Music Can Change Your Brain

I recently read a Wired Magazine interview with Oliver Sacks. He is a neurologist who has written about the healing power of music.

I can attest to that healing power. I think back to my childhood when my father, who wasn't a musician per say, would play the piano to put my sisters and I to sleep at night. I don't know what he played. I just remember that it was soothing. I would feel my body sinking into the bed and I would drift off to sleep with this deep knowingness of being safe.

Fast forward to 2007. Here I am faced with the stress of everyday living and where do I find my sanctuary? Again, in music. So when I picked up the latest copy of Wired Magazine and saw it contained an article about how music can change your brain, I had to read it.

One of the questions the interviewer, Steve Silberman, asked was, "Can playing music alter the structure of the brain?" Oliver Sacks response was, "Very strikingly. In musicians, parts of the corpus callosum - the bridge between the two hemispheres - are enlarged, and there's more gray matter in the cerebellum. While you can't tell by a glance at someone's brain if they're a writer or a mathematician, you can tell if they're a musician."

I found that fascinating! I've always known that musicians were different, special people... And I don't mean special "challenged". I mean Special... Amazing! But to read that their brain's are actually different, that was astounding to me.

Lately I've been listening to the healing music of composer and author, Bob Baran. His most recent CD Escape Music® A New Dawn, is a solo piano album that I find relaxing and stimulating at the same time. That's not a combination I've ever noticed in a music CD before. I can't help wondering... Being a composer and author, what does Bob Baran's brain look like?

Oliver Sacks also mentioned something that I believe effects all of us that listen to music every day. He said, "The brain is very sensitive to music, you don't have to attend to it to record it internally and be affected by it."

So according to Sacks, we are recording the music we hear around us directly into our brains, even if we aren't consciously listening to it.... And we are affected by it! That certainly makes me want to be more aware of what kind of music I listen to and is playing in the places I frequent.

If we are affected by what we listen to, you could say, "We are what we hear." Just like the saying, "You are what you eat," our brains are "eating up" the music around us. It is a strong argument for being plugged into an iPod with music that feeds the person you want to be.

About the Author

Eleanor DeWolf - writer, dancer, music lover. Expounding on whatever subject that grabs her interest, from wherever she resides at the moment.