Carol Rosenstein was watching her husband, Irwin, slip away inch by inch.
At one time he had been a brilliant lawyer, a lover of Broadway musicals, a world traveler. But after his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2006, he developed dementia, and slowly everything changed. His gait flattened to a shuffle. The sparkle in his eyes turned into a blank stare. His mood soured. Worsening matters, the medications he took caused hallucinations and extreme agitation. As communication grew more challenging, Carol felt the distance between them growing.
Then, in 2014, something happened. Irwin, who had been a gifted pianist since childhood, sat down at the piano and began to play. As his fingers floated through American classics like “Fly Me to the Moon,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “Try to Remember,” Carol saw his posture straighten. The sparkle returned to his eyes. The husband she once knew came back, bit by bit, if only briefly. “I could see this human being resurrect and start to reconnect with his environment,” she says, “just like I had given him a dose of medication.”
Mystified, she called his neurologist and asked what was happening. “He said, ‘Carol, you are watching the power of music, changing brain chemistry.’”
That statement would go on to change not only their lives but the lives of countless others.
Music, it turns out, is medicine for the mind.
While it’s tempting to search for a woo-woo reason why music resonates with us so deeply, it’s not necessary. For people like Concetta Tomaino, the effects can be explained by science and logic — even if there’s still a lot to learn. “I think I went past that magical, mysterious piece a long time ago,” she laughs. Tomaino is one of the pioneers in this area; she has been researching how music affects all aspects of neurologic function for more than 40 years. To her, the impact of music on the mind and body demonstrates how much of our makeup as human beings is based on rhythm, resonance, and perception, all of which connect us in a fundamental way to who we are. “Everything in the world is a vibration of some kind,” she says. “Music is an extension of who we are, and that’s why it helps us reach people who seem to be disconnected because of illness or a traumatic brain injury.”
Tomaino spent decades as a music therapist, pursuing evidence-based research around music and the brain before volumes of such literature existed. In 1980, she began working at Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Center) in the Bronx, New York, where she first met the consulting neurologist Oliver Sacks. By then Sacks had already written Awakenings, an autobiographical book (and later a movie) about a group of encephalitis lethargica patients frozen in trancelike states, whom he “awakened” using a new drug, along with music.
To continued reading, please visit https://www.rotary.org/en/melodies-and-memories.