The room is filling up with some very particular attendees. They walk slowly, as if they were carrying a cup of tea on their heads. They stagger, their sense of smell has not responded to them for a long time, they speak with difficulty, in a monotonous voice and at a reduced volume. They all tremble. They all have Parkinson’s disease. They manage to settle into a circle of chairs with classical guitars on their laps and play. touch Rash, the solo of the famous guitarist Eddie Van Halen. And as if to invoke that word, eruption, the participants explode. They shed their involuntary movements and miraculously make music. They are part of an experiment conducted by one of the most prestigious research centers in the United States, the Johns Hopkins for Music and Medicine. For 84 days they took one-hour guitar lessons twice a week and all of them improved their mood and quality of life. Some optimized motor functions, corrected posture and gait, and reduced tremors. They repeated the rehearsal with singing classes and also playing the drum. Similar studies are full of medical literature and various documentaries. Perhaps the most famous Alive Inside (Alive Inside), collects the effects of music on diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or dementia. The response of these people with so few resources to feel better is overwhelming. Music restores a sense of identity to those who seem to have lost all notion of themselves, says Oliver Sacks in one of those videos, the neurologist who devoted almost his entire career to revealing the effects of sound vibrations on our bodies.
The Buddhist monks shed light on the scientists when they exposed their brains to the magic of the electroencephalogram and there it was seen how in meditative states these subjects managed to make different brain regions operate harmoniously. And then they observed that when music or certain frequencies were used, those of us who are not trained in acute meditation can reach similar states: as a kind of shortcut to help us reach expanded states of consciousness and well-being. When we listen to melodies the centers of emotion, memory and movement are activated.
In the body we have more than 30 trillion cells, each with its electrical power. And we already know that they all sound (although we don’t hear them with our ears). This is powerfully expressed by the series The Sounds of Creation on the Gaia platform. A journey through the history of music and its healing power. The series is committed to the fact that the future of medicine is found in music and vibration. If we were able to find out at what frequency the tumor cells vibrate, we might alter their rhythm with another harmony until making them disappear, ventures to dream one of the interviewed scientists.
The healing power of music has been explored by all cultures from all latitudes. As with so many ancestral medicine practices, it is only now that we have endorsed in laboratories what our ancestors experienced and taught that we begin to believe.