Music as Medicine for the Brain

We'd love to hear from you if you have a great story to tell about how music has impacted your life, or if you recently read something that you just have to share.

Here's a great example, a link sent to us by Michele in South Bend. It's a U.S. News and World Report feature entitled Music as Medicine for the Brain, from July of this year. Here's a sample:

Music therapy has been practiced for decades as a way to treat neurological conditions from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's to anxiety and depression. Now, advances in neuroscience and brain imaging are revealing what's actually happening in the brain as patients listen to music or play instruments and why the therapy works. "It's been substantiated only in the last year or two that music therapy can help restore the loss of expressive language in patients with aphasia" following brain injury from stroke, says Oliver Sacks, the noted neurologist and professor at Columbia University, who explored the link between music and the brain in his recent book Musicophilia.

There are also links to videos and discussion groups.