Magical Music: Balm for Mental Calmness, Now Seen Helping Long Term Memory

Three centuries ago, the British poet William Congreve wrote that, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.“

Or, as the jazz great Louis Armstrong later plainly put it: “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

Harvard music therapist Lorie Kubicek agrees. For starters, to see what she’s saying, let’s define two basic terms. Music medicine is a passive procedure, meaning that a patient simply straps on headphones and listens to tunes as a way to relax and distract oneself while undergoing treatment. Music therapy, on the other hand, is positively active.

First the patient is evaluated by a medical professional to see how they relate to music and whether there might be any difficulties in difficulties in linking their reactions to the sounds. Once cleared for takeoff as it were, they are taught to play (and use) what they hear.

The link between music and mental calm has a long history. The Chinese character for medicine includes the one for music, and in more modern times music therapy was used to rehabilitate World War II veterans. Multiple studies show that it is surprisingly effective. For example, as Kubicek told Harvard’s Women’s Health Watch Newsletter editors, handing a patient a ukulele and teaching them to strum appears to create a sense of calm even during such stressful moments as undergoing cancer chemo. “Instead of saying ‘I have to go to the hospital for my chemo,’” she says, patients adopt a positive point of view: “I have to go to the hospital for my ukelele lesson.”

As a team of neurologists in the Department of Biological and Physical Sciences, at the American University in Dubai reported last February in Brain Behavior & Immunity, “Music is a universal language that can elicit profound emotional and cognitive responses..., [that] can bring about structural and functional changes in the brain [and] and can be used to retrain impaired brain circuits in different disorders.”

What’s happening here is pure physical neurology. Here’s how it works: Musical sounds connect to the limbic system, a set of brain structures that includes the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, and cingulate gyrus, each one of which plays a part in emotion, motivation, memory, and behavior regulation.

When you listen to music and sound reaches these regions, a natural physical relaxation response kicks in, calming nervous responses, slowing your breathing, and spiriting you away from concentrating on what’s happening to your body.

This train of neurological reactions is why music is well-known to known to relieve depression. Last year, a report from Department of Biological and Medical Psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway, took it several steps farther. Their report in the journal Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy suggests that while Alzheimer’s patients such as the redoubtable Tony Bennett might have lost most of their memories, musical threads might remain. Listening to music might actually improve memory and thus their links to reality. Which is why even when he had forgotten the names of many people in his life, he could still recall all the words to the songs he sang with Lady Gaga–and even her name–in a moving farewell concert at Radio City Music Hall in August, 2021.

In everyday life, when you run into one of those moments when you truly need some soothing, cable networks have a wide number of channels dedicated to specific brands of music. Spectrum TV has nearly 50 channels allowing you to tune in and turn on to exactly what works for your own personal body and brain. Verizon Fios has 60 music channels, for everything from Broadway to Calming Pet Music.