NIH Bets $20 Million Music Can Heal Our Brains

 Robin Seaton Jefferson    September 28, 2019

Music holds the secret,

To know it can make you whole

It's not just a game of notes,

It's the sound inside your soul

The magic of the melody

Runs through you like a stream

The notes the play flow through your head

Like a dream...

~Triumph

We can’t prove it. But it’s something most of us have always known. Music just makes you feel better. Whether it’s the classic melodies of Beethoven, Brahms or Tchaikovsky; the toe-tapping feel-good rhythm of pop music; or even for some the head-banging, heart-pounding throbbing of heavy metal, we all have our favorites. And whatever they are, they somehow feed our souls.

Well, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is hoping to find out why and whether music can feed and perhaps heal our brains as well. The nation’s medical research agency is throwing in $20 million over five years to bring together music therapy and neuroscience and to study music’s potential to ease symptoms of an array of disorders including Parkinson’s disease, stroke and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Color of Music series. Design composed of musical symbol, female head and color paint as a metaphor ... [+]GETTY

The funds will support the first research projects of the Sound Health initiative–an NIH-Kennedy Center partnership—to explore the potential of music for treating a wide range of conditions resulting from neurological and other disorders. The National Endowment for the Arts—a federal grant-making entity that funds projects in every Congressional District in America—also contributed to the awards. 

“We hope that these in-depth studies of the science behind music’s influence and impact on the brain will bring real understanding of something we know anecdotally — that music is good for you,” said Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter in a statement, adding that she is “eager to hear how the results of these studies support the very real connections between creativity and brain health.”

“The potential is enormous,” said renowned soprano and Kennedy Center Artistic Advisor at Large Renée Fleming in a statement, “with benefits that range from early childhood development to end of life care, and a host of therapeutic interventions to treat the symptoms of stroke, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, autism, PTSD and pain, to name a few.”

It’s no secret that music therapy works wonders. Numerous studies have confirmed its effects on health. But Sound Health is taking it a huge step forward. Their research aims to advance scientists’ understanding of music’s “mechanism of action” in the brain and how it may be applied more broadly to treat symptoms of disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, stroke, chronic pain and other disorders. The research will also seek to understand the effect of music on the developing brain of children, the NIH reports.

“We know that the beat of a metronome can steady the gait of someone with Parkinson’s disease, for example, but we don’t fully understand how that happens,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. in a statement. “If we can pinpoint in the brain how music therapy works through the use of imaging and biomarkers, the hope is that we can improve its effectiveness and apply it more broadly to improve the lives of millions of people who suffer from neurological and other disorders.”

The effort comes out of a 2017 workshop, wherein the NIH brought together neuroscientists, music therapists and supporters of both biomedical research and the arts to discuss the interaction of music and the brain and how music is already being used as therapy. That workshop was split into three sessions covering the lifespan — “Building:” Music and the Child’s Brain, “Engaging:” Music and the Adult Brain, and “Sustaining:” Music and the Aging Brain, with each session including a panel on fundamental science and therapeutic applications. According to the NIH, recommendations for further research were derived from the workshop that researchers hoped will advance both the fundamental science of music’s interaction with the brain as well as the therapeutic applications of music.

It was also through the 2017 workshops that the NIH developed the Sound Health research plan. According to the NIH, with funding from 10 NIH institutes, centers and offices, Sound Health awardees will:

• Investigate the impact of music and singing on the walking ability and gait of people with Parkinson’s disease and older adults, and how these methods influence the brain. 
• Study how repeated exposure to music — including songs stuck in your head sometimes referred to as earworms — contribute to the creation and consolidation of memories, and how music serves as a cue for retrieving associated memories even when memory structures of the brain involved in effortful memory retrieval are damaged, as in Alzheimer’s disease.
• Analyze data from longitudinal studies that define growth curves of brain and behavior from childhood to adulthood to learn how brains are shaped by music and how musical training affects attention, executive function, social/emotional functioning and language skills.
• Examine mechanisms underlying the effects of music intervention on improving early speech and later language learning for developing infants, specifically those at-risk for speech and language disorders.
• Assess the effects of active music interventions on multiple biomarkers to provide a more holistic understanding of how active music interventions work to mitigate cancer-related stress and its potential to improve immune function.
• Study musical rhythm synchronization as a mechanism of healthy social development and how that is disrupted in children with autism spectrum disorder, with the goal of developing music interventions for social communication.
Sound Health was effectively formed to explore the brain’s relationship with music. A series of Kennedy Center events have been focused on raising awareness of the science of music and its role in health and well-being. 
Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said the Endowment has, through its programs, “gathered and reported evidence on how the arts can be integrated in therapy protocols across a range of medical conditions. We are very excited to see how the Sound Heath initiative applies music to neurological diseases and disorders, and to learn how music affects healthy brain functioning.”
“We are fortunate to live in an exceptional time of discovery in neuroscience, as well as an extraordinary era of creativity in music,” Collins wrote in his September blog. “I am convinced that the power of science holds tremendous promise for improving the effectiveness of music-based interventions and expanding their reach to improve the health and well-being of people suffering from a wide variety of conditions.”
Some of the NIH-funded projects that could help older Americans include: 
• Song-Making in a Group (Sing): Music, Hallucinations and Predictive Coding:  This research at Yale University will determine if listening to, performing and creating music helps people with psychosis learn to predict the world, themselves and others more accurately and reliably, which mollifies the distress associated with voices, and makes social relationships more manageable and enjoyable. According to Yale researchers, “people with psychotic illnesses perceive and believe things about themselves, the outside world and other people that do not obtain. Listening to and performing music can help mitigate this distress, but we do not know why. This project aims to find out…One way that music might help psychosis involves this precision. By making one set of predictions more precise—predictions about music—other predictions can change. This might be why we tap our toes or sing along to music we enjoy. We propose that experiencing more reliable predictions about ones’ actions (by singing) and other people (by singing along with them) will help to change the predictions that underwrite the symptoms of psychosis.”
• The Role of Involuntary Repetitive Music Imagery in Memory Consolidation: University of California at Davis researchers will examine the relationship of two prevalent music and memory phenomena: the vivid reliving of memories triggered by music and having fragments of music repeating, and how they may help to consolidate memories not only for the music itself, but also for non-musical information that has been associated with the music.
• Decreasing Delirium Through Music (DDM) in Critically Ill Older Adults: Researchers at Indiana University-Purdue and University Indianapolis will evaluate the efficacy of a music intervention on delirium/coma-free days among mechanically ventilated, critically ill older adults. 
• Evaluating the Impact of Singing Interventions on Markers of Cardiovascular Health in Older Patients with Cardiovascular Disease: Medical College of Wisconsin researchers plans to conduct a clinical trial to assess the impact of singing as an alternative or adjunctive therapy to improve important cardiovascular health biomarkers.
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2019/09/28/nih-bets-20-million-music-can-heal-our-brains/#709da3bec721