Your Health

“Where words fail, music speaks.” Music for the mind

W. Gifford-Jones MD & Diana Gifford-Jones

March 25, 2022

BY W. GIFFORD- JONES MD & DIANA GIFFORD-JONES

Music may be the world’s greatest medicine. From infants to centenarians, people love music and the way it makes them feel good. In tribute to its universal qualities, Hans Christian Andersen said, “Where words fail, music speaks.”

Even without lyrics, songs certainly convey feelings. Among healthy people, researchers have shown that across cultural divides, people can readily place vastly different types of music into emotional categories ranging from sad to heroic, annoying to beautiful, and desirous to indignant.

But the miracle of music is in its healing qualities. Scientists studying people with brain injuries and neurological conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are making remarkable discoveries.

Music, for example, can improve the gait of people relearning to walk after a brain injury. Listening to music has also been shown to reduce perceptions of pain. People who have lost the ability to communicate due to severe brain damage can regain function by singing the words.

Symptoms of Alzheimer typically become evident when the part of the brain involved in memory starts to fail. This gradually erodes the ability to manage everyday life independently. Loss of the sense of identity is confusing for the patient and heartbreaking for family and loved ones.

But playing music lights up wide networks in the brain including areas responsible for motor actions, emotions, and creativity. Researchers are studying how music can help treat Alzheimer’s disease.

Michael Thaut, Director of the University of Toronto’s Music and Health Science Research Collaboratory, has studied patients with early Alzheimer’s disease who listen to personally meaningful music.

He identified “Autobiographically relevant, long-known music” wedding songs, for example, or favourite records from teenage years and played these songs repeatedly to test subjects.

Whether the participants in the research were accomplished musicians or non-musicians, the results were similar: brain function improved.

Ground-breaking research by Dr. Lola Cuddy of Queen’s University demonstrating that patients with Alzheimer’s disease have an ability to recognize music and display musical memory. It has informed the development of musical therapy programs as simple as creating a familiar playlist for people with dementia.

What is going on in the brain? It appears that familiar music stimulates activity in the brain that leads to rewiring new circuits that bypass damaged regions and re-establish connections to memories.

“Music is an access key to your memory, your prefrontal cortex,” Thaut says. For those hoping to prevent dementia, he adds, “It’s simple: keep listening to the music that you’ve loved all your life. Your all-time favourite songs, those pieces those are especially meaningful to you. Make that your brain gym.”

Experts disagree on whether it is better to listen to familiar music or new music. While familiar music elicits happiness, some experts suggest that listening to the grandchildren’s music might help the brain create and reinforce additional neural pathways. On this, the jury is out.

What is certain is that music does what no pill can do. Within seconds of exposure, and for sustained periods, it heals the mind.

More good news, it is not just the brain that benefits from music. Music can reduce anxiety, lower blood pressure, ease pain, improve sleep, boost mood, and elevate alertness. But there is something remarkable about music that helps stow away and later retrieve deeply valued information and connections.

Shelley, the English Romantic poet, who tragically lived only to 29 years, wrote, “Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory” Today’s researchers have proven him right.

What sweeter medicine than to turn on the music and enjoy the journey through happy memories while also exercising the mind.

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Written By W. Gifford-Jones MD & Diana Gifford-Jones

Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, MD is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Harvard Medical School. He trained in general surgery at Strong Memorial Hospital, University of Rochester, Montreal General Hospital, McGill University and in Gynecology at Harvard. His storied medical career began as a general practitioner, ship’s surgeon, and hotel doctor. For more than 40 years, he specialized in gynecology, devoting his practice to the formative issues of women’s health. In 1975, he launched his weekly medical column that has been published by national and local Canadian and U.S. newspapers. Today, the readership remains over seven million. His advice contains a solid dose of common sense and he never sits on the fence with controversial issues. He is the author of nine books including, “The Healthy Barmaid”, his autobiography “You’re Going To Do What?”, “What I Learned as a Medical Journalist”, and “90+ How I Got There!” Many years ago, he was successful in a fight to legalize heroin to help ease the pain of terminal cancer patients. His foundation at that time donated $500,000 to establish the Gifford-Jones Professorship in Pain Control and Palliative Care at the University of Toronto Medical School. At 93 years of age he rappelled from the top of Toronto’s City Hall (30 stories) to raise funds for children with a life-threatening disease through the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Diana Gifford-Jones, the daughter of W. Gifford-Jones, MD, Diana has extensive global experience in health and healthcare policy. Diana is Special Advisor with The Aga Khan University, which operates 2 quaternary care hospitals and numerous secondary hospitals, medical centres, pharmacies, and laboratories in South Asia and Africa. She worked for ten years in the Human Development sectors at the World Bank, including health policy and economics, nutrition, and population health. For over a decade at The Conference Board of Canada, she managed four health-related executive networks, including the Roundtable on Socio-Economic Determinants of Health, the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management, the Canadian Centre for Environmental Health, and the Centre for Health System Design and Management. Her master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government included coursework at Harvard Medical School. She is also a graduate of Wellesley College. She has extensive experience with Canadian universities, including at Carleton University, where she was the Executive Director of the Global Academy. She lived and worked in Japan for four years and speaks Japanese fluently. Diana has the designation as a certified Chartered Director from The Directors College, a joint venture of The Conference Board of Canada and McMaster University. She has recently published a book on the natural health philosophy of W. Gifford-Jones, called No Nonsense Health – Naturally!

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