At the Toronto Marathon, he raced in 15-year-old shoes and a singlet that was 20 or 30 years old. He has no coach. He follows no special diet. He does not chart his mileage. He wears no heart-rate monitor. He takes no ice baths, gets no massages. He shovels snow in the winter and gardens in the summer but lifts no weights, does no situps or push-ups. He avoids stretching, except the day of a race. He takes no medication, only a supplement that may or may not help his knees.
In 2012, a group of male patients underwent heart transplants at Teikyo Universityâs Department of Surgery, in Tokyo, Japan. As they recovered, closely monitored by attending physicians, an alert onlooker may have noticed a subtle difference in each patientâs recovery room: the ambient noise. Some rooms were silent. In others, Giuseppe Verdiâs âLa Traviataâ played in the background. From yet other rooms emanated strains of the Berlin Philharmonicâs interpretation of Mozart, or âThe Best of Enya.â A final set of rooms was filled with a steady sound frequency between a hundred and twenty thousand hertz.
For six days, researchers observed the patients to see how the different types of background sound would affect their recovery. Would music, they wondered, play a positive role in the healing process? And if so, did it matter what particular kind of music? Their conclusions would be limited: the patients were a group of laboratory mice. Still, the Tokyo researchers had high hopes; how the mice responded could be a step toward improving the recovery process from difficult medical procedures.
The idea that music can have therapeutic value is far from new: in ancient Egypt, chant therapies were seen as integral to the healing process, while in ancient Greece, both Aristotle and Plato embraced its beneficial properties, writing that it could help people become better human beings and overcome emotional difficulties during the process of catharsis. The first major movement in modern psychology, psychoanalysis, held that music could offer an effective means of sublimationâexpressing inappropriate desires in socially appropriate waysâand greater access to a patientâs unconscious. More recent approaches have included playing music in hospital wards and waiting areas to help improve patientsâ mood and their physical well-being. And we listen to music constantly in everyday life: we flip on Pandora or Spotify to set the mood for drinks with friends, a romantic date, or a workout. Music can psych us up before an important meeting, or calm us down after a stressful conversation. It can even help us vent our anger or express our love, as anyone who has ever created a mix for a significant otherâand then a break-up mix when things didnât quite work outâcan tell you.
In a review of over eighty studies on the use of music in therapeutic settings, the pediatrician Kathi Kemper and the psychologist Suzanne Danhauer concluded that music had multiple direct physiological effects: steady rhythms helped regulate breathing and elicited increased activity in the lateral temporal lobe, an area of the brain that helps integrate sensory inputs. In particular, classical music helped improve heart-rate variability, a measure of stress and resilience, while relaxing music led to decreased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in a group of students who were engaged in stressful activities. Music had, as well, more indirect effects on both emotion and behavior, making people happier, more relaxed, less anxious, and less overwhelmed. As a result of both the physiology and the psychology, the authors concluded, music was an effective way of improving outcomes for patients who had undergone surgery, or, indeed, any medical procedure.
Since Kemper and Danhauerâs initial review, conducted eight years ago, the data have grown even stronger. Music has now been used therapeutically for a number of diseases, including dementia, schizophrenia, Alzheimerâs, Parkinsonâs, and cerebral ischemia. In a study of chronic pain sufferers, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found that listening to music helped patients experience less physical pain, as well as lower rates of depression; in a study of older people with dementia, scientists from the National Taipei College of Nursing found thatplaying background music during lunch significantly lowered both verbal and physical aggression. In 2006, researchers discovered that even something as complex as open-heart surgery could be improved with a musical intervention: patients who listened to music during and after heart surgery not only felt less anxious but required, on average, two hundred fewer minutes of intubation than those who had undergone standard procedure.
At Teikyo University, Masanori Niimi and his colleagues began to notice differences between the groups as the mice recovered: the mice placed in the silent or the single-frequency rooms suffered from acute graft rejection, as their immune systems rejected the foreign cells from the transplants. Those who had been listening to either Verdi or Mozart showed significantly improved survival outcomes, living an average of twenty days longer. The Enya listeners were not as fortunate: they did little better than the mice who had listened to nothing at all, living just four days longer, on average, than the mice exposed to noise or silence. The authors speculated that what might have been at play are the particular harmonies and musical features of a piece of music.
The human auditory cortexâthe part of our brain devoted to hearing and listeningâcan differentiate between extremely specific frequencies of sound. In fact, single neurons can adjust to barely noticeable frequency shifts at a level that exceeds almost all other mammals (bats are the exception). Music with a four-four tempo, which corresponds closely to a normal heart rate, can help regulate heart rate, circulation, and breathing. Lyrical melodies and rhythms of about sixty to eighty beats a minute, which is common to much classical music and bird song, can stimulate relaxation and alpha brain waves, a type of pattern associated with wakeful relaxation. Yet music that departs from either of those tempos confers none of the benefits.
