What’s the Best Musical Choice—Classical or Rock?

/

I began to contemplate why Karen’s abilities in music were so very advanced and how this affiliation with music could interfere with her self-injurious gouging behaviors. After seeing many people for whom this was true, I set up an experiment to move beyond observation to investigation. The experiment was an intra-subject design meaning that the same person served as both a subject in the control condition (without music) and the experimental condition (with music). The study began with the psychology team evaluating the frequency and types of self-injurious behaviors for the eight participants. In pilot sessions and then the actual sessions, we played music groups for periods of 20 minutes. Two psychologists rated whether the subjects were self-stimulating or not (binary assess) every thirty seconds.

Read More

Killer Stress: Its Grip on Healthcare

/

Howard Benson of the Benson-Henry Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital has said that up to 90% of all medical office visits in this country are stress-related or stress-exacerbated (https://www.bensonhenryinstitute.org/mission-history/). This is indeed a public health crisis. Since the statistics come from so many different reporting groups (cardiology, oncology, gynecology/obstetrics, urology, neurology), we don’t see what is central to all of these patients - the way stress works in modern life.

Read More

Killer Stress: A Series Introduction

/

Years ago, I became interested in the biology of stress. It was catalyzed by a desire to live my life with the highest quality of well-being that I could achieve. My curiosity was met with an important resource from our local library. That resource was a film called ‘Killer Stress.’ It was produced by National Geographic and features the amazing work of Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University and other researchers in the field of stress biology. What I would learn from this film and the subsequent readings would change my life, the content that I teach and the way I teach.

Read More

Finding Peace Through Music During Life’s Challenges

/

In April of 2014, I was accepted to do a TEDx talk in Valencia, Spain. When I arrived at the venue, there was naturally a great deal of nervousness and excitement amongst the speakers and the organizers. As a therapist, I could sense it and it was beginning to unnerve me. So I left the venue and went to another part of the Oceanogràfic. I found refuge in the benches around a dolphin pool. There was no show on so I was able to sit in relative solitude with the sun shining on my face. There I listened to my favorite sedative and relaxing music tracks -

Read More

The Life and Music of Clive Wearing

/

In Musicophilia, Dr. Oliver Sacks’ writes of Clive Wearing a man who became an amnesiac following an infection. His hippocampi, structures in the brain that serves as our management system for memories were destroyed by an infection (for more information, see this TED-Ed. Clive no longer had access to much of his past and could not create new memories. He lived in the moment and every moment was new and could be quite scary.

Read More

Adversity, Resilience and Music

/

I just spoke with a dynamic woman who founded and runs an organization called the Modern Widows Club (www.modernwidowsclub.com). The group’s mission is to “serve the empower widows to lean into life, build resilience and release their potential to make a positive difference in society.” She somehow heard about music therapy and intuitively thought there was something there to support her mission. And there is.

Read More