The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

180 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 From “Hopeless” to “Healed” Deborah Longenecker Imagine waking up after a stroke completely unable to speak. Two years of speech therapy later, the gift of words has still not returned. Samuel S. found himself in this very situation—brain damage from a stroke had confiscated his ability to speak and had not given it back, and the speech therapists had deemed his case “hopeless” (Sacks 232). Yet Samuel could still sing “Ol’ Man River,” though only a few words of the lyrics survived the ravages of the stroke (232). One day the resident music therapist, Connie Tomaino, heard him singing in the hospital corridor and decided to experiment (232). Two months of music therapy later, Samuel had not only regained the ability to sing lyrics to several songs; he also had begun to speak in short, effective sentences (232-3). Stories such as these illustrate music’s restorative power for those suffering from neurological disorders, physically reorganizing the brain and reconnecting various brain structures. The efficacy of neurological music therapy relies on music’s influence over brain organization and structure. Music’s neurological effects encompass genuine physical changes in the brain. Gaser and Schlaug actually discovered “gray matter volume differences in motor as well as auditory and visuospatial brain regions comparing professional musicians . . . with matched amateur musicians and nonmusicians” (514). Like any other habitual action, professional musicians’ long-term, repeated practice of their instruments contributes to the increase in gray matter (514). But not only does musical training add brain mass; it also reorganizes the cerebral cortex. As a structure of the brain, the brain’s cerebral cortex includes both the motor cortex and the sensory cortex, which respectively send out and receive messages to and from the other organs in the body. Depending on specific environmental demands, cortical organization can actually change through an ability of the brain known as “plasticity.” Plasticity particularly evidences itself in the brains of musicians: as compared to non-musicians, musicians’ auditory cortexes contain “enlarged cortical representation of tones of the musical scale as compared to pure tones [non-musical tones]” (Pantev et al., “Cortical Plasticity” 438). This variation in cortical organization displays the remarkable effects on the brain wrought by music coupled with the brain’s