How else can you describe it but as a mystery, when music heals and we have no idea why? This question came to me as I have been reading an article that appeared in Parade Magazine back in 2002, written by Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP, entitled “When Music Heals”.

Dr. Sacks worked, in 1966, as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. His work with a group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, became his book “Awakenings” and eventually a well-known movie by the same name starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.

His article “When Music Heals” struck close to home with me. He spoke of how we all have personal experiences with music. I had my own experience of healing with the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” as a child. For him, it was after spending two weeks with one leg paralyzed and having to relearn how to walk, that music made the difference.

He has no way of explaining how it happened, but music reminded him how to walk. In his words, “I had no impulse to walk. I could barely remember how one would go about walking” until a particular piece of music came to mind.

Sacks had somehow “lost the rhythm of walking”. Only after remembering this favorite piece of music did walking “regain its natural, unconscious, kinetic melody and grace”.

Who knows how or why that happened, it just mysteriously did.

Sacks goes on to share:

“Music can have the same effect on the neurologically impaired. It may have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, at least in the precious few minutes that it lasts.

“…After a stroke, patients may suffer from aphasia, the inability to use or comprehend words. But the ability to sing words is rarely affected. even if an aphasic cannot speak them.”

The mystery of healing music.

“…Some of my patients with strokes or Alzheimer’s are unable to carry out a complex chain of actions: to dress, for example. Here, music can work as a mnemonic, a series of promptings in the form of verse or song, as in the childhood rhyme “One, two, buckle my shoe.”

“…My patient Dr. P. had lost the ability to recognize or identify even common objects, though he could see perfectly well. He was unable to recognize a glove or a flower when I handed it to him, and he once mistook his own wife for a hat. This condition was almost totally disabling but he discovered that he could perform the needs and tasks of the day - if they were organized in song. And so he had songs for dressing, songs for eating, songs for bathing, songs for everything.”

More mystery…

“…As a result of a brain tumor, my patient Greg has not been able to retain any new memories since the 1970s. But if we talk about or play his favorite Grateful Dead songs, his amnesia is bypassed. He becomes vividly animated and can reminisce about their early concerts.

“I first saw the immense therapeutic powers of music 30 years ago, in the post- encephalitic patients I later wrote about in “Awakenings”….Among those who could walk and talk, though only in a jerky, broken way, music gave their movement or speech the steadiness and control it usually lacked….We noted this when patients listened to music or sang it or played it, even when they imagined it.

“Take Rosalie B., a patient who had a severe form of Parkinsonism. She tended to remain transfixed for hours a day, completely motionless, stuck, usually with one finger on her spectacles. But she knew all of Chopin’s works by heart. We had only to say “Opus 49″ to see her whole body, posture and expression change. Her Parkinsonism would vanish as soon as she even imagined Chopin’s Fantasie in F minor. Her EEG would become normal at the same instant the Chopin played itself in her mind.”

Sacks goes on to describe how the music needs to be individualized for the patient in order to be effective. This is where a certified music therapist can help. Usually it’s the old pop songs that animate the elderly; it’s generational or cultural favorites, folk melodies, that resonate, create connections to the past and effect emotional catharsis.

Somehow music is intimately connected to our neurology, species-wide. Research is just beginning to solve this healing music mystery.