On September 12th, the Teikyo University team received public recognition for their efforts: the IgNobel Prize in Medicine, awarded annually for research that âmakes people laugh and then think.â The implications of their findings may well contribute to more successful organ-transplant surgeries in humans in the future, at little additional medical cost beyond a simple music file. And they may prompt more careful consideration of the exact type of music thatâs being played; Enya unfortunately has been a frequent therapeutic choice of prior researchers.
This all comes, of course, with a major disclaimer: what works in mice may not work in humans. In mental health, obesity, and some subsets of oncology, the mouse-to-human translation is fraught with uncertainty. Decades of work on inflammatory diseases, for instance, have led to the sad conclusion that mouse models are severely limited, if not counterproductive, when it comes to humans. As Clif Barry, the chief of the Tuberculosis Research Section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, once told Slate, âThe truth is that for some questions, mice give you a very nice and easy model system for understanding whatâs happening in humans, but mice are mice, and people are people. If we look to the mouse to model every aspect of the disease for man, and to model cures, weâre just wasting our time.â
In fact, most research on the therapeutic benefits of music in humans has been conducted on either older patients or infantsâindividuals who are more likely to prefer opera or classical music based on personal taste, on the one end, and, on the other, whoâve yet to develop any personal preferences at all. Babies are, in that latter sense, a bit more like mice, responding to the basic characteristics of the music rather than the music itself. For the generations in the middle, though, for whom opera may be somewhat foreign or a sign of generational rebellion, self-selected alternatives may be the better option. In a recent review of the data on music use in modern medicine, the biologist Guenther Bernatzky and his colleagues concluded that, as long as the music follows certain basic parameters, patient self-selection offers the best results in surgical outcomes. If patients donât find the music inherently enjoyable the positive benefits to their recovery may not be nearly as great. Even the famous (or infamous, as the case may be) Mozart effect went away with a group of over eight thousand British ten- and eleven-year-olds in the face of musical competition: instead of performing better after theyâd heard Mozart, the children showed improvement after listening to music that they enjoyed more, recordings from the then popular band Blur. The researchers called it the Blur Effect. (On the other hand, grunge has been shown to negatively affect mood even if people say they like it.)
The Teikyo University mice may well have been responding to the different musical options on a purely physiological level, unlike humans, for whom psychology and preferences matter. But an alternative explanation for the Teikyo results, perhaps, is that no one, not even mice, would ever willingly choose to listen to Enya.
In photography - and this is evident in every single photo - there is something that extends beyond the photographerâs action, and no photographer, even the most gifted, can claim ownership of what appears in the photograph. Every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer, neither of whom can, on their own, determine how this meeting will be inscribed in the resulting image. The photograph exceeds any presumption of ownership or monopoly and any attempt at being exhaustive. Even when it seems possible to name correctly in the form of a statement what it shows - âThis is Xâ - it will always turn out that something else that can be read in it, some other event can be reconstructed from it, some other playerâs presence can be discerned through it, constructing the social relations that allowed its production.
â Ariella Azoulay, writing in the introduction to The Civil Contract of Photography
Man, life is too beautiful, too wonderful, thereâs just too many things,â he said. âItâs not just you. Itâs your family and kids and all. Fight. Fight until the end. Fight as hard as you can.
What a close study of "inner speech" reveals about why humans talk to themselves
Language is the hallmark of humanityâit allows us to form deep relationships and complex societies. But we also use it when weâre all alone; it shapes even our silent relationships with ourselves. In his book, The Voices Within, Charles Fernyhough gives a historical overview of âinner speechââthe more scientific term for âtalking to yourself in your head.â
Fernyhough, a professor at Durham University in the U.K., says that inner speech develops alongside social speech. This idea was pioneered by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who studied children in the 1920s and noted that when they learned to talk to other humans, they also learned how to talk to themselves, first out loud, and eventually, in their heads.
Inner speech, Fernyhough writes, isnât bound by many of the conventions of verbal speech. For one, we can produce it much faster when we donât have to go at the pace required to use tongues and lips and voice boxes. One researcher the book cites clocks inner speech at an average pace of 4,000 words per minuteâ10 times faster than verbal speech. And itâs often more condensedâwe donât have to use full sentences to talk to ourselves, because we know what we mean.
But it does maintain many of the characteristics of dialogue. We may imagine an exchange with someone else, or we may just talk to ourselves. But that doesnât mean itâs not a conversation. Our minds contain many different perspectives, and they can argue or confer or talk over each other.
âWe are all fragmented,â Fernyhough writes. âThere is no unitary self. We are all in pieces, struggling to create the illusion of a coherent âmeâ from moment to moment.â
I spoke with Fernyhough about how the fragments of ourselves communicate through inner speech, the difficulty in studying the phenomenon, and what it might teach us. [full article]
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