 |
Violinist
Anthony Hyatt leads dancers through MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in
Washington on Oct. 11, 2017. Musicians and dancers are part of the Georgetown
Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center's arts and humanities program. (AP
Photo/Tom Sampson)
|
Like a friendly Pied Piper, the violinist keeps
up a toe-tapping beat as dancers weave through busy hospital hallways and into
the chemotherapy unit, patients looking up in surprised delight.
Upstairs, a cellist strums an Irish folk tune for
a patient in intensive care.
Music increasingly is becoming a part of patient
care - although it's still pretty unusual to see roving performers captivating
entire wards, like at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital one fall morning. 'It takes them away for just a few minutes to
some other place where they don't have to think about what's going on,' said
cellist Martha Vance after playing for a patient isolated to avoid spreading
infection.
The challenge: Harnessing music to do more than
comfort the sick. Now, moving beyond programs like Georgetown's, the National
Institutes of Health is bringing together musicians, music therapists and
neuroscientists to tap into the brain's circuitry and figure out how.
'The brain is able to compensate for other
deficits sometimes by using music to communicate,' said NIH Director Dr.
Francis Collins, a geneticist who also plays a mean guitar.
To turn that ability into a successful therapy,
'it would be a really good thing to know which parts of the brain are still
intact to be called into action. To know the circuits well enough to know the
backup plan,' Collins added.
Scientists
aren't starting from scratch.
Learning to play an instrument, for example, sharpens
how the brain processes sound and can improve children's reading and other
school skills. Stroke survivors who can't speak sometimes can
sing, and music therapy can help them retrain brain pathways to
communicate. Similarly, Parkinson's patients sometimes walk
better to the right beat.
But what's missing is rigorous science to better
understand how either listening to or creating music might improve health in a
range of other ways - research into how the brain processes music that NIH is
beginning to fund.
'The water is wide, I cannot cross over,'
well-known soprano Renee Fleming belted out, not from a concert stage but from
inside an MRI machine at the NIH campus.
The opera star - who partnered with Collins to
start the Sound Health initiative - spent two hours in the scanner to help researchers
tease out what brain activity is key for singing. How? First Fleming spoke the
lyrics. Then she sang them. Finally, she imagined singing them.
'We're trying to understand the brain not just so
we can address mental disorders or diseases or injuries, but also so we can
understand what happens when a brain's working right and what happens when it's
performing at a really high level,' said NIH researcher David Jangraw, who
shared the MRI data with The Associated Press.
To Jangraw's surprise, several brain regions were
more active when Fleming imagined singing than when she actually sang,
including the brain's emotion center and areas involved with motion and
vision. One theory: it took more mental effort to keep
track of where she was in the song, and to maintain its emotion, without
auditory feedback.
Fleming put it more simply: 'I'm skilled at
singing so I didn't have to think about it quite so much,' she told a spring
workshop at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, where she is an
artistic adviser.
Indeed, Jangraw notes a saying in neuroscience:
Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Brain cells communicate by firing messages to
each other through junctions called synapses. Cells that regularly connect - for example, when
a musician practices - strengthen bonds into circuitry that forms an efficient
network for, in Fleming's case, singing.
 |
In this Oct. 11, 2017
image from video, cellist Martha Vance plays for a patient at Medstar
Georgetown University Hospital in Washington DC. Musicians and dancers are part
of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre's arts and humanities
program. (AP Photo/Tom Sampson)
|
But that's a healthy brain. In North Carolina, a
neuroscientist and a dance professor are starting an improvisational dance
class for Alzheimer's to tell if music and movement enhance a diseased brain's
neural networks. Well before memory loss becomes severe,
Alzheimer's patients can experience apathy, depression and gait and balance
problems as the brain's synaptic connections begin to falter.
The NIH-funded study at Wake Forest University
will randomly assign such patients to the improvisation class - to dance
playfully without having to remember choreography - or to other interventions. The test: If quality-of-life symptoms improve,
will MRI scans show correlating strengthening of neural networks that govern
gait or social engagement?
With senior centers increasingly touting arts
programmes, 'having a deeper understanding of how these things are affecting our
biology can help us understand how to leverage resources already in our
community,' noted Wake Forest lead researcher Christina Hugenschmidt.
Proof may be
tough.
An international music therapy study failed to
significantly help children with autism, the Journal of the American Medical
Association recently reported, contradicting earlier promising findings. But
experts cited challenges with the study and called for additional research.
Julia Langley, who directs Georgetown's programme, wants research into the type and dose of music for different health situations: 'If we can study the arts in the same way that science studies medication and other therapeutics, I think we will be doing so much good.'
Originally published on AP/DAILY MAIL
No comments :
Post a Comment