Sometimes it all just fits together!
Yesterday afternoon, I was watching PBS while I folded clothes. There was a discussion about the plasticity of our brains. Plasticity is the ability that our brains have of making new tissue. The man on the program emphsized that if we do the same thing over and over, it does not promote plasticity. We need to try new things, or do old things in different ways. This then causes our brains to keep "growing" rather than stagnating or even into going backwards into dementia as we age.
Then, last night I was reading Jill Bolte Taylor's book, My Stroke of Insight. On page 111, she said, "Scientists are well aware that the brain has tremendous ability to change its connections based upon its incoming stimulation. This 'plasticity' of the braing underlies its ability to recover lost function."
In another part of her book, she said that because singing is a function of the right brain, when some people have a stroke on the left side of their brain, as they recover, their speech is slow and labored, yet they can sing what they want to say smoothly!
Finally, in today's (6/1/2008) local paper (The Sun, Baltimore, MD), there was an article about music's healing effect on people with Parkinsons, autism, alsheimer's, and Tourette's syndrome.
Here is that article:
"Recognizing musics' healing power
by Karen Matthews
NEW YORK - Noted neurologist Oliver Sacks has found common ground with the pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church: Both men believe in the healing power of music.
Sacks, a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center and the best-selling author of Awakenings, shared the church stage Saturday with the famed gospel choir as part of the inaugural World Science Festival, a five-day celebration of science which ended yesterday.
Last week, Sacks said he planned to "talk about the therapeutic and beneficent power of music as a physician, and then their wonderful choir will perform. ... And the audience will make what they can of it."
Sacks' most recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, which examines the relationship between music and the brain, including its healing effect on people suffering from such diseases as Tourette's syndrome, Parkinson's, autism and Alzheimer's.
"Even with advanced dementia, when powers of memory and language are lost, people will respond to music," he said.
Abyssinian's pastor, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, said that music plays a central role in the healing power of prayer.
"What we have been studying ... is that when you pray, there's actually a physiological change in the body," he said. "Music is very much a part of this. There are certain notes that generate in the human body a kind of peacefulness."
The World Science Festival was conceived by Columbia University physicist Brian Greene and his wife, Tracy Day, a broadcast journalist, as a way to "help shift the public perception of science, so that people realize that science is as important as art, literature, film, theater," Greene said.
Panelists included Nobel laureates, actors, dancers, philosophers and science journalists."
This is so EXCITING!
Karen started this discussion 4 months ago. ( )