So, Dr. Funkenstein was right?

You've seen them around, filtering the world through a pair of headphones, hunching over to catalogue the used CD section at Cutler's, chain-smoking while surveying the scene at concerts. Whether you have direct contact with them or only know them from John Cusack and Jack Black's poorly-groomed-enough-to-be-cute characters in High Fidelity, the consensus remains: audiophiles do not look healthy. Yet last Saturday's "Neuropathic Effects of Music" symposium at the Med School suggested that record junkies may be healthier than they look, and that listening today may save your body and mind tomorrow.

Granted, most of the symposium dealt with severe nervous disorders pretty remote to college students only beginning to pound their livers, lungs, and brain cells into submission. However, Dr. Michael Thaut's lecture on rhythmicity and brain function struck a chord even with casual music-lovers. While preparing music therapy treatments to help stroke victims walk again, Thaut did a series of experiments to find how the motor control skills of healthy people were affected by rhythmic patterns. He had people tap along with a beat that decelerated at a rate of five beats per minute. Although such a small tempo shift is not normally audible, most of the subjects kept the beat almost exactly.

The experiment led Thaut to believe that music speaks directly to our sense of motor control, bypassing our conscious minds. Furthermore, the subjects undergoing the therapy experienced an improved subconscious sense of rhythm with repetition. This could explain why misanthropic John Cusack had such luck with women in High Fidelity; perhaps all that obscure pop gave him the motor control of a superior lover.

Whether or not Hollywood has music therapy in mind when shooting films, the world of music therapy certainly proved that it knows a bit about showmanship. Therapist Connie Tomaino followed Thaut's charts-and-graphs-filled presentation with a lecture on music-based neurotreatment programs. She relied on footage of people with problems ranging from Alzheimer's to complete loss of bodily control. While the lack of data supporting her claims made Tomaino seem like a snake-oil seller, the sheer breadth of her treatments was a testament to the power of music. In interview footage, one stroke-afflicted subject said that listening to big band reminded him of his days as a dancer and helped him control his stride. Video then showed the man walking with and without musical accompaniment, showing a more steady gait with Glenn Miller in the background, and even throwing a few uncontrollably executed fragments of dance steps.

The most impressive part of Tomaino's talk was her treatment of a quadriplegic who went into spasms with every attempt at movement. Tomaino hooked the man to a machine that allowed him to produce a tone and change its pitch by moving his hand toward or away from a motion sensor. Eventually he could play along to a simple melody. After much practice, the man was able to move his arm by thinking solely in terms of music—for example, he would imagine an F sharp to extend his arm halfway, a high B to fully extend it, and a low B to contract it. Besides helping people with nervous disorders to regain motor control, Tomaino's treatments also allowed patients to interact with others. As the quadriplegic played along with a therapist, two more dexterous patients kept rhythm on percussion. One said it was the first time in years he could remember "directly responding to something happening in that very moment."

In a world where music majors rarely hike up Science Hill, both Thaut's and Tomaino's lectures pointed to ways of bridging the gap between songwriting and psychiatry. As the back cover of Stereolab's Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements points out, "art is a science having more than seven variables." One can only imagine what would happen if professional tunesmiths were to participate in music medicine. Either way, I know that from now on I'm going to listen to my stereo as often as possible in the hopes that it will save me once my tendons begin to tighten and my synapses begin to snap. It can't hurt anything except the eardrums.

Graphic by Sarah England.

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