Patients tell him when the music soothes them, and Rezai can hear
the corresponding changes in a single neuron. The research, he
said, can serve as a keystone for other studies of music’s
potential in treating people with traumatic brain injuries, stroke,
multiple sclerosis and severe depression.
But some of the oldest healing music
may still be the most potent. Frescos painted around 4,000 B.C.
depict harp-playing priests. Today, live harpists can be heard at
Gagnon, at the University of Rochester Medical Center and at least
five other hospitals.
“This gentle but powerful instrument
goes to the deepest places of the body that need to be healed,”
said Tami Briggs, a pioneer in “harp therapy” who has played at the
bedsides of hundreds of patients, including many at the Mayo
Clinic. “I’m not a nurse, but I know enough about the monitors, and
what I see is blood pressure usually goes down (when I play),
oxygenation rates go up. That’s connected to that more peaceful
place, where they are taking deeper breaths.”
The harp is the only instrument that
has 20 to 50 strings and is open, unlike, say, a violin. When a
harpist strikes a chord, she also opens vibrations in strings just
above and below the few she plucks. Those vibes, Briggs said, are
absorbed by the body.
“When I play, it’s as subtle as
watching somebody relax in the littlest ways,” Briggs said. “They
fall deeper into their bed.”