Music Therapy or Not?

The other day I watched the 20/20 interview with Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly.  I was so touched by this interview.  However, it visually brought back so many memories of my husband's injury, hospital stay and rehabilitation.  It really was a remarkable interview. Gabrielle Giffords is truly an amazing woman as all the many people out there recovering from a brain injury are.  So much hard work is involved for them and every bit of progress whether it be large or small is astonishing.

On my phone I have a dictionary app which gives you a word of the day, every day.  I really enjoy it as not only do I get a word of the day, there is always some little anecdote.  Today's anecdote was about Gabrielle Giffords and how music helped her relearn words.  She was injured on the left side of the brain near the area that controls language.  It said that recovery specialists have started using music to help patients recover their language ability. Even though we understand and create language on the left side of our brain, we understand music primarily on the right side .  The way the brain relates to music is very unique.  When we have a song stuck in our head or listen to a song by imagining it, our brain is very active as if we were really listening to that song.  Neuroscience research has shown that music has an incredible impact across the entire brain. Because music relies on pitch and rhythm in addition to speech, it is interpreted in different parts of the brain, not solely the music or language areas.  When rehabilitating injured patients, rather than trying to redevelop the language area directly, this therapy retrains the connections in the brain and creates a new language area in the music region of the brain.

After watching the interview and then reading this information on my phone, I can't help but think that even in the short amount of time since my husband's injury, there is still so much progress being made.  I found this most fascinating as I remember when my husband was just learning how to learn to talk again, there was no music.  We were not allowed to play music or turn on the TV or do anything that would over stimulate him.  I wonder if he would have made faster progress if we could have added music?  I guess we will never know as his speech is pretty good at this point in time.

However, we were talking about this today.  I told him they should have allowed us to play music and sing to him.  He just laughed.  My husband was always involved with music being a piper in a bagpipe band.  But as he reminded me, he never sang.  You see, anyone who knows me knows I am the one who sings all the time to myself.  He marvels at the songs that just seem to pop into my brain.  He said that if they allowed us to play songs and sing to him, he probably would have run screaming from the room and never want to talk again.  Maybe in his case it was a good thing he had just the traditional speech therapy!