Music and Mind

February 26, 2024
Singer Fleming (The Inner Singer) gathers essays that probe the “powerful health benefits of music and the arts” in this stimulating anthology. Among the multidisciplinary slate of contributors featured are singer-songwriter Ben Folds, who explains in “Our Symphony Orchestra” that live music spurs communal connection, vividly describing how he performed at a concert in the weeks following 9/11 in which the audience’s “grief silently reverberated around the room”; Christopher Bailey, the arts and health lead of the World Health Organization, who became blind in midlife and details in “Sounding Joy” how sight loss spurs the production of “new neural pathways to the auditory center use sound to create an aural landscape”; and Michael H. Thaut, a professor of music at the Institute of Medical Sciences’ Rehabilitation Science Institute, who outlines in “Coda and Crescendo” how music therapy can retrain “cognitive, motor, and speech and language functions via shared brain systems, altered connectivity, and enhanced plasticity.” Taken together, the essays reflect a “human-centric” model of care that smoothly integrates traditional scientific research and intuitive notions of integrative health. The result is an expansive and thought-provoking look at the dynamic intersection between art and science.