Memory, Emotion, and Therapy in Music

Currently, there is A LOT of information out about music and the brain. I've been reading Oliver Sack's book, Musicophilia, which covers many different aspects of how the brain remembers music, including those catchy advertising jingles, or how a song will pop into one's head out of nowhere, or how someone can be transported back in time to a specific time and place when hearing a song.

Dance/Movement Therapists see the transformative effects of music on people every day. When the sounds of James Brown or Al Green bellow from the boombox in the hospital, many patients become alive when they were not before. It is the music many times that physically gets people out of their seats and moving, singing along, and even smiling. The staff will join in at times, bouncing to their own beats, joining in on the group when they weren't before, for a moment or two of connection to self and to the dance/movement therapy group.

Music and dance go together. Thus, research on the brain's effects of listening to music, especially those when hearing a particular song that one has not heard in a long time, is pertinent to our research as dance/movement therapists.

Here's a related article by Discover magazine.