It is now more and more fashionable to talk about the effect of music on the brain. As I had mentioned it on an earlier blog, books are coming out about the subject, and now the PBS show Nova has an episode on the subject, centered on Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia. But it is another PBS show that struck me, and although I usually don’t watch it, P.O.V. showed a 80 minute film about the story of the struggle of guitarist Jason Crigler overcoming the debilitating effect of a stroke, which occurred while playing a gig in a club.
Jason basically lost all normal higher brain functions, and had to re-learn how to function as a human being. The movie describes the hardship Jason family went through to help him recover his brain function. Against many odds and the prognostics of doctors, Jason made a full recovery. But what did fascinate me is that obviously music, and of course all the love and patience of his family, was very much instrumental (no pun intended) in his recovery.
Jason’s insurance eventually ran out, leaving him in a state where he was totally dependent on outside help. The ‘normal’ route was to go into hospice care, but his family decided against it and decided to take him home where he could be in a more stimulating environment. There he would be able to reconnect with familiar things, like all of his music making tools, and in particular his guitar.
As Jason’s dad recounts it, after a while in the house, Jason got drawn back in his music room, and the moment Jason picked up a guitar and began to play again was the milestone that seemed to validate the family’s faith. Jason started with small ostinato phrases of four or five notes that he would repeat as he was practicing. A few months later he sat in at a friend’s gig, then a whole set, and then his own gig in downtown NYC. After the gig where all his friends came and were quite impressed by his control of the instrument, Jason recalled: “I had trouble connecting,” but at Jason’s first concert in New York, something clicked and he suddenly connected with the music. “It’s the first gig I played that I felt really good,” he later said. That was the moment, a year and a half after his brain hemorrhage, when things turned around.
Jason is now fully recovered, although he does have a somewhat deeper relationship with music.
Well this is quite an amazing story, and I have to say that I kept thinking, at the point he picked up his guitar, that since music involves so many areas of the brain, it must be the way to recovery. And off course there is no way this would have happened without the incredible support from his family. But, some regions where damaged, on the other end there also must have been some other regions that still functioned well, and it was a matter of remapping them all back together. Some of the good parts of Jason’s brain must have been involved with music, and they could act as some kind of crutches to his healing brain, that led to recovering the damaged part.
It seems that the ability for repair exists in anyone with a brain injury, but the challenge is to find the crutches, and in this, music seems to be unique, since music stimulates so many areas in the brain, rendering those areas potential crutches in the event of a brain injury. I would be interested if other examples of recovery are linked to other kind of activities of the brain. It might not be that music has a monopoly on this but, to me, it seems self evident.
Here’s a few links to the movie and the P.O.V. site:
http://www.pbs.org/pov/lifesupportmusic/film_description.php