Patients suffering Parkinson's can dance even when walking remains a challenge. Some children with cerebral palsy can learn to express themselves by singing simple songs even though they may never learn to speak. “Music is the birthright of us all. Evolution appears to have 'hard-wired' us to be musical. We know that the unborn child can recognise musical sounds and that these early responses often remain beautifully intact, even when our personal integration is eroded by conditions such as Alzheimer's and other dementias.”
“While music's ability to inspire and ennoble has been long accepted, its power over our body and wellbeing is only now becoming better appreciated and understood through modern scientific research. “It will become increasingly possible to appreciate the very complex networks of brain processing that allow us, for example, to prefer Handel to Purcell. Once we accept that musical forms directly reflect the neurological forms and structures that have created them, then our musical language can be recognised as a form of code, or map, of the brain.
“The much fêted Mozart Effect IQ research is based on just such a presumption. The researchers who discovered that listening to Mozart raises spatial IQ based their investigations on a mathematical modelling of brain function. The resulting research showed that music can have a direct impact upon cognitive and spatial brain processes.”
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