Remember how you feel when you drive and play a song you love on the radio, or the feeling that invades you every time you listen to a song from your childhood, or the melancholy that hugs you when you hear the ballad you danced with. that’s no longer in your life. Music provokes feelings, sensations, joy, sadness, melancholy. It evokes good memories and bad memories.
In early January this year, Rosa Montero published an article in the newspaper El País Semanal about an astonishing book, “Instrumental: Memories of Music, Medicine and Madness”, by James Rhodes (Blackie Books). This British writer has a very harsh biography: sexual abuse, suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitalization, prostitution . . . But at the same time, Rhodes is proof that music and its beauty can heal.
- “Music gives soul to the universe.
- Wings to the mind.
- Flights to the imagination.
- Comfort to sadness and life and joy to all things.
? Plato?
Rhodes is a pianist, dropped out for 10 years and resumed his studies at the age of thirty. In 2010, he became the first classical musician to sign a six-disc contract with the multinational Warner. In general, a person who leaves an instrument does not play it, but he does, and it is the healing power of music that has regenerated his life.
Does the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks tell in his book?Musicofilia?the relationship between music and the brain and shows how music can awaken damaged areas of the brain. In the book he talks about people, not patients and recounts such disturbing cases as Francois Lhermite, who identifies a single melody, “A Marselhesa”, or the case of Martin, a person with deep mental retardation who knows more than two thousand complete. Operas.
One of the most moving stories Sacks tells in his book is that of Clive Wearing, an English musician who, at age 45, suffered a brain infection that severely affected his memory, so now his memory margin is seven seconds. when Clive sits at the piano everything flows, and begins to come into contact with his memory and musical wisdom, as his ability to play the piano and organ has remained intact.
“Music expresses everything that cannot be said in words and cannot be silenced.
-Victor Hugo-
Not only did Oliver Sacks demonstrate the benefits of music for humans, scientist Sarah Johnson has even created a college discipline in the United States, where music therapy is able to cause major physiological changes in the body: it accelerates or slows down organic functions. (breathing, circulation, digestion, etc. ), psychologically stimulates emotions (facilitates expression or causes a calming effect), and intellectual level helps to achieve concentration, stimulates imagination and facilitates learning social skills.
In recent decades, several experiments have been conducted to study how listening to music affects the brain very positively, resonances were performed on people while solving math problems and listening to music, and in this second case it was found that several areas are activated at the same time in the brain.
On the other hand, the brains of people playing musical instruments were analyzed and it was shown that playing an instrument amounts to complete physical activity for the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered that different areas of the brain work simultaneously and very quickly.
Playing an instrument activates virtually the entire brain at the same time, especially the visual, auditory and motor cortex, so continuous practice of an instrument can also benefit other activities.
The difference between listening to and playing music is that the latter requires fine motor skills, which is controlled by both hemispheres of the brain, and also combines the linguistic and mathematical precision for which the left hemisphere is most developed, with the creativity in which it is located. protrudes right hemisphere.
For all these reasons, playing music has been proven to increase volume and activity in the insensitive body of the brain, which connects the two hemispheres, allowing musicians to solve problems creatively in many other areas.
Musicians have a more developed memory and are able to put different labels on their memory (contextual, emotional, auditory, etc. ), almost like a good Internet search engine, other activities such as sport or painting have not been shown to have the same benefits of playing a musical instrument in the brain, although they have different advantages.
“They say that when a silence appeared between two people, it was because an angel passed by and stole their voice.
-Silvio Rodríguez-