Music helps brain organize, keep order

LAYTON — Men and women may write the songs, but music was never mankind's idea. It's the cosmos'. Planets in orbit have certain vibrations. They actually rumble, each one pitched an octave apart from its nearest neighbor.

"They are held in orbit by a 'divine chord,'" said Michael Ballam, music professor at Utah State University. And as music holds things together, it can also heal, he added.

Music is "organized sound" and has a lot more than entertainment value, he said Thursday at the Brain Injury Association of Utah's conference in Layton. It's therapeutic and compelling and jump-starts the brain.

The brain functions from order, said Ballam, and that's something that can be lost through traumatic brain injury, birth defect, Alzheimer's disease, stroke and other ills. But music restores some of that order. And it can bolster skills in areas like math and concentration.

Ballam agrees with Einstein that music prepares the brain for math.

Not all music is equally brain-friendly. "There's danger in thinking that all music helps." The secret is setting up a pattern and then varying it. The early Greeks, he noted, outlawed music with a constant repetition because it "shuts down the brain."

So Ballam tells people to find music that has a sense of humor, because the brain has one. It's titillated by the unexpected, which is why listening to baroque music from Bach or Handel, for instance, can help students do better at math. "Humor lights up the brain and the synapses start to fire."

He recently saw the impact of humor and music on the brain. At a hospital Ballam met a little girl who had nearly drowned. She survived but suffered some oxygen deprivation and is still battling her way through the effects.

For the first two weeks, she didn't communicate. Then a therapy dog walked into her room and did something unexpected. It belched and that made the little girl laugh. It was her first response to anything since the accident. Not long after, she started singing to herself and with the singing "things started to happen," Ballam said. She started "coming back."

He once had a grade school teacher who used music to counter "brain sag" during the day. Those kids outscored the rest of their county on math, he said.

"When you need cognitive excellence, surround yourself with music," Ballam challenged. "It works."

The secret to how music helps the brain is not unlike how a filing system helps a computer keep track of all the bits and pieces of information it has accumulated. Music, with those nice patterns and variations, helps the brain organize and restore order. People with dementia or stroke seem more able to communicate or recognize people if they've been listening to music. The problem isn't that the data has gone away, just that it's no longer easily accessible.

Similarly, children preparing for tests or studying could benefit from certain music. Ask people to list all 50 states and they forget some. But find someone who learned the states with the song "The Nifty 50 United States" and you'll find they can recite them quickly. "It never goes away," he added.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com