A Song a Day Keeps the Doctor Away: The Benefits of Music on Health

This paper explores the current research on the benefits of music on health and the implications of this research. Considering its effects on cognitive, emotional, and motor systems in the brain, music has the ability to facilitate recovery from certain illnesses and reduce the negative secondary symptoms of numerous illnesses. For instance, music therapy has been used to help Aphasic individual regain their ability to speak, facilitating recovery from the disorder. It can also reduce agitation in Alzheimer’s patients, which may be considered a secondary symptom of this disease. This paper will examine how music is used to address a variety of illnesses and symptoms, including motor deficiencies experienced by individuals with Parkinson’s disease and recovering stroke patients, hindered linguistic abilities in Aphasia, damage to memory as in Alzheimer’s and Amnesia, and severe mood disturbances experienced in Major Depression and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Listening to music is cognitively engaging; it activates more brain regions than any other known activity. This makes music an attractive stimulus for use with patients who are difficult to engage, such as those with profound dementia. Music offers a variety of properties (such as a regular beat, acoustic similarity to spoken language, memorability, and the use of structural features that communicate and evoke emotions) that make it an appealing stimulus to incorporate into treatment programs, as these properties can be tailored to multiple treatment goals, such as the pace-setting of motor activity, language recovery, facilitation of recall, and mood regulation. Interventions that require long-term adherence to a treatment program may be particularly well-suited to the incorporation of musical activities, as participants may be more likely to comply with treatments that they find enjoyable.