In January 2011, a 9mm bullet, fired point-blank from the gun of a mentally ill assailant, passed through the left rear of Gabrielle Giffords's head and exited just over her left eye. The Arizona congresswoman, who had been meeting with constituents in front of a supermarket near Tucson, would survive—despite massive trauma to the left side of her brain, the regions that control vision, movement, and speech. After surgery and intensive therapy, some 10 months later Giffords could respond to TV journalist Diane Sawyer's interview questions with mostly one-word answers—yet she could sing all the lyrics of "Tomorrow" from the Broadway show "Annie." Struggling to find language, she would call a chair a "spoon," but she could belt out all the words to Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." It was music that helped pave a road back to speech, and it was music that—in the form of a guitar-strumming therapist by her side to help organize her movements—even supported Giffords's steps as she relearned how to walk.
In a brand of health care that dovetails with the beaux arts (think "doctor turned artiste"), creative arts therapies are cropping up everywhere these days, from hospitals and rehab centers to group therapy and workshop settings. Expressive arts such as music, drama, dance, writing, and the visual arts have a wide range of applications and can be tailored to help people with such diverse diagnoses as autism, anorexia, and post-traumatic stress. Music therapy in particular has some solid research behind it: The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about his studies on the subject in Musicophilia (Vintage Books, 2008), a book that brims with Sacks's remarkable experiences with patients whose relationship to music deepened after being struck by lightning, or while coping with diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Scientists have long suggested that while language is largely held in the left side of the brain, music activates regions in both hemispheres, as well as areas deep within the brain that hold memory and emotion. That's why song lyrics can act like a superhighway (or a bumpy country road, as the case may be), connecting music and speech for people suffering from stroke, dementia, or brain injuries like Giffords's. It is this unique "whole brain" approach that makes music, and perhaps some of the other expressive arts too, so richly promising therapeutically.
[For more of this story, written by Wendy Kagan, go to http://m.chronogram.com/hudson.../Content?oid=2353394]
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