The Healing Power of Music

Neuroscientists at the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research have found that music can have positive effects on mood, motivation, concentration, and other cognitive processes.

Alexander Street and Jufen Zhang included 201 patients in their 2020 study to assess the effectiveness of a growing treatment option called Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT). This system of clinical techniques is aimed at improving sensorimotor skills, speech and language, and cognition in patients with neurological diseases. During the study, researchers looked for changes in patients’ motivation and mood, concentration, arm and hand functioning, speech and communication, and walking.

Of the 201 patients referred to rehab, 177 received this new treatment for two days per week over the course of 24 months, totaling in 675 sessions. As part of the sessions, patients would play drums and percussive instruments to test attention and executive function and sing songs to practice speech, word retrieval and production, articulation, and breath control. This treatment was not only effective, but also rather enjoyable to the patients based on questionnaires included in the study. Because depression is common in people who experience stroke, it was a pleasant surprise when the patients reported feeling more motivated to participate in rehabilitation efforts by the end of the experimental period.

Additionally, most patients reported improvements in mood, concentration, and arm and hand functioning and rated the NMT treatment as “helpful” or “very helpful” in a questionnaire. While the therapy was less highly rated for improving speech, with 21 of 99 patients rating it as “not helpful” in the same questionnaire, the authors of the study reported a few brief moments when patients with speech impairments and difficulties produced fluent speech while singing songs familiar to them.

Anesthesiologist and critical care specialist Pratik Pandharipande felt that this study had very encouraging results for patients experiencing critical illness: “I think it’s promising work that has applications towards delirium and other neurological impairments while patients are in the ICU and applications for rehabilitation from a cognitive standpoint post-ICU.”

This sentiment was echoed by Peyton Boyd, a researcher at the Vanderbilt Music Cognition Lab: “it [NMT] poses to be a very interesting therapeutic technique, especially for those who might not necessarily want to go the more traditional route of going through rehabilitative therapy.” He continues, “I think the power of music is somewhat underestimated, especially in a clinical setting, so I think any innovation that lends itself to giving music that credibility within medicine and therapy is very cool.”

Despite not being included in the study, the researchers considered music-based apps to be options for improving finger dexterity in patients, especially since this method would be deliverable by non-NMT staff. Touchscreen keyboard apps, for example, have been empirically demonstrated to improve hand rehabilitation during acute stages of stroke.

Street and Zhang also suggest further research towards developing more cost-effective methods to improve treatment dosage and delivery, which could potentially lead to patients administering this treatment by themselves using apps or with spouses or relatives.