Last week we talked about Love Songs, and while we often think about music lessons as necessary for the development of the brain, music is also used in diagnosing and even healing the (physical) heart.
Some of these arrythmia are so close to Beethoven’s work, some scientists believe that he was in tune with (due to his deafness) his own irregular heartbeat.
Understanding that passion and heated moments change how a heart functions, cardiologists study how emotions affect the conductive properties of heart cells and mental stress changes how the heart cells recover after every heartbeat. This leads research into new ways of looking at the heart and involving music in healing.
The human heartbeat provided the standard measure of musical time, until the mechanical metronome replaced it. One reason music moves us is it links us to the primal intuition of our own heartbeat. Music changes our heartrates, breathing, and blood pressure. Music-induced physiological changes have been traced to a central spot in the brain linked with the nerve responsible for unconscious regulation of bodily functions.
There’s so much to be learned from these and other discoveries about the heart and music. We may be close to getting music prescriptions for both physical and mental health